Meriç Çağlar is a researcher specializing in forced migration and gender studies. She is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at Central European University in Austria. Her dissertation titled “Gendered Vulnerabilities, Precarities and Temporalities: Refugee Women Under International Protection in Turkey” investigates the relationship between gendered categories of vulnerability in refugee protection and migrant deservingness in Turkey. 

Çağlar received her BA in International Relations from Galatasaray University (Turkey) and MA degrees in Euro-Mediterranean Relations and Migration Management from Rovira i Virgili and Pompeu Fabra Universities (Spain). She has worked as a gender and forced migration researcher in various European institutions such as the Development Studies Institute at Sussex University and Graduate Institute of International Development Studies in Geneva and held fellowship positions in reputable academic institutions such as Bielefeld University (DAAD scholar), The Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) Vienna, and the Migration Research Center at Koç University (MiReKoc) in Istanbul. She has presented her work at numerous Turkish and international conferences such as Imiscoe. Her research interests lie in the areas of gender and asylum, intersectionality in migration studies, refugee protection and integration in Turkey, and migrant deservingness.

Project: “From Vulnerability to Resilience: Policy Making for Gender Based Protection Needs of Refugees in Turkey and Greece”

Both Turkey and Greece, independently, but also together as parties of the European border and asylum regime, are important case studies for examining the arrival of (forced) migrants in great numbers particularly over the last ten years and as states carrying out the heavy burden of the assessment of protection needs of various refugee groups with the involvement of multiple international, local, and humanitarian actors. This research aims to understand gender-based protection needs and assistance for different groups of forced migrants in Turkey and Greece in order to inform more accurate and nuanced policy making in the field of refugee protection, assistance, and resettlement.

This research aims to understand through which socio-political processes the current gender-based protection regimes in these countries are put in place, how different actors are informed by various international and local discourses, how moral economies are involved in decision- and policy-making processes, and how the knowledge produced in the field regarding contextual vulnerabilities and strategies refugees employ in order to cope with these experiences can inform more accurate and inclusive gender-based refugee protection, assistance, and resettlement schemes. Thus, the project will produce insights that not only take into account refugees’ vulnerabilities but also their agency and resilience, which is crucial for long-term protection and integration policies in Turkey and Europe.