Sam Erkiletian is PhD Candidate researching the internal dynamics of armed groups—specifically the changing identities of combatants during and after conflict. He is interested in how the military socialization process and subgroup dynamics of armed groups affect the behavior and identity of combatants. He employs comparative case studies and data from conflict archives in his research. He is supervised by C&C members Kristin Bakke, Nils Metternich, and Zeynep Bulutgil.
His research project, “Socialization and Resocialization: The Changing Identities of Combatants”, examines how former combatants reshape their identity in postwar settings. Sam theoretically argues that one of the main drivers of identity formation and reformation are subgroups, the social units within armed organizations that form its informal structure and environment. He contends that subgroups guide combatants through the socialization process and that they can reinforce the intended norms of the wider organization or undermine them.
To test his theories, Sam leverages archival data from cases of state-sponsored re-education programs for prisoners of war (POWs). Two of the cases he examines—the British re-education program for German POWs (1944-1948) and the US re-education program for Chinese and Korean POWs (1950-1953)—provide unique data for tracking the changing identities of combatants.
The National Archives houses reports and administrative data on the British re-education program for German POWs
Sam has a co-authored chapter with Zeynep Bulutgil, “Civil Society, Fifth-Column Perceptions, and Wartime Deportations: Japanese and German Americans”, which is a part of the forthcoming edited volume Enemies Within published by Oxford University Press. He is also working with Nils Metternich and Janina Beiser-McGrath on an archival data project that analyzes the networks of delegates that attended the various Pan-African conferences from 1945 to 1963 and how they influenced colonial and post-colonial states.