Bayram Balci holds degrees in political science and in Arab and Islamic studies from the Political Studies Institute of Grenoble and Aix-en-Provence. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Turkish Islamic movements and their missionary activities in post-Soviet Central Asia. He was a Jean Monnet post-doctoral fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, where he worked on Central-Asian communities in Saudi Arabia and their contribution to the re-Islamization of the region. Further in his career, he was a scholar at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul and set up the French Institute of Caucasian Studies in Baku, while researching on relations between the Chia and the Sunni Muslims in Azerbaijan and in Iran. From 2006 to 2010, he was the director of the French Institute of Central-Asian Studies (IFEAC) in Tashkent. From 2012 to 2014, he was a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C.Bayram Balci’s current research focuses on Islam and politics in the former Soviet Union and on Turkey in its regional environment (Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East). From 20017 to 2022, he was the director of the Institut Français d’Études Anatoliennes (IEFA) in Istanbul.