Nihan Karagul

Nihan Karagul holds a master’s and a bachelor’s degree from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. She held research fellow positions at the Political Violence Lab at the University of California Washington Center and Koç University’s Migration Research Center in Istanbul. She has conducted fieldwork in California’s San Joaquin Valley, focusing on Latin American descendant communities and their access to public services. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Nihan worked as an information management officer at the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

Her research interests lie in citizenship, migration, and state capacity, with a methodological emphasis on network analysis and geospatial data. Her dissertation examines how internationally mobile populations interact with nationally structured institutions. Specifically, she explores how noncitizens outsource access to state services to international humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), who serve as intermediaries in lieu of the informal interpersonal networks typically used by citizens. Her work highlights how these alternative forms of brokerage shape who receives public services, when, and under what conditions.

Nihan will use the IGCC fellowship to support the completion of her dissertation fieldwork in Turkey, where she is actively collecting original data from humanitarian NGO personnel. The fellowship will also support the writing phase of her project, which aims to contribute to our understanding of how humanitarian infrastructure intersects with national bureaucracies in delivering services to noncitizens.