Prof. Umut Yildirim

Profile
 

PhD granting institution 
University of Cambridge 

Umut Yıldırım is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute. She specializes in war and decolonial mobilization, forced migration and resettlement, transnational development programs and aid policies, and expert networks and mobilities. Her research is grounded in an ethnographic perspective from the Armenian/Kurdish region in Turkey. Her forthcoming book provides an ethnographic inquiry into the complexities of war making and peace building through the lens of extraction, centering on the almost four decades-long, low-intensity war between the Turkish state and the guerrilla network of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). In 2023, she published an edited volume, "War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East" (ICI Berlin Press), which identifies a conceptual intersection between war, environmental issues, political aesthetics, and more-than-human memory. Her current research interests include maritime anthropology and transnational waters. Previously, she was affiliated with the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA, the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at FU Berlin, and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI Berlin). She has also taught political anthropology at Boğaziçi and Sabancı Universities in Istanbul, Turkey.

Thematic expertise

• State-building, sovereignty
• Self-determination & minorities
• Social movements, trade unions, NGOs
• Development, cooperation, aid policies
• Military occupation
• Armed conflicts, violence
• Boundaries & territorial disputes
• Immigrants, refugees, diasporas
• Intersectional inequalities & emancipation
• Race, racism & discrimination

Geographical expertise

• Turkey

Theme

• Democracy and Sovereignty
• Civil Society
• Development and Cooperation
• Peace, War and Conflict
• Mobilities and Migration
• Gender, Class, Race and Intersectionality