Bayram Balci is a visiting scholar in Carnegie’s Middle East Program, where his research focuses on Turkey and Turkish foreign policy in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. He is also affiliated with CERI Sciences Po, in Paris, France.
As a research fellow at the French Institute for Anatolian Studies in Istanbul, Turkey, Balci established the institute’s office in Baku, Azerbaijan. During his four-year mission, he studied the features and interactions of Shia and Sunni Islam in Azerbaijan and its relations with Iran. From 2006 to 2010, he was the director of the French Institute for Central Asian Studies in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. During his time in the region, his research also examined Turkey’s influence and the Islamic revival in Central Asia.
He is a founding member of the European Journal of Turkish Studies, director of the editorial board of Les Cahiers d’Asie Centrale, a French journal dedicated to Central Asian studies, and assistant editor of the online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, which offers descriptions and analyses of massacres and genocides in the twentieth century.
He is the author of Missionnaires de l'Islam en Asie centrale: Les écoles turques de Fethullah Gülen (Maisonneuve & Larose, 2003) and recently co-edited China and India in Central Asia: A New “Great Game”? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
