Dr Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi

Dr Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi

Lecturer

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2034
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 critical 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 particular focus on contemporary Iran and the wider Middle East. He studies how political ideologies, anti-colonial traditions, and debates about sovereignty shape foreign policy, statecraft, and competing visions of global order across the region and the Global South.

His research investigates the circulation of political ideas across borders and the ways revolutionary and religious actors translate these ideas into diplomatic practice, strategic doctrine, and critiques of international hierarchy. A central strand of his work analyses imperialism, neo-colonial power, and economic coercion, especially sanctions, as instruments of contemporary statecraft. Drawing on critical theories of war and empire, he approaches sanctions not simply as policy tools but as forms of hybrid warfare that transform political economy, state institutions, and social relations. More broadly, his research explores how ideology structures political action 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 study of ideological change and reformist political thought in the Islamic Republic, situating debates on reform, legitimacy, and political authority within wider transformations in Cold War and post-Cold War political thought. He has published extensively on Iranian political ideologies, Third Worldism, and transnational intellectual and militant networks, examining how Iranian revolutionary thinkers drew on anti-colonial, Marxist, and religious traditions to articulate critiques of imperial domination and global hierarchy.

He is 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, serves as series editor of Radical Histories of the Middle East, and has held editorial roles at the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and at Politics, the flagship journal of the Political Studies Association.

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

Selected publications

 

See more publications