Şule Yaylacı

Dr. Şule Yaylacı is a political scientist specializing in comparative politics of the Global South. Her research focuses on how conflict, identity, and migration intersect, with a particular emphasis on trust dynamics during civil wars and strategies to improve social cohesion in host communities. She employs mixed methods, including quantitative methods, experiments, and qualitative methods, and has done fieldwork in Turkey and Peru.

Her work has been published in leading journals, including Journal of Politics, American Journal of Sociology, and Security Studies. Her book project, Civil Wars and Trust, examines how geography and identity shape social and political trust during civil wars. Using original data from the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey (1984–present) and the Maoist insurgency in Peru (1980–2000), she demonstrates that unrestricted wars reduce generalized trust in strangers, while restricted conflicts erode trust in outgroups more significantly. This research, funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre, received honorable mention for APSA’s Best Fieldwork Award in 2018.

A major focus of her current research is addressing anti-immigrant attitudes. She has explored strategies such as perspective-taking and intergroup contact and is currently developing an AI-driven intervention designed to foster personalized dialogues that reduce prejudice and promote social cohesion.

Dr. Yaylacı teaches courses on migration and conflict, ethnicity and political violence, politics of development, and research methods. She integrates her fieldwork experience and interdisciplinary approach into her teaching, encouraging students to engage critically with pressing global issues.

Dr. Yaylacı holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of British Columbia, an MSc in Public Policy and Administration from the London School of Economics, and a BSc in Political Science and Public Administration from Middle East Technical University. Before joining the University of New Brunswick, she was a predoctoral fellow at Yale University, a Banting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and a postdoctoral researcher at Georgetown University.

Publications from the last five years

* Equal authorship

Yaylacı, Şule. (2024). Trust in Civil Wars: Wartime Transformations of Social Trust. Security Studies. Accepted.

Sambanis, Nicholas*; Matthew, Simonson* & Şule, Yaylacı,*. (2024) Once We Too Were Strangers: Can a Heritage of Displacement be Leveraged to Build Support for Present-Day Refugees? Journal of Politics. Accepted.

Yaylacı, Şule* & Wendy, Roth*. (2024). Do Genetic Ancestry Tests Change Ethnic and Racial Identities? Findings from a Randomized Controlled Trial. American Journal of Sociology, 129(4): 1172–1215.

Yaylacı, Şule & Onur, Bakiner. (2023). Anti-Immigrant Attitudes: The Role of Casual Intergroup Contact in Perceived Group Threat. Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies. Online First.

Yaylacı, Şule & Chris, Price. (2023). Exposure to Violence as Explanatory Variable: On Meaning, Measurement, and Theoretical Implications of Different Indicators. International Studies Review. Online First.

Yaylacı, Şule* & Chris, Price* (2021). What Exactly are the Social and Political Consequences of Civil War? A Critical Review and Analysis of the Scholarship. Civil Wars, 23(2):283-310.

Yaylacı, Şule; Wendy, Roth & Kaitlyn, Jaffe. (2021). Measuring Genetic Essentialism in the Genomic Era: The Genetic Essentialism Scale for Race (GESR). Current Psychology, 40(8):3794-3808.

Yaylacı, Şule. (2020). Focus Groups as a Strategy to Alleviate the Challenges with Retrospective Narratives in Conflict Research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. Online first.

Roth, Wendy; Şule, Yaylacı; Kaitlyn, Jaffe & Lindsey, Richardson (2020). Do Genetic Ancestry Tests Increase Racial Essentialism? Findings from a Randomized Controlled Trial. PLOS One 15(1): e0227399.