Felicity Turkmen

Fulya Felicity Turkmen is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California Riverside. Her research interests include the politics of international migration and citizenship, transnational political engagement, authoritarianism, and diasporas. For her doctoral dissertation, she explores how emigrants from illiberal regimes politically engage with their home countries, focusing on the cases of emigrants from Turkey and Zimbabwe. Building on Albert O. Hirschman’s exit, voice, loyalty model, Felicity argues that authoritarian diaspora engagement could be strategically designed not only to foster loyalty but also to suppress dissent (voice) and manipulate political disengagement (exit) among diaspora communities. She hypothesizes that negative diaspora engagement outreach and policies (DEPs) will lead to increased opposition, covert resistance, or disengagement. In contrast, positive DEPs will encourage political engagement, indicating loyalty to the regime in the homeland. After conducting fieldwork in the United Kingdom for a year, she plans to extend her multi-sited field research into Germany and the United States and to collect individual-level data through a survey of emigrants. Felicity holds an M.A. in political science from UC Riverside, and an M.S. and B.S. degree in political science and public administration from Middle East Technical University.