Kazım Yavuz, his father, was a political activist and teacher who was graduated from the Ernis (Van) Village Institutes and led numerous cooperative projects to develop rural area economy and infrastructure.
He received a two-year MacArthur Foundation scholarship to carry out research on the localization of Islam in the Fergana Valley of Uzbekistan as well as in eastern Turkey.
[1] His dissertation titled Islamic Political Identity in Turkey[2] was published by the Oxford University Press in 2003.
He held a joint appointment in the university's Department of Political Science and the Middle East Center.
Yavuz wrote that "there was no genocide, but rather local responses to the Armenian provocations, the guerrilla tactics on the side of the occupying Russian army, and the rebellions in different parts of Anatolia".