Mehmet Celil Çelebi was born in 1979 in Istanbul’s Anatolian side. Both his parents were teachers, products and dedicated supporters of the Kemalist westernization project. He graduated from Galatasaray High School, the famous Franco-Turkish “Turkey’s window to the West.” He got his bachelor’s and master’s degree from Middle East Technical University, an institution established with the help of the United States in the framework of the Cold War to combat Communism, but which quickly became a hotbed for radical left activism. Between 2007 and 2010, he worked for the European Union Department of Ministry of Labor. After realizing Turkey’s candidacy was doomed to fail, he left the bureaucracy for academia and got his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon about Turkey’s misguided democracy. He’s currently the chair of the Political Science and International Relations Department of AGÜ, a university in Kayseri in the middle of Anatolia.