Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
Senior Lecturer in the History of the Middle East International Officer

Profile

Biography

DPhil (Oxon) FRHistS

Eskandar is an interdisciplinary scholar of the Middle East, working at the intersections of international political theory, intellectual and political history, postcolonial theory, and international relations. His research explores the global entanglements of revolutionary movements, with particular attention to the modern history of Iran and the wider Shi'i Muslim world. He works extensively on theories and practices of decolonisation, examining how anti-colonial and postcolonial thought have shaped political ideologies, movements, and state practices across the Global South.

He has written on the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, situating it within the broader context of revolutionary statecraft, ideological formation, and international political theory. His work explores how revolutionary and religious ideologies influence Iran’s international relations, and how these intersect with regional and global dynamics of civil war, popular mobilisation and ideological contestation.

Before joining the University of York, Eskandar was a Lecturer in the Contemporary Politics and Modern History of the Middle East at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has previously taught and lectured at the University of Exeter, the University of Oxford, and was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford from 2016 to 2019.

His first monograph, Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran, examines the political, intellectual, and ideological genealogies of Iran’s post-revolutionary reform movement within the context of the global Cold War and Euro-American traditions of Cold War liberalism. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.

Eskandar has also researched and published extensively on the history of Iranian intellectuals, political militants, and clandestine organisations in the 1960s and 1970s. His work on “Third Worldism” situates Iran’s revolutionary history within broader anti-colonial and internationalist movements, tracing the networks, solidarities, and intellectual exchanges between Iranian opposition groups and likeminded revolutionary movements across the Global South.

He is the co-editor of Political Parties in the Middle East (Routledge, 2019), and the editor of a newly expanded edition of Fred Halliday’s Iran: Dictatorship and Development (Oneworld, 2024), for which he wrote an article-length introduction.

Eskandar is currently engaged in a number of research projects spanning modern Iranian intellectual history, international political thought, and postcolonial theory. One project offers an in-depth study of the influential Iranian thinker and dissident Jalal Al-e Ahmad (d. 1969), situating his work within broader currents of global intellectual history. He is also investigating the history of internationalism and the strategies through which states and movements in the Global South have sought to mobilise international and multilateral institutions to reshape the global order. His research further explores the history and practice of diplomacy in the Islamic Republic of Iran, alongside a wider interest in the diplomatic cultures of revolutionary states. This research traces the global circulation of revolutionary ideas and critical practices and explores the complex relationships between ideology, state-building, and foreign policy in the postcolonial and post-revolutionary world.

In addition, he is undertaking a major project on the postcolonial and cultural politics and semiotics of Iran’s nuclear programme - an area of inquiry that remains significantly under-theorised in both mainstream international relations and conventional political histories of the country’s atomic ambitions. Drawing on postcolonial theory, world-systems analysis, and critical approaches to international order, this research interrogates the racialised and geopolitical hierarchies embedded in global nuclear governance and non-proliferation regimes. At its core is the paradox that while the Islamic Republic has pursued nuclear development as a marker of modernity and civilisational legitimacy, it is simultaneously subjected to regimes of suspicion, surveillance, and strategic exclusion. The project critically examines how these tensions are mediated through narrative, memory, and symbolic discourse, not only at the level of elite diplomacy and statecraft but also through popular culture, collective identity, and everyday forms of national self-understanding. It explores how the nuclear issue has come to function as a metonym for broader aspirations such as sovereignty, independence, and technological self-reliance, and how these meanings circulate and are reproduced across everyday contexts far beyond the sphere of formal state discourse. The research situates the nuclear question within a longer genealogy of anti-colonial resistance, linking it to the legacy of the Iran–Iraq War, the trauma of chemical warfare, and earlier struggles such as the nationalisation of oil in the 1950s. Through this lens, it explores how Iran’s atomic ambitions have come to embody wider contests over justice, recognition, and the unequal structure of the international order.

Departmental roles

Current PhD Students:

• Kimia Talebi. PhD project: "The political imaginaries and activism of Middle Eastern migrants in Britain during the Long Sixties"

Research

Overview

Eskandar’s research interests include the history and contemporary politics of modern Iran, the modern intellectual history of Iran, political thought in the modern Middle East and North Africa, histories of decolonisation and the global Cold War, histories of revolutionary social movements in the modern Middle East, Islamist social movements and ideologies, global histories of socialism and Marxism, as well as postcolonial and decolonial theory.

Publications

Full publications list

Select Publications:

Monographs

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 456.

