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Kayhan Valadbaygi

Fellow

Kayhan Valadbaygi is a researcher at the International Institute of Social History. His work explores the configurations of global capitalism and the international economic order in Iran and the broader Middle East, with particular attention to the roles of ethnicity, gender, and geopolitics in shaping class structures and state formations. Adopting a relational methodology, his research challenges methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism, while also avoiding the limitations of methodological globalism, which often overemphasises international factors at the expense of national and local agency.

He is the author of Capitalism in Contemporary Iran: Capital Accumulation, State Formation, and Geopolitics (Manchester University Press, 2024; paperback 2026), and co-editor of Mode of Production and the Historiography of Capitalism: Gender, Race and Eurocentrism (Bristol University Press, January 2026).

His current project examines the relationship between ethnic and class oppression in Iran within the context of neoliberal global capitalism. Rather than treating ethnicity as secondary or external, the project conceptualises it as integral to labour valuation and capital accumulation. Drawing on theories of racial capitalism and social reproduction feminism, it argues that ethnicity, similar to race and gender, is embedded within the mechanisms of capital accumulation and exploitation, structuring who works, where, for how much, and under what conditions.

Kayhan earned his PhD in International Relations from the University of Nottingham, where his doctoral research on post-revolutionary Iran received the Best PhD Thesis Prize in 2021. He also holds an MA in International Relations (Research Track) from the University of Nottingham, an MSc Econ in International Relations from Cardiff University, and a BA in Communication and Media Studies from the University of Tehran. Before joining the IISH, he held teaching and research positions at Leiden University and Nottingham Trent University.

Publications

Kayhan Valadbaygi