He is a political scientist and a social and political anthropologist. He lectures at the University of Vienna and the Fachhochschule Vorarlberg, and is the general secretary of the Austrian Society for the Promotion of Kurdish Studies/European Center for Kurdish Studies. He is a board member of the humanitarian organization LeEZA (League for Emancipatory Development Cooperation), active in Kurdistan. Thomas Schmidinger has traveled repeatedly to Syrian Kurdistan, allowing him to offer a current perspective on a region caught between revolution and civil war.