Rouzbeh Parsi is Head of the Middle East and North Africa Programme.
Rouzbeh Parsi received his PhD. in history from Lund University in 2009. In his dissertation he applied a conceptual history framework to how modernity, nationalism, and gender were discussed by intellectuals in Iran between the two world wars. The analysis focused on how intellectuals wrote the modern Iranian nation into being and among other things what role they envisioned for Iranian women and minorities in that project.
In 2003 in Lund, he was part of the group that started one of the first interdisciplinary educational programs in human rights studies. Here the disciplines of ethics, law, political science, and history were brought together in order to understand how human rights as a language and political-legal framework had developed.
Between 2009-2013 he worked for the EU think tank Institute for Security Studies in Paris where he focused on policy issues related to the Middle East in general, and Iran and the Gulf states in particular. Important topics here were Iran’s nuclear programme, relations to various Gulf states, and developments in Iraq.
In 2013 Rouzbeh Parsi returned to Lund where was senior lecturer at the History and Human Rights department until 2019.
Among the themes Rouzbeh Parsi have researched and work are state formation and military interventions in the Middle East, nuclear proliferation, sanctions regimes, mediation and Track II projects.