IBEI Graduate Summer School
Tutku Ayhan is a Fellow in International Security at IBEI. Before joining IBEI, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention at State University of New York, Binghamton.
Broadly situated within Feminist Security Studies, Tutku's research examines gendered dimensions of war and its aftermath from an intersectional framework. She is mainly interested in post-conflict gender dynamics and women's post-conflict experiences, particularly their experience of resilience and empowerment. Her work also explores forced displacement, ethnic conflict and genocide, as well as sexual and gender-based violence.
Her research methodology involves extensive, multi-site fieldwork among marginalized communities affected by conflict. Using a combination of in-depth interviews, participant observation, and ethnographic techniques, she follows forcibly displaced individuals surviving conflict in various settings, including camps, informal shelters, and cities across both the Global South and Global North.
At IBEI, she has been coordinating "The Securitization of Migrants and Ethnic Minorities and the Rise of Xenophobia in the EU" (SECUREU) project.
Laia Balcells is a Professor of Government at Georgetown University. Her research explores the causes and consequences of political violence and repression, nationalism, and transitional justice after conflict. Her first book, entitled Rivalry and Revenge: the Politics of Violence during Civil War was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. She has also published over forty articles in peer-reviewed journals. She is the recipient of the 2025 ISSS Emerging Scholar Award from the International Studies Association. Her research has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim foundation, the United Kingdom's Economic and Social Research Council, and the Folke Bernadotte Academy, among others.
Susana Galán is a Ramón y Cajal Assistant Professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals. She has a PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University (USA), a Master in European Studies from the Europa-Universität Viadrina (Germany), and a BA in Journalism from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Her research adopts an intersectional, interdisciplinary, transnational, and social justice approach that draws upon feminist and queer theory, affect theory, feminist media studies, and feminist geography. Her work has been published in Signs: Journal of Women in Gender and Society, Gender, Place & Culture, the Journal of International Women’s Studies, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, the Observatori del Conflicte Social, and the books Young People Shaping Democratic Politics (Palgrave), Freedom Without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions (Duke University Press), and Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings (Terreform).
Between 2022 and 2024, she coordinated the COST Action Platform Work Inclusion Living Lab (PWILL), of the European Cooperation in Science and Technology, and the project “Gender equality qualities of the platform economy. A framework of analysis,” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Bruce W. Jentleson is William Preston Few Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science at Duke University. He also is a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and Senior Advisor to the Bridging the Gap project promoting greater policy relevance among academics. He has served in a number of U.S. foreign policy positions, most recently as Senior Advisor to the State Department Policy Planning Director (2009-11). In 2015-16 he was the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress. His most recent books are Economic Sanctions: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2022) and The Peacemakers: Leadership Lessons from 20th Century Statesmanship (W.W. Norton, 2018). Recent articles include “Beyond the Rhetoric: A Globally Credible U.S. Role for a ‘Rules-Based Order’,” The Washington Quarterly (Fall 2023). Career awards include the 2018 American Political Science Association (APSA) International Security Section Joseph J. Kruzel Award for Distinguished Public Service; the 2020 Duke University Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award; and the 1985 APSA Harold D. Lasswell Doctoral Dissertation Award for his doctoral dissertation. He holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University.
Anastassia Obydenkova holds a PhD in Political and Social Science from the European University Institute (Florence) and MA in Political Science from the Central European University (Budapest-Vienna). She was awarded research fellowships at Yale, Princeton, and Harvard Universities. She held multiple teaching and research appointments around the world, at Gonzaga University in Florence, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Barcelona Institute for International Studies, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and Davis Center at Harvard University, Uppsala University (Sweden), among others. Currently, Dr. Obydenkova is a research scientist at the Institute for Economic Analysis of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (Barcelona) and a senior research fellow at the IBEI (Barcelona). She studies comparative politics and international relations with special focus on international organizations, global environmental politics and sustainable development, regionalism, democratization, post-communism, with area-focus on Eurasia and China. Her work on these topics had been published in such journals as European Journal of Political Research, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Post-Soviet Affairs, Review of International Organizations, Intelligence, Environmental Research, Democratization, and Journal of Democracy, among others. She is also a (co-)author and editor of various books with the most recent ones published by Oxford University Press (2019) and Cambridge University Press (2021). She welcomes the supervision of theses of MA students (from IBEI); and PhD students (from all universities) working on the related research topics.