Teaching
IR1006 Foreign Policy and Diplomacy in Global Politics
IR3107 International Relations of the Middle East
IR4595 Iran in World Politics
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, 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 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 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 attends to the genealogies of political Islam across the twentieth century, including the encounters between Muslim intellectuals and Marxism that generated distinctive Islamic critiques of capitalism, imperialism, and class exploitation. He is equally concerned with post-Islamism as a political and theoretical phenomenon: the renegotiation of the relationship between Islam, democracy, and political authority that followed the exhaustion of revolutionary Islamist projects in Iran and beyond. This includes the transnational networks of scholars, activists, and organisations through which competing visions of Islamic politics have travelled, and the tension between religious universalism and postcolonial particularity that continues to shape contemporary Muslim political thought.
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 精东传媒, 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) offers a study of 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).
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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Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, E., 12 Apr 2026, Jacobin Magazine.
Research output: Contribution to specialist publication 鈥� Article
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Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, E., 5 Feb 2026, London Review of Books, 48, 2.
Research output: Contribution to specialist publication 鈥� Book/Film/Article review
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Open access
Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, E., 1 Jun 2026, Phenomenal World, 1.
Research output: Contribution to specialist publication 鈥� Article
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Open access
Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, E., 20 Jan 2026, New Left Review.
Research output: Contribution to specialist publication 鈥� Article
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Open access
Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, E., 3 Mar 2026, London Review of Books.
Research output: Contribution to specialist publication 鈥� Article
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Open access
Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, E., 18 Mar 2026, Phenomenal World.
Research output: Contribution to specialist publication 鈥� Article
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Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, E., 7 Jan 2025, Iran: dictatorship and development . London : Oneworld Publications, p. vii-xxxiv 28 p.
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding 鈥� Foreword/postscript
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Open access
Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, E., 19 May 2025, Jadaliyya.
Research output: Other contribution
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Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, E., 1 Jul 2024, In: South Atlantic Quarterly. 123, 3, p. 505-527 23 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal 鈥� Article 鈥� peer-review
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Open access
Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, E., 2024, In: Political Theology. 25, 2, p. 91-97 7 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal 鈥� Article 鈥� peer-review