Mustafa Çıraklı was born in Nicosia in 1986. He graduated from the Turk Maarif College in 2003 and from the Faculty of Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University with a BA in Politics and European Studies in 2007. He continued his postgraduate studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, obtaining an MA in International Politics in 2009. In 2017, he defended his PhD thesis titled "Identity, immigration and citizenship in Northern Cyprus" and obtained his PhD degree from Lancaster University (United Kingdom).
In 2018, he was appointed as an assistant professor at Near East University. In 2021, he was granted associate professorship. Since June 2019, Dr Çıraklı has been serving as the Director of the Near East Institute at Near East University.
Dr. Çıraklı has published extensively in national and internationally indexed journals, and attended various conferences and symposiums, internationally and at national levels in Cyprus and Turkey. His academic interests include security, identity politics, ethnic/ethnonational conflict, and geopolitics. He is married and has one child.