MESA Graduate Student Paper Prize
Ronay Bakan
Johns Hopkins University, Department of Political Science
2023 Honorable Mention
Ronay Bakan
The award committee’s honorable mention goes to “Conflict in Ruins: Counterinsurgent Urbanism and Its Discontents in Northern Kurdistan.” Through an interdisciplinary
approach that integrates historical studies with meticulous ethnographic analysis, the paper focuses on “heritage-making” to study the “sociality of war and
counterinsurgency.” The author effectively blends the argument of the paper with theoretical debates encompassing a transnational framework and well-conducted research
on Armenian history, Kurdish politics, and the ongoing warfare and conflict in Diyarbakir of Kurdistan in Turkey.