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, focusing in particular 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.

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. He is especially interested in how ideologies structure political action, how postcolonial legacies condition forms of mobilisation and resistance, and how domestic struggles over legitimacy intersect with regional and international arenas. He has written widely on Iranian foreign policy, the politics of revolutionary states, the relationship between political theology and international order, and the strategic uses of ideology in moments of crisis and contestation.

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 demonstrates how Iranian actors engaged global theoretical traditions to articulate alternative understandings of sovereignty and political order.

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 shaped their critiques of developmentalism, imperialism, and prevailing models of international order.

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 their approaches to statecraft, influence operations, and regional security. 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, Foreign Policy, Jadaliyya, Al Jazeera, Lobelog, Muftah, Jacobin, and The Guardian.