PHD THESIS
Title: Of Revolution and Reaction: The Decolonization-Era Third-Worldism and the Politics of Knowledge Production in International Law
PhD Supervisor & Co-Supervisor: Fuad Zarbiyev & Grégoire Mallard
Expected completion date: 2027
profile
Soheil Ghasemi is a PhD candidate in International Law and a teaching assistant at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID), where he also completed his Master’s degree in International Law. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Law (LL.B.) from the University of Tehran, Iran. He is also affiliated with the Graduate Institute’s Center for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism and was formerly a Schindler Junior Scholar at the Institute for International and Comparative Constitutional Law of the University of Zurich for the academic year 2025-2026. He has previously been a visiting researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of the University of Helsinki (Finland), the European University Institute in Florence (Italy) and Edinburgh Law School (UK). His research interests range from public international law to sociology and history of international law, with a focus on non-Western and peripheral histories of international law throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. His doctoral project constructs a historical sociology of the politics of knowledge production in the discipline of international law through the lens of the decolonization-era Third-Worldist international lawyers and academic institutions in the global periphery.
Areas of expertise
- Public international law
- History and theory of international law
- Sociology of legal profession and expertise
- Political economy of international law
Publications and Works
- Ghasemi, Soheil (2026) “Where ‘Falls the Shadow’: The 2025 ESIL Conference in Berlin and the Disciplinary Ambivalences of ‘Reconstructing International Law’” 37(1) European Journal of International Law. https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chag006
- Ghasemi, Soheil (2026) “The Law’s Apocalypse or the Law of Apocalypse?: On the (Counter-)Theatrical Perversion of Legality”. Völkerrechtsblog, https://doi.org/10.17176/20260410-172928-0
- Ghasemi, Soheil (2026) “The Tehran School and International Law in Early 20th Century Iran”. ant.e, available at: https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/the-tehran-school-and-international-law-in-early-20th-century-iran/
- Ghasemi, Soheil & Eghbalizarch, Mohammadreza (2023) “Of Capitulations, Capital, and Collateral: Russian Imperial Banking in Late Qajar Persia (1891-1921)”. 66 German Yearbook of International Law 237–258. https://doi.org/10.3790/gyil.2024.370078
- Ghasemi, Soheil (2025) Review of “Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960–82, written by Umut Özsu”. 15(1) Asian Journal of International Law 190-191. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2044251324000341
WORK EXPERIENCES
- Teaching Assistant at the Graduate Institute’s International Law Department (2024-2025)
- Legal Assistant at International Law Commission (2023)
- Intern, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2019-2020) Intern
- United Nations Information Center (2018-2019)
Fellowships, grants and awards
- Graduate Institute PhD Scholarship (2022-2026)
- Vahabzadeh Foundation Scholarship (2020-2022)