Umut Yıldırım is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. 

 

Her areas of expertise include war and decolonial mobilisation, forced migration and resettlement, transnational development programmes and extractivism, ecologies of war and political mass violence, and, most recently, maritime extraction and commons. Her book monograph, Extractive States: War and Resistance in Turkey's Kurdish Heartland (Stanford University Press, 2026), provides an ethnographic inquiry into the complexities of warfare and peacebuilding through the lens of extraction. It centres on the nearly four-decade-long, low-intensity war between the Turkish state and the guerrilla network of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Previously, she published an edited volume entitled War-Torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East (ICI Berlin Press, 2023), which identifies a conceptual intersection between war, environmental issues, political aesthetics, and more-than-human memory. Her current research interests include maritime anthropology and transnational waters, and her first article on the subject will be published as part of a special issue on “Political Mass Violence and More-Than-Human Memory” (Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 2027) which she co-edited with Professor Yael Navaro and Dr. Daniel Ruiz-Serna.