Dr Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi

Dr Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi

Lecturer

Researcher profile

Email
es404@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Research areas

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi is an interdisciplinary scholar of the international politics of the Middle East whose research brings political theory, postcolonial studies, and interpretive social science into sustained conversation with regional and global politics. His work examines how revolutionary and post-revolutionary states conceptualise and engage the international, with a particular focus on the Islamic Republic of Iran and the wider Shi‘i Muslim world. He studies how political ideologies, anti-colonial traditions, and debates about sovereignty shape foreign policy, statecraft, and competing visions of global order within the Middle East and across the Global South, especially under conditions of sustained external pressure.

His research analyses the circulation of political ideas across borders and the distinctive ways in which revolutionary and religious actors translate these ideas into diplomatic practice, strategic doctrine, and critiques of international hierarchy. A central strand of his current and ongoing research examines imperialism, neo-colonial forms of power, and the use of economic coercion, particularly sanctions, as instruments of contemporary statecraft. Drawing on critical theories of war and empire, he analyses sanctions not merely as tools of foreign policy but as forms of political warfare that reshape state institutions, social relations, and patterns of legitimacy within targeted societies. He is especially interested in how ideologies structure political action, how postcolonial legacies condition forms of mobilisation and resistance, and how domestic struggles over authority intersect with regional conflict, coercive diplomacy, and international intervention.

Eskandar received his doctorate (DPhil) from Queen’s College, University of Oxford, where he also held a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Before joining the University of St Andrews, he was Senior Lecturer at the University of York. He previously taught at Goldsmiths, University of London, SOAS, University of London, the University of Exeter, and the University of Oxford.

His monograph Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2019) offers a major study of ideological change and reformist political thought in the Islamic Republic. It situates debates about reform, legitimacy, and political authority within broader transformations in Cold War and post-Cold War political thought and shows how Iranian actors engaged global theoretical traditions while operating within an international system shaped by coercion, containment, and asymmetrical power.

Eskandar has published extensively on Iranian political ideologies, the development of Third Worldist thought, and the networks of militant and intellectual exchange that connected Iranian actors to anti-colonial movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. His work examines how Iranian revolutionary thinkers drew on global anti-colonial, Marxist, and religious traditions to develop distinctive analyses of power, inequality, and global hierarchy, and how these frameworks informed critiques of developmentalism, imperial domination, and the unequal structuring of the international system.

He is the editor of the expanded 2024 edition of Fred Halliday’s Iran: Dictatorship and Development (Oneworld) and co-editor of Political Parties in the Middle East (Routledge, 2019). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy and serves as series editor of Radical Histories of the Middle East at Oneworld Publications. He has held editorial positions at the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and at Politics, the flagship journal of the Political Studies Association.

Eskandar is currently advancing several research projects at the intersection of international relations theory, postcolonial thought, and Middle East politics. These include a study of how Iranian thinkers and policymakers conceptualised the international and internationalism in the twentieth century and how these understandings shaped Iran’s engagement with the Global South. He is also developing a project on the diplomatic cultures and strategic practices of revolutionary states, examining how ideology, political theology, and historical memory inform approaches to statecraft, influence operations, and regional security. Another major strand of his research focuses on imperialism and critical theories of war, with particular attention to economic sanctions as instruments of coercive power and their effects on political economy, governance, and social conflict in the Islamic Republic of Iran. More broadly, his work investigates how political ideas travel, how they become institutionalised, and how they structure competing normative and practical visions of world politics.

He regularly writes on Middle East politics and international affairs for New Left Review: Sidecar, London Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Jadaliyya, Al Jazeera, Lobelog, Muftah, Jacobin, and The Guardian.

Selected publications

 

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