M. Firat (Mustafa)

I am an Assistant Professor in Psychology of Conflict, Risk and Safety at the University of Twente. My research takes a multidisciplinary approach to understand how individuals and groups navigate conflict, inequality, and broader societal challenges. Drawing  on perspectives from psychology, sociology, and history, I examine how social identities, intergroup relations, and wider cultural and institutional contexts shape people’s experiences, attitudes, and responses to intergroup conflict and social inequality. This multidisciplinary approach allows me to connect processes at the individual and group levels with the general historical and societal contexts in which they unfold.

Before joining the University of Twente, I was a postdoctoral researcher in Economic and Social History at the University of Groningen (2025-2026), working on the social historical analysis of population decline and community welfare in the Netherlands, Finland, and Ukraine. Prior to that, I was a PhD candidate in Sociology at Radboud University (2021-2025), studying social inequality in retirement from a life course and comparative perspective across 28 European countries. My earlier training was in psychology, with an MA from Boğaziçi University (2019) and an MSc from the University of Alberta (2021), where I examined the role of intergroup contact and social identity in intergroup conflict in the context of Turkey and Canada.

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