Abbas Vali

Abbas Vali (born 1949) is an Iranian political and social theorist specialising in modern and contemporary political thought and modern Middle Eastern Politics.

Biography

Vali was born in 1949 in Mahabad, Iran. He obtained a BA in Political Science from the National University of Iran in 1973. He then moved to the UK to continue his graduate studies in modern political and social theory. He obtained an MA in Politics from the University of Keele in 1976. He then received his PhD in Sociology from the University of London in 1983.^[1]

Vali was an academic at the University of Wales, Swansea, from 1985 to 2004, and in the Department of Sociology at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul from 2004 to 2006.^[2] He became president of the University of Kurdistan Hewler^[3] until 2008. Vali then returned to Boğaziçi University until 2017, when the Turkish government revoked his work permit over his protests against Turkish crackdowns on the Kurds.^[4]

Selected works

• Pre-Capitalist Iran: A Theoretical History, New York: New York University Press, 1993.^[5]
• Essays on the Origins of Kurdish Nationalism, (ed.), Costa Mesa, California: Mazda Publishers, 2003.^[6]
• Kurds and the State in Iran: The Making of Kurdish Identity, London, I.B. Tauris, 2014.^[7]
• The Forgotten Years of Kurdish Nationalism in Iran, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.^[8]