Staff

Dr Fatma Yılmaz-Elmas

Associate Researcher


contact by e-mail

fyilmazelmas(at)gmail.com

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Expertise

Research Profile


Fatma is mainly interested in migration studies and has been involved in many internationally funded projects (e.g., EU Horizon, ERC, IOM) conducted by different institutions. Recently, she was part of the Horizon Europe Project GAPs (2023–2026), focusing on migrant returns and readmission, for which she co-designed and co-created an interactive data repository on migrant returns. For another EU Horizon Project MATILDE (2020–2023), she worked as a post-doctoral research fellow, focusing on migration from a rural perspective, assessing the impact of migration to promote integration and local development. She has also contributed to several projects on resilience in local governance and conducting a needs assessment for effective implementation of readmission agreements.

Research Topics / Key Expertise


International migration, migration in rural areas, migrant returns, readmission policies, migration databases, migration–foreign policy nexus, racism and xenophobia, far-right, Islamophobia, Turkish diaspora, Turkey–EU relations, contemporary political theory and contentions around Cyprus.

Professional Career

Dr Fatma Yılmaz-Elmas is currently working as a research fellow for the Horizon Europe Project GAPs, co-led by bicc. She has over 15 years of experience in working at think tanks, NGOs and project research/consulting. She worked as a post-doctoral research fellow for Ozyegin University (2023) and Istanbul Bilgi University in different projects (2020–2023). She has also lectured at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, İstanbul Bilgi University (2020–2023). For over ten years, she engaged in research in European Studies at the International Strategic Research Organization (USAK), a Turkish independent think-tank. She also took on editorial roles for different publications, was editor-in-chief of a monthly policy magazine (2013–2016) and editorial coordinator of an online news portal on diaspora (2017–2018). She obtained her PhD in International Relations/European Studies from Ankara University (2016) with a dissertation on the EU migration–foreign policy nexus, for which she conducted research at the Jean Monnet European Union Centre of Excellence (University of Pittsburgh) in 2012. She received her BA in International Relations from Dokuz Eylül University, Izmir (2006), and her MA in European Studies from Ankara University (2008).

Publications

Report

Şahin-Mencütek, Z., & Yilmaz-Elmas, F.

GAPs Data Repository on Return: Guideline, Data Samples and Codebook

BICC , Bonn (2024)

Open