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Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is Professor in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies at SOAS, University of London and Fellow of Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge. Educated at the University of Hamburg, American University (Washington DC) and Cambridge, where he received his MPhil and PhD as a multiple scholarship student. Prof. Adib-Moghaddam was the first Jarvis Doctorow Fellow in International Relations and Peace Studies at St. Edmund Hall and the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. He is co-editor in chief, together with Prof. Ali Mirsepassi (New York University), of the Cambridge book series, The Global Middle East. He is the author of several books, including On the Arab revolts and the Iranian revolution and Psycho-nationalism. In addition, he has published over 50 research articles in scientific journals and books and he has given numerous key-note lectures all over the world including in Japan, Qatar, Armenia, the United States, Iran, Germany and the UK. More recently, Adib-Moghaddam has started to research the impact of artificial intelligence on human security. He tweets at @Adib_Moghaddam.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

The most progressive and cutting edge advances are being made beyond disciplines. An emergent caste of critical scholars is blurring the lines between artificial boundaries in a very innovative and refreshing way. In some of the fields that I have engaged with: International Relations, Middle Eastern Studies, Psychology, and Philosophy, new movements are emerging that appreciate the complexity of our social world which can only be achieved with an appreciation of different methods and research designs drawn from the wide range of the contemporary social sciences. My new field of research, artificial intelligence (AI) and human security, is a case in point: trying to understand the ethics and dangers of AI for us humans requires even venturing into the so-called “hard sciences”. These trends are the reason why I created the Professorship in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies at SOAS. It denotes, to my mind, the transdisciplinary and global approach that is emerging out of the recent movements in transnational scholarship. At least this is my impression at the moment.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

Change is inevitable and scholarship needs to be continuously renewed in order to contribute to an understanding of our troubled world. We are living through incredibly dangerous and tumultuous times and I continue to believe that good scholarship carries a culture of peace and tolerance with it. I have only just started to write with a firm understanding of the complexity of the world and my role as a writer or intellectual within it. My first books were mission statements – if anything. They were written at a time when I was an inexperienced “kid scholar” who was advised to publish or perish by many of his peers. Hence my brushstrokes were heavy and at times convoluted. Academia can be a merciless and intimidating trade and at that point of my career I almost felt coerced to produce something. My very young age didn’t help, so in the end, I closed my eyes, wielded the pen and published.

There is then this inner urge to continuously improve – to study the world deeper, not only in books, but in real life. Indeed, the latter aspect – real life experience – is getting more and more important to my work, as I have somewhat escaped the institutional dictates and the political economy of the publishing world. I write more freely and a lot of that has to do with the fact that I have pursued an approach to my research that synthesises – as much........

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