Dr Alireza Shams Lahijani

Alireza Shams Lahijani is a Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS University of London, specialising in diplomacy, international order and the modern Middle East. He is Deputy Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy (CISD), and convenor of the MA Global Diplomacy.

His research examines how international order is made, contested, and transformed, and how states and polities relate to one another. With an emphasis on diplomacy and foreign policy, he works at the intersection of International Relations theory, historical international relations, with a focus on the modern Middle East and its place in global history. A central thread across his research is the relationship between crisis, time, and order: how moments of rupture are experienced and used to remake international politics.

Alireza teaches on campus and online across risk and policy analysis, diplomatic studies, geopolitics, and the politics and diplomacy of the Middle East. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and his teaching has been commended and nominated for awards at LSE.

At SOAS, he leads CISD’s public programming bringing together senior diplomats, policymakers, and international affairs specialists alongside students and the wider public. He also co-convenes the CISD DiploSem seminar series, New Frontiers in Diplomacy Research, with Dr Alvina Hoffmann.

Previously, Alireza held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the University of Oslo, where he led a research project on the conceptual history of international order. He holds a PhD and MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and a BA in Politics and Law from the University of Essex, and has taught at LSE and Oslo.

• Diplomacy and international order
• Identity, foreign policy and knowledge production
• Crisis and time
• The modern Middle East in global history
• Conceptual history