Dr Sadeghi-Boroujerdi is an interdisciplinary scholar of the international politics, history and political thought of the Middle East. Bringing critical theory, postcolonial studies and interpretive social science into conversation with regional expertise, his research explores how political ideas and ideological projects shape statecraft, foreign policy and competing visions of international order. His work focuses particularly on modern and contemporary Iran and the Persian Gulf, while situating the region within the wider histories and politics of the Middle East and Global South.

A central strand of his research concerns Iranian foreign policy and the ways revolutionary and post-revolutionary states theorise and engage the international. He examines how political ideas travel across borders and are translated by state and non-state actors into diplomatic practice, strategic doctrine and transnational forms of political mobilisation. Of particular interest are the ideological foundations of the Islamic Republic’s engagement with the international order, its cultivation of regional and transnational alliances, and the strategic and doctrinal dimensions of Islamic internationalism. This work considers how revolutionary states mobilise ideological resources to contest international hierarchies, reinterpret dominant norms of sovereignty, legitimate the use of force and project power beyond their borders. It also investigates how struggles over political authority within states intersect with regional conflict, imperial intervention and changing configurations of global power.

His current research increasingly brings his expertise on Iran to bear on the history, politics and cultural life of the Persian Gulf. Rather than treating the Gulf as a self-evident geopolitical container or a collection of discrete nation-states, he approaches it as an interconnected region made and remade through empire, commerce, migration and war. A central concern is the long history of British and American intervention, the militarisation of the region, and the ways military power, energy infrastructures and the circulation of capital and commodities have become materially entangled. This research examines how imperial power has shaped sovereignty, political authority and regional order, while remaining attentive to local struggles for self-determination and the contradictions accompanying imperial retreat. At the same time, it looks beyond interstate relations and foreign policy to forms of exchange, mobility and political and economic interaction operating below and across the level of the state, including those sustained through diasporic communities and cross-Gulf networks. He is particularly interested in how identities are formed, remembered and contested across the region, and how national, ethnic and sectarian imaginaries, cultural production and collective memory shape affective attachments, solidarities and antagonisms. His research focuses especially on Iran’s historical and contemporary relations with Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

A related strand of his work focuses on Islamic political thought and movements, particularly the contested boundaries between religion and politics. He traces how concepts of justice, authority and political 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. His research reconstructs the genealogies of political Islam across the twentieth century, including the encounters between Muslim intellectuals and Marxism that produced distinctively Islamic critiques of capitalism, imperialism and class exploitation. He is also concerned with post-Islamism as both a political and theoretical phenomenon, and with efforts to renegotiate the relationship between Islam, democracy and political authority following the exhaustion of revolutionary Islamist projects in Iran and elsewhere.

Dr Sadeghi-Boroujerdi received his DPhil from The Queen’s College, University of Oxford, where he subsequently held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Before joining the University of St Andrews, he was Senior Lecturer in Modern Middle East History at the University of York. He has also taught at Goldsmiths, University of London, SOAS, the University of Exeter and the University of Oxford.

His first 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. It situates Iranian debates over political reform, international relations and political authority within broader transformations in Cold War and post-Cold War political thought. He is also 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).

His research has appeared in journals including 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.

Dr Sadeghi-Boroujerdi is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy. He 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 Politics, the flagship journal of the Political Studies Association. He also writes regularly on Middle Eastern politics and international affairs for publications including New Left Review: Sidecar, London Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Phenomenal World, Jadaliyya, Al Jazeera, Jacobin and The Guardian.

Undergraduate 

IR1006 Foreign Policy and Diplomacy in Global Politics 

IR3107 International Relations of the Middle East 

IR4595 Iran in World Politics