Sinem Kavak is a postdoctoral researcher at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and a research affiliate in Center for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS) at Lund University. She holds a PhD in Political Science and International Relations earned at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris Saclay in France and Boğaziçi University in Turkey. Her research areas are in fields of political economy, extractivism, migration and refugee studies as well as human rights issues in labor markets. She also carries research on themes related to critical agrarian studies and rural/environmental movements.
Before joining RWI, she held various academic positions on political economy research with human rights implications as well as professional appointments in the broader field human rights practice and advocacy. She was visiting postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Sustainability Studies at the Lund University; she worked as program coordinator and researcher for the Fair Labor Association in Eastern Europe and MENA region and she acted as Turkey expert for Council of Europe in the area of trafficking of human-beings for the purpose of labor exploitation.
Her research cuts across human rights issues around decent work, child labor, refugee experiences and transnational labor governance as well as macro-level issues of democratic backsliding, authoritarianism, cronyism, extractivism. Her publications appeared in New Perspectives on Turkey, Journal of Agrarian Change among others and she co-edited the volume on Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Resistance in Turkey: Construction, Consolidation and Contestation published by Palgrave McMillan (2022). Geographically, she focuses on Turkey, Lebanon and Colombia.
Currently, she is carrying out two research projects.
- Refugee Decision-making in First Countries of Asylum (ReDeFi)
- Unraveling Climate-change Impacts on Migrant Farmworkers in Global Food Production
For further updates on her research please refer to: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sinem-Kavak
https://portal.research.lu.se/sv/persons/sinem-kavak-2