Raghavi Viswanath

Raghavi Viswanath joined the SOAS School of Law as a postdoctoral researcher in September 2024. Raghavi is a member of the team, led by Dr. Mayur Suresh, working on the Leverhulme-funded project ‘The Social Life of Law in Authoritarian Contexts’. Her research examines how the rise of authoritarianism in India has informed the making and determination of land claims by nomadic communities. Raghