About Raghavi Viswanath

I am a legal academic and consultant specialising in international human rights law, authoritarianism, and international criminal law. I am a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London, and a Founding Fellow of the Law and Humanities Hub of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London. At SOAS, I am engaged in a Leverhulme project led by Dr. Mayur Suresh on the 'Social Life of Law in Authoritarian Contexts'. Under the aegis of this project, I have been working with pastoral communities in Kachchh in western India to unpack the changing dynamics of the implementation of forest laws. I am also a teaching fellow in the 'Law and Society in South Asia' course.

Prior to joining SOAS, I was a doctoral researcher at the European University Institute in Florence. My PhD proposed a multimedia and ethnographic re-articulation of cultural rights in international law using Global South epistemologies. To this end, I was engaged in extensive collaborative fieldwork with the Irulars, a semi-nomadic community based in southern India. The thesis was awarded the 2025 Antonio Cassese Prize for the Best International Law Thesis. I hold postgraduate degrees from Leiden Law School and the University of Oxford, where I specialised in international human rights and international criminal law. I have taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the University of Torino, National Law School of India University, the University of Salamanca, La Sapienza University, Ashoka University, and the University of East London, and dabble as a careers mentor/moot court mentor in several academic institutions.

My interests (in academia and policymaking) extend to issues of epistemic injustice, sensory approaches to law, hate crimes, land rights, cultural heritage law, and authoritarianism. I have been a consultant for cultural rights collectives/ministries in India, Italy, and Kenya, a Research Fellow at the Global Citizenship Observatory, and a Senior Research Associate at Public International Law and Policy Group. Presently, I am a member of the ICOMOS Working Group on Rights-Based Approaches.