Merih Angin, Ph.D.

mangin@ku.edu.tr


Assistant Professor

Koc University

Year of PhD: 2016

City: Istanbul

Country: Turkey

About Me:

Merih Angin is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Koç University, where she is also the director of the MA-Computational Social Science Lab. She holds a Ph.D. degree in International Relations/Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), a master’s degree in International Relations from METU, and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Bilkent University. Her research interests lie in the areas of international political economy, international organizations with a particular focus on the IMF and the World Bank, international development, migration, SOE privatizations, investment arbitration, AI, statistical methods, agent-based modelling, computational simulation, machine learning and mixed methods in social sciences.  Dr. Angin was a visiting scholar at the Mortara Center for International Studies of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University during the 2013-2014 academic year, and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government of the University of Oxford between 2016-2018, where she conducted research on IMF program design. She completed the last leg of this extensive research project aiming to shed light on the processes leading to variation in IMF conditionality at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs of Harvard University, as a postdoctoral researcher during the 2018-2019 academic year. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on a comparative study of Southeast European IMF borrowers.  Dr. Angin’s work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Economics & PoliticsJournal of International Dispute Settlement, Journal of World Energy Law & Business and New Perspectives on Turkey. She has recently moved back to Turkey upon being awarded the International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. Dr. Angin has received numerous grants for her research, including the European Commission's Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship, multiple fellowships from the Swiss National Science Foundation, among others.

Research Interests

Political Economy

International Law & Organization

Research Methods & Research Design

State and Local Politics

Bureaucracy

Development

IMF

International Financial Institutions

International Organizations

Computational Social Science

World Bank

International Political Economy

Countries of Interest

Turkey

Romania

Greece

My Research:

“Building Invisible Walls:  International Organizations in the Age of Migration” (with Albana Shehaj and Adrian J. Shin) Why do international organizations (IOs) favor some countries over others? Previous research has primarily focused on the strategic and special interests of donor states to explain why some countries receive better deals from international organizations. This project highlights migration pressure from the developing world as an important factor that enters into the decision-making calculus of major IO shareholders. Focusing on the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the European Union, our research shows that countries that pose substantial migration pressure to major donor states of these organizations receive preferential treatment, including larger financial packages and less stringent loan conditions. In addition, we compare and contrast the organizations’ strategies in governing international migration. Using in-depth case studies and novel datasets on loans, conditionality, and fiscal transfers, we demonstrate the important role of international migration in shaping some of the most critical decisions made by the world’s most powerful international organizations.