Ayhan Isik defended his PhD dissertation in the Department of History-Political History at Utrecht University focusing on Turkish paramilitarism and violence in the 1990s on September 11, 2020.

He finished undergraduate and master’s degree at the Department of History at Istanbul Bilgi University. His master’s thesis was about Kurdish and Armenian Relations in the Ottoman Kurdish Press (1898-1914) at Istanbul Bilgi University Institute of Social Science Master of Arts in History, in July 2014. He is a co-founder and an editorial board member of Toplum ve Kuram (Theory and Society: Kurdish Studies) Journal. He participated in an oral history project, Göç Hikayeleri: (The Stories of Migration) carried out by Göç-Der (Migration Association in Istanbul) between October 2007 and June 2008. He is also a member of the Kurdology Studies Group, which was formed to transcribe Ottoman texts into modern Turkish. He was co-author of the book The Unspoken Truth: Enforced Disappearances, the research of the Truth Justice Memory Center, June 2013. He is a co-founder of ZAN Institute for Social, Political and Economic Studies that is based in Diyarbakir and he is also a co-founder of Kurdish Studies at Istanbul Bilgi University in fall of 2013.  His research interests include political violence, civil war, paramilitarism, oral history, migration, enforced disappearances, Kurdish and Armenian relations in the late Ottoman Empire, Modern Kurdish and Turkish history, mass violence and Turkish state politics.