Dr Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi

Dr Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi

Lecturer

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2034
Email
es404@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Teaching

Undergraduate 

IR1006 Foreign Policy and Diplomacy in Global Politics 

IR3107 International Relations of the Middle East 

IR4595 Iran in World Politics 

Research areas

Dr 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 theorise and engage the international, with particular focus on contemporary Iran and the wider Middle East, exploring 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 examines how political ideas travel across borders and how revolutionary and religious actors translate them into diplomatic practice, strategic doctrine, and critiques of international hierarchy. A central preoccupation is Iranian foreign policy and the ideological foundations of the Islamic Republic's engagement with the international order, including its cultivation of transnational alliances and the strategic and doctrinal dimensions of what might be called Islamic internationalism. He examines how revolutionary states develop and deploy ideological resources to contest dominant norms of sovereignty, legitimate the use of force, and project power across regional and global arenas. More broadly, he is interested in how ideology shapes political action and how domestic struggles over authority intersect with regional conflict and imperial intervention.
 
A parallel strand examines Islamic political thought and movements, and the contested boundaries between religion and the political. He traces how Islamic concepts of justice, authority, and community have been mobilised across a range of ideological projects, from anti-colonial and Third Worldist movements to Islamic socialism and the heterodox religious left. This work explores the genealogies of political Islam across the twentieth century, including the encounters between Muslim intellectuals and Marxism that produced distinctive Islamic critiques of capitalism, imperialism, and class exploitation. He is equally concerned with post-Islamism as a political and theoretical phenomenon, and the renegotiation of the relationship between Islam, democracy, and political authority that followed the exhaustion of revolutionary Islamist projects in Iran and beyond.
 
More recently, Dr Sadeghi-Boroujerdi has turned to the role of emotions, affective communities, and the politics of collective memory, violence and trauma in shaping the international politics of the Middle East. This research extends his longstanding interest in political ideology by asking how political projects are not only theorised and articulated, but also felt, remembered and reproduced. He is particularly interested in how feelings of indignation, moral outrage, and humiliation animate nationalist, populist and anti-colonial imaginaries, and in the ways that fear, victimhood and resentiment have shaped postcolonial state-building and the militarisation of societies. The tensions and entanglements between these affective forces lie at the heart of his current thinking, above all in relation to the political practices and cultures of memory through which violence and trauma are narrated, contested and mobilised in contemporary Iran.
 
He received his doctorate (DPhil) from The 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, and 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) examines ideological change and reformist political thought in the Islamic Republic, situating debates on political reform, international relations, and political authority within wider transformations in Cold War and post-Cold War political thought.
 
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), and has published in a wide range of peer-reviewed journals such as Politics, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, Postcolonial Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, Modern Intellectual History, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Iranian Studies, Philosophy and Global Affairs, and Political Theology.
 
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, Phenomenal World, Jadaliyya, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, and The Guardian.

Selected publications

 

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