My main expertise areas are International Political Economy, Middle East Politics, and Turkish Political and Economic Life. Specifically, my research focuses on global free trade relations, the role of the state and business associations in the global political economy, and relationship between the state and capital.
I defended My Ph.D. thesis in 2019 at the University of Nottingham, which was supervised by Prof. Andreas Bieler and co-supervised by Dr. Vanessa Pupavac. Approaching from a historical materialist perspective, my thesis focused on the role of Turkish business associations (TUSIAD, MUSIAD, and TUSKON) in explaining the shifting nature of the global free trade regime. The thesis provided a class-based analysis of business associations in Turkey in order to understand the historical specificity of capitalist relations in Turkey and the expansion of Turkish capitalism towards the Middle East and North Africa in the 2010s. The thesis argued that business associations in Turkey are constitutively divided into class fractions. Accordingly, it argues that these are not monolithic blocs without contradictions and cracks. Also, it is argued that the fragmentation of capitalist classes in the Turkish social formation is not primarily based on religious, ideological, and cultural dynamics, rendering it misleading to speak primarily of secular and Islamist capital or of Istanbul and Anatolian capital. To a considerable extent, what differentiates capitalist class fractions is the way in which they engage in the social relations of production, what role they play in the power bloc, and their specific forms of integration into global relations of free trade, bearing in mind that they are at different scales and stages of accumulation arising from uneven development, and thus have interests corresponding to a capitalist class at different stages of its development.
The findings of the thesis are published in
- Avci, A. (2022). Unraveling the Social Formation: Free Trade, the State, and Business Associations in Turkey, Leiden: Brill.
Apart from the book, I have also published several types of research in different journals, such as Capital & Class, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, and New Middle Eastern Studies.
Akif Avcı 