Dr Raghavi Viswanath
- Position: Lecturer in Law
- Areas of expertise: international human rights law; critical approaches to international law; epistemic injustice; ethnography; abolition; sensory approaches to law
- Email: R.Viswanath@leeds.ac.uk
- Location: 2.39 The Liberty Building
- Website: LinkedIn | Googlescholar | ORCID
Profile
Before starting at Leeds, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Leverhulme Trust-funded ‘Social Life of Authoritarian Legality’ project at SOAS University of London (2024-26) and a teaching fellow for the ‘Law and Society in South Asia’ module at SOAS. I have also held the Visiting Professor of International Law position at the European School of Political and Social Sciences at Lille (2025-26) and a Visiting Professorship at the University of Torino (2024).
Research interests
My current research straddles two related themes. Firstly, I am working on my monograph on nomadic peoples and their encounters with international law, thinking through how they subvert eurocentric understandings of land, borders, and rights. My monograph centres nomadic epistemologies – building on long collaborative fieldwork with communities in South Asia – to animate new ways of imagining voice, vocabulary, and grammars of rights in international law. Secondly, I am building an abolitionist collective comprising students, researchers, artists, organisers, and civil society groups from India, South Africa, and Kenya. Through my work in the collective, I interrogate international law’s carceralities across sites of racial difference, militarism, climate injustice, and even heritage securitisation. The collective is invested in building a Global Majority-focussed pedagogical resource to advance abolitionist thinking in international law.
Qualifications
- PhD in Law, European University Institute (2024)
- Advanced Masters in Public International Law, Leiden University (2020)
- Bachelor of Civil Law, University of Oxford (2019)
- Bachelor of Arts and Law, National Law Institute University Bhopal (2018)
Professional memberships
- Socio-Legal Studies Association
- Asian Society of International Law
- ICOMOS Our Common Dignity Working Group
Student education
In the 2026-27 academic year, I will be teaching the undergraduate modules of land law, law and society, and international human rights law.
Research groups and institutes
- Centre for Law and Social Justice