Decades of research form an extensive body of knowledge on International Collaboration in Research (IRC). However, experiential perspectives of the operative core (the academics) in research collaboration, remained relatively uninvestigated. Besides, explorations on how academics in peripheral countries accomplish IRC are still very limited. Finally, the representation of social sciences is also limited compared to natural sciences and engineering. The current study aims to explore the factors facilitating and inhibiting IRC from the lived experiences of academics in Iran and Türkiye comparatively. The study was designed as a dual phenomenology, one study in each country. In each of the countries, 20 academics in social sciences participated in the study. The results suggest that similar generic forces motivate the researchers for IRC in Türkiye and Iran at the individual level, parallel to international literature. However, macro-level factors surrounding higher education ecologies including national-level support schemes, geopolitical dynamics, and the country's foreign policy play an important role in determining the IRC cluster to connect with and the mode of collaboration in these two peripheral countries. The role of macro-level political factors in IRC patterns suggests that although individual researchers intend to attach to the core cluster (USA, UK, Germany, France) of IRC at the global level, macro-level factors push researchers in the periphery for more periphery-periphery collaboration, which may strengthen the growing regionalization in IRC.