Dr. Pınar Dinç is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at Lund University. She is a political scientist specializing in environmental peace and conflict studies, with a particular focus on the interplay between political power, climate and environmental change, ecological degradation, authoritarianism, resistance, and migration.

Her research primarily examines both state and stateless actors in the Middle East, with Turkey, Syria, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and Palestine as her main regions of focus. Drawing on political science, political ecology, and geography, she leads the interdisciplinary ECO-Syria project, which explores conflict and environmental interactions in North and East Syria. From 2020 to 2024, she coordinated Turkey Beyond Borders: Critical Voices, New Perspectives, a project fostering transnational dialogue and critical scholarship on Turkey’s political landscape. She was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (2018–2020), focusing on the nexus between conflict and environmental destruction.

At CMES, she contributes to the CMES Middle East Data Lab (CMES-MEDL), a cutting-edge data infrastructure initiative designed to support interdisciplinary research on the Middle East.

She has taught in both Turkey and Sweden, and has supervised bachelor’s and master’s students at Lund University’s Faculty of Social Sciences. She has extensive teaching experience in courses across Political Science, Peace and Conflict Studies, Research Methods, and Middle Eastern Studies, among others. She also serves as a co-supervisor (Biträdande handledare) on Ph.D. committees. Dr. Dinç has mentored numerous graduate students on fieldwork, literature reviews, and interdisciplinary research methods. Many of these students have interned in her research projects, where she continues to provide mentorship. 

She holds a PhD in Political Science from the London School of Economics (2017). Her publications span topics such as environmental peacebuilding, ecological destruction in conflict zones, and diaspora identity. Her work has appeared in journals including Ecology and Society, Environmental Research Letters, Climate and Development, Human Ecology, and Nations and Nationalism. She is co-editor of two volumes: The Republic of Turkey and its Unresolved Issues – 100 Years and Beyond (Palgrave, 2025) and Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Resistance in Turkey: Construction, Consolidation and Contestation (Palgrave, 2022).

In addition to her academic work, she regularly gives invited lectures, writes op-eds, and contributes expert commentary to international media on Turkish and Kurdish politics, social movements, and environmental issues, and their transboundary impacts across the region. Dr. Dinç is a Research Fellow on the Environment-Conflict Nexus at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, where she contributes to global research on environmental drivers of conflict and peacebuilding.