Abbas Vali is from Mahabad in Rojhelat,Kurdish region in Iran. He had his primary and secondary education in Tabriz. He began his higher education in Tehran obtaining a BA in Political Science from the National University of Iran in 1973. He then went to the UK to continue his graduate studies. He obtained an MA in Political Theory from Keele University in 1976 submitting a thesis on Transition to Capitalism in Russian Political Thought 1861-1917. Abbas completed his doctoral studies in Sociology at University of London writing a thesis on Land, Labour and Social Relations in Pre-Capitalist Iran. He was awarded a PhD in Historical Sociology in 1983. This was followed by post-doctoral research at the university of London working on a project on Religion and Intelligentsia in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 (1983-85). Abbas began his academic career in 1986 at the University Wales at Swansea where he taught Political Theory and Middle Eastern Politics before moving to Erbil to establish a new university on the request of the head of the KRG in 2005. He was the founding president of the University of Kurdistan in Hewler for three years. He left Erbil in 2008 due to disagreements with the government over the management of the university. Abbas then moved to Istanbul where he  held the chair of Modern Social and political thought at the Department of Sociology, Bogazici University in Istanbul( 2008-2017). His writings include Pre-Capitalist Iran: A theoretical History (I.B. Tauris, 1993), Essays on the Origins of Kurdish Nationalism (Mazda 2003), Kurds and the State in Iran: The Making of Kurdish Identity (I. B. Tauris 2012), The Forgotten Years of Kurdish Nationalism in Iran,  (Palgrave-Macmillan 2019). He is currently working on  two  new books:  Power and Resistance in Kurdistan (2021) and The Republic of Violence (2022).