Professor Abbas Wali is from Mahabad. He completed his primary and secondary education in Tabriz and continued his university education in Tehran, where he received a bachelor's degree in political science from Tehran National University in 1973.

He went to Britain for higher education. In 1976, he received a master's degree in political theory from the University of Keele. His research thesis was "The Transition to Capitalism in Russian Political Thought between 1861 and 1917".

Abbas Wali completed his doctorate in sociology at the University of London with a thesis entitled "Land, Labor and Social Relations in Pre-Capitalist Iran".

He obtained his Ph.D. in historical sociology in 1983 and then began postdoctoral research at the University of London, working on a project entitled "Religion and Intellectuals in the 1979 Iranian Revolution".

Wali began his academic career in 1986 at the University of Wales in Swansea, where he taught political theory and Middle Eastern politics before moving to Hawler (Erbil) in 2005 at the request of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Prime Minister to establish a new university.

Character Designer: Hemin Qaramani

Abbas Wali was the president and founder of Kurdistan University in Hawler (Erbil) for three years. He left Hawler in 2008 due to different ideas with the government over the university's management.

After Hawler, Abbas Wali moved to Istanbul, where he became Head of the Department of Modern Social and Political Thought at Bogazici University (2008- 2017).

Among the writings of Professor Abbas Wali are the following books:

Precapitalist Iran: A Theoretical History (I.B. Tauris Publishing 1993)

Some ideas on the bases of Kurdish Nationalism (Mazda Publishing House 2003)

Kurds and the State in Iran: Building Kurdish Identity (I.B.Tauris Publishing House 2012)

Forgotten Years of Kurdish Nationalism in Iran (Palgrave-Macmillan Publishing House 2019)

Power and Resistance in Kurdistan

The Republic of Violence