Bayram Balcı is the director of the Institut Français d’Etudes Anatoliennes in Istanbul, Turkey and a researcher at CERI Sciences Po Paris, France. Dr. Balcı was the director of the French Institute for Central Asian Studies, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and was a nonresident scholar in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C.