Dr. Serap Ruken Sengul is a sociocultural anthropologist and independent country-conditions expert specializing in Turkey, with over twenty-five years of experience in longitudinal country research, field-based human rights documentation, legal and institutional analysis, and policy work. She has substantial expertise in Turkey's legal and regulatory framework as it relates to political and human rights conditions, including anti-terror legislation and its implementation, and extensive experience assessing country-of-origin information and documentary evidence.
Her substantive expertise encompasses political and ethnic persecution; the Kurdish conflict and Kurdish populations in Turkey; political participation and actual or imputed political opinion; state and security practices; gender-based persecution and the intersection of gender with ethnicity, religion, political identity and family relations; forced displacement; and ethnic, religious and sectarian minorities, with particular expertise on Kurdish Alevis and Armenian Christians.
Since 2017, she has provided independent expert evidence in U.S. asylum proceedings involving Turkey, preparing approximately twenty expert affidavits, declarations, and country-conditions reports. Her expert work combines individualized case assessment with longitudinal research, multilingual source analysis, and extensive field experience in Turkey.
Dr. Sengul is a sociocultural anthropologist and independent country-conditions expert with more than twenty-five years of research and professional experience concerning political violence, human rights, displacement, gender, minority populations, and the Kurdish conflict in Turkey. Her expertise draws on long-term ethnographic research, field-based human-rights monitoring and documentation, legal and institutional analysis, and policy work. This combination of academic research and professional experience informs her preparation of independent expert evidence for asylum and immigration proceedings.
Her areas of particular expertise include the historical and contemporary dimensions of the Kurdish conflict; the political and social conditions affecting Kurdish populations; political participation and actual or imputed political opinion; Kurdish political parties, movements, and activism; and the treatment of individuals targeted on the basis of actual or imputed political or religious affiliations. Her work also encompasses state and security-force practices, anti-terror legislation and its implementation, forced displacement and internal migration, and ethnic, religious, and sectarian discrimination and persecution, particularly concerning Kurdish Alevis and Armenian Christians.
A significant dimension of her research concerns gender and the ways political violence, state power, and institutional practices operate through gendered social relations. Her expertise in gender-based persecution extends beyond particular forms of violence to the intersections of gender with ethnicity, religion, political identity, class, family, and kinship relations. In assessing gendered forms of harm, she considers both the social conditions through which vulnerability and risk emerge and the legal, political, and institutional circumstances that shape access to protection.
Dr. Sengul has substantial expertise in Turkey’s legal and institutional framework relevant to human-rights and international protection claims. Her work examines the criminalization of political activity, restrictions on freedom of expression and association, the application of anti-terror legislation, and the relationship between formal legal protections and their implementation through judicial, administrative, and security practices. Her expert assessments also address the availability and effectiveness of state protection, internal relocation, associative and family-based risk, return to Turkey following an asylum claim abroad, and, where relevant, compulsory military service as a site of ethnically or sectarianly differentiated vulnerability.
Over the course of her academic research, human-rights documentation, and expert-witness practice, Dr. Sengul has developed and maintained an extensive longitudinal country-conditions research archive on Turkey. The archive brings together human-rights monitoring and documentation, legislation and policy materials, judicial and administrative records, parliamentary and institutional sources, academic scholarship, media and open-source reporting, and her own ethnographic research and field-based documentation. Its longitudinal scope enables her to examine changes in political, legal, and institutional conditions over time and to situate individual claims within their relevant historical and regional contexts.
Her country-conditions assessments draw on Turkish-, Kurdish-, and English-language sources and combine primary field research with systematic analysis of documentary evidence. In preparing expert opinions, she evaluates the relevance and reliability of available sources, distinguishes documented country conditions from case-specific inference, and considers how political, social, familial, and regional circumstances may shape an individual’s exposure to risk.
Her research also extends to Kurdish political and social formations across Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, with particular attention to political movements, cross-border relations, displacement, gender, and political violence. This regional expertise may also be relevant to asylum claims involving Kurdish populations in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Her assessment of such cases would be informed by the particular historical, political, and institutional circumstances at issue, the scope of her relevant expertise, and the availability of sufficient country-specific evidence to support an independent expert opinion.
Independent country-conditions expert in U.S. asylum and immigration proceedings since 2017. Has prepared approximately twenty expert affidavits, declarations, and country-conditions reports concerning Turkey. Expert work has included case-specific assessment of claims involving political and ethnic persecution; Kurdish identity and political activity; actual and imputed political opinion; gender-based persecution and gendered violence; religious and sectarian identity; state and security-force practices; associative and family-based risk; state protection; internal relocation; return after seeking asylum abroad; and compulsory military service in relevant cases.
From 2022 to 2024, served as Asylum Case Management Supervisor at a U.S. immigration law firm with nationwide operations, supervising a multilingual team and overseeing approximately 300 EOIR-bound asylum case files. Her work included substantive supervisory review of Turkey claims and the review of intake records, supporting documentation, and country-conditions evidence. She also curated and maintained a substantial Turkey country-conditions evidence database to support corroboration and case-specific analysis.
Earlier professional experience includes field-based human-rights monitoring and documentation; research on forced displacement and the Kurdish conflict; political and human-rights analysis, including parliamentary research and fact-finding; documentation and advocacy concerning conflict-related gender-based violence; and academic research and teaching on political violence, gender, displacement, memory, sovereignty, genocide, and the Kurdish conflict at the University of Michigan and UCLA.
Selected Scholarly Publications and Research
Sengul, Serap Ruken. 2014. Broken (His)tories Inside Restored Walls: Kurds, Armenians, and the Cultural Politics of Reconstruction in Urban Diyarbakır. PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.
Sengul, Serap Ruken. 2005. Empowering Kurdish Women, Making the Turkish State: The ÇATOM Project in Turkey. MA thesis, University of Texas at Austin.
Sengul, Serap Ruken. 2013. “Qırıx: An ‘Inverted Rhapsody’ on Kurdish National Struggle, Gender, and Everyday Life in Diyarbakır.” In Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East, edited by Kamala Visweswaran. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Human Rights Monitoring and Documentation Reports
Author and contributor to human-rights monitoring, research, and documentation reports concerning political violence, torture and ill-treatment, forced displacement, gender-based violence, minority rights, and the Kurdish conflict in Turkey. This work includes field-based investigations, testimonial documentation, institutional reporting, and analysis of state practices and human-rights conditions.
Independent Expert Reports and Declarations
Since 2017, Dr. Sengul has prepared approximately twenty independent country-conditions reports, expert affidavits, and declarations for U.S. asylum and immigration proceedings concerning Turkey.
A comprehensive professional CV, including scholarly publications, research, and human-rights documentation and reporting, is provided as part of formal expert-engagement and case-instruction arrangements.