Status
In Progress
Email Address
semuhi.sinanoglu@mail.utoronto.ca
Website
Major
Comparative Politics
Supervisor(s)
Sinanoglu, Semuhi
Dissertation:
For Better, For Worse: Autocrats and Business Elite under Economic Hardship
Biography
Semuhi is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto, studying state‑business relations under electoral authoritarianism. He examines how an autocratic regime calibrates its decisions of repression and cooptation targeting the business elite to ensure their loyalty.
He is also the co‑founder of a Toronto‑based consultancy company that leverages open data and quantum computing to predict protests. Prior to his doctoral studies, he served as a social policy consultant. He also co‑founded two social impact initiatives for youth empowerment, one based in Montreal that advocates for youth inclusion in the design of smart cities, and the other based in Istanbul that mobilizes more than 30 stakeholder organizations in six countries across the MENA region to foster youth employment.
He is a non‑resident fellow at Massey College
Publications
2021. “Mobilizing the Masses: Measuring Resource Mobilization on Twitter” Sociological Methods & Research. with A. Abdul Reda and Mohammed Abdalla. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0049124120986197
2021. “Containing Ethnic Conflict: Repression, Co‑optation, and Identity Politics” Comparative Politics. Accepted for publication.
2018. “Socially Inclusive Fourth Industrial Revolution: Fostering Youth Employment in the Middle East and North Africa.” In Realizing Youth Potential in the Mediterranean: Unlocking Opportunities, Overcoming Challenges, edited by Lorenzo Kamel & Asli Selin Okyay:101‑12. Rome: IAI Research Studies.
Research Interests
Business, authoritarianism, repression, polarization
Previous Degrees
MA in International Relations at Koc University, Turkey
BA in Economics at Bogazici University, Turkey
BA in Political Science and International Relations at Bogazici University, Turkey
Teaching Experience
Course Instructor:
Autocrats of the World: International Politics of Authoritarianisms (UTM)
Politics in the Middle East (UTSC)
Teaching Assistant:
Statistics for Political Scientists
Introduction to Quantitative Reasoning
Democratization in Modern Europe
Politics of Development