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Al-e Ahmad’s Faustian Bargain? Antonio Gramsci, the ‘Progressive Clergy’ and the Search for Hegemony in Late Pahlavi Iran, South Atlantic Quarterly (Duke University Press), (2024) 123 (3): pp. 505–527.
•  Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Iran’s Uprisings for “Women, Life, Freedom”: Overdetermination, Crisis, and the Lineages of Revolt, Politics (SAGE), Vol. 43(3) 2023., pp. 404 –438.
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Shariʿati, Anti-Capitalism, and the Promise of the “Third World”, Philosophy and Global Affairs, Vol. 2, Issue 1, 2022, pp. 197-211.
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Yaacov Yadgar, Al-e Ahmad, Guardianship, and the Critique of Colonial Sovereignty, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory (Wiley-Blackwell), Volume 29, Issue 1, March 2022, pp. 19-33.
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Iran and the Permanence of the Theologico-Political?, Political Theology, 4 July 2022.
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Gharbzadegi, Colonial Capitalism and the Racial State in Iran, Postcolonial Studies, 24:2, 2021., pp. 173-194.
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Yaacov Yadgar, Jalal’s Angels of Deliverance and Destruction: Genealogies of Theo-politics, Sovereignty and Coloniality in Iran and Israel, Modern Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press), Volume 18, Issue 1, March 2021, pp. 223-247.
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, The Origins of Communist Unity: Anti-Colonialism and Revolution in Iran’s Tri-continental Moment, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 45, Issue 5, 2018., pp 796-822.
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Mostafa Malekian: Spirituality, Siyasat-Zadegi and (A)political Self-Improvement, Digest of Middle East Studies (Wiley), Volume 23, Number 2, 2014., pp. 279–311.
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, From Etelaʿati to Eslahtalabi: Saʿid Hajjarian, Political Theology and the Politics of Reform in Post-Revolutionary Iran, Iranian Studies, Vol. 47, No. 6, 2014., pp. 987-1009.

Edited Books

• Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development, new expanded edition, edited and introduced by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi (London: Oneworld, 2024).
• Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi & Lauren Banko (eds.), Political Parties in the Middle East (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).

Commissioned Book Chapters 

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Crescent Moon, Hammer and Sickle: Muslim Socialism and Islamic Populism in Modern Iran, The Cambridge History of Modern Political Thought in Iran, edited by Ali Mirsepassi (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), forthcoming.
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Nasser Mohajer, Translation, Revolutionary Praxis, and the Enigma of Manuchehr Hezarkhani, in Rasmus C. Elling and Sune Haugbølle, eds. The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East: Iran, Palestine and Beyond (London and New York: Oneworld Publications, 2024).
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Strategic Depth, Counterinsurgency & the Logic of Sectarianization: Perspectives on the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Security Doctrine and Its Regional Implications, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, in Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East, (eds.) Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Special Issues of Academic Journals

• Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi & Lauren Banko (eds.), Political Parties in the Middle East: Historical Trajectories and Future Prospects, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 44, Issue 2, 2017.

Online Articles

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Iran and the 'Axis of Resistance': A Brief History, Jadaliyya, 19 May 2025. 
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Who Translated Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth into Persian?, Jadaliyya, 13 August 2020.
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, Musaddiq's Spectre: On the Recent Declassification of US Documents, Jadaliyya, 17 July 2017.
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Scholarship in the Service of Empire: The Legacy of Ann K.S. Lambton in 20th Century Iran, Ajam Media Collective, 6 March 2017.
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi & Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, Serving the Leviathan: The Life and Legacy of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Jacobin, 18 January 2017.

Translations

• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, “Some of the Vanguard of the Return to Self in the Third World” by Ali Shariʿati, in Spirit and Defiance: Ali Shariati in Translation, (eds.) Siavash Saffari, Arash Davari and Maryam Rabiee (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, fortcoming).
• Heydar Tabrizi, The Foreign Relations of the Organisation of Iranian People’s Fadaʿi Guerrillas: From Its Formation until the Iranian Revolution of 1979, translated by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Fada'i Guerrilla Praxis in Iran, 1970 - 1979: Narratives and Reflections on Everyday Life, (eds.) Touraj Atabaki, Nasser Mohajer, and Siavush Randjbar-Daemi (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2024).

Teaching

Undergraduate

An example of modules taught:

• HIS00125I Historical Thinking
• HIS00169I Decolonisation and Social Revolution in the Modern Middle East and North Africa, 1945 to the present
• HIS00223H Revolutionary Iran: The Islamic Republic and Iran-Iraq War in Global History

Postgraduate

An example of modules taught:

• HIS00173M Messiahs, Mojaheds, and Marxists: Social Protest, Resistance, and Revolution in Modern Iran
• HIS00053M Making the Contemporary World: History, Politics and Ideas since 1945

External activities

Overview

Eskandar is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and series editor of Radical Histories of the Middle East (Oneworld Publications). He also previously served as an associate editor at the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and Politics. 

Eskandar regularly writes on the politics and international relations of the Middle East for online media and journals including New Left Review's Sidecar, Foreign Policy, Jadaliyya, Al Jazeera, Lobelog, Muftah, Jacobin, and The Guardian.