Kayhan Valadbaygi

Kayhan Valadbaygi is an Iranian researcher in the fields of international political economy, international relations, and Middle Eastern studies. He received his BA in Communication and Media Studies from the University of Tehran and then pursued his postgraduate studies in the United Kingdom: an MA in Economics in International Relations from Cardiff University, and a research MA and PhD in International Relations from the University of Nottingham. His doctoral dissertation on the political economy of post-revolutionary Iran won the 2021 Best PhD Thesis Award from the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham.

Before joining the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam as a researcher, Valadbaygi held teaching and research positions at Leiden University (the Netherlands) and Nottingham Trent University. His research interests include the political economy of development, authoritarianism, subaltern class struggles, capitalist restructuring and state formation in modern and contemporary Iran, as well as non-Eurocentric historiography of capitalism.

His major work is the book <em>Capitalism in Contemporary Iran: Capital Accumulation, State Formation and Geopolitics</em> (Manchester University Press, 2024), which, by employing the ontology of internal relations (influenced by Bertell Ollman) and the tradition of historical materialism, analyzes Iran's patterns of capital accumulation and class and state transformations in their internal connection with global neoliberal capitalism. He has proposed the concept of 'hybrid neoliberalism' to describe the specific path of capitalist development in Iran and has published key articles such as 'Hybrid Neoliberalism: Capitalist Development in Contemporary Iran' (2021) and 'Neoliberalism and State Formation in Iran' (2022). Valadbaygi is also the co-editor of the volume <em>Mode of Production and the Historiography of Capitalism: Gender, Race, and Eurocentrism</em> (Bristol University Press, 2026), and his ongoing projects focus on the nexus of ethnic and class oppression within the framework of global neoliberal capitalism.