Anna Rajkowska defended her PhD thesis, Militant Trajectories of Turkish Female Jihadis: Mobilization, Logistics, and the Role of Women-Only Spaces in the Jihadi Struggle, in August 2025 at the European University Institute. She holds an MA in Political Science from Ankara University (Mülkiye), Turkey. Following the completion of her PhD, she worked as a Lecturer in the Department of International Relations and Diplomacy at the Catholic University in Erbil, Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
As a sociologist, her research examines women’s mobilization into the Islamic State (IS) through gender-segregated spaces, with a particular focus on Turkish jihadi women, based on extensive sources in Turkish.
Her research has been published in edited volumes, including Salafism: Challenged by Radicalization? Violence, Politics, and the Advent of Post-Salafism (European University Institute, 2021), and “The Islamic State (IS) Returnees to Turkey,” in Counterterrorism and Safeguarding in Response to Islamic State (CASIS) (European University Institute & London School of Economics, 2022).
During her doctoral studies, she was a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Antwerp. She conducted fieldwork in four countries: Turkey, Iraq, Tunisia, and Jordan.