Bayram Balci Research engineer, CNRS Tel .: + 33158717054 - bayram.balci@sciencespo.fr Bayram BALCI has a degree in political science and Arab-Islamic civilization from Sciences Po Grenoble and Aix en Provence. His doctoral thesis focused on the Turkish Islamist movements and their missionary activities in post-Soviet Central Asia. Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, he continued his post-doctoral research on the Central Asian communities settled in Saudi Arabia, in their contribution to the re-Islamization of Central Asia. A researcher at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul, he set up his counterpart in Baku for Caucasian studies and worked on the relations between Shiism and Sunnism in Azerbaijan and Iran. From 2006 to 2010, he headed the French Institute for Central Asian Studies (IFEAC) in Tashkent. From December 2012 to September 2014, he was a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in Washington DC. His current research focuses on the relations between Islam and politics in the post-Soviet space and on Turkey in its regional environment, Caucasus, Central Asia, Middle East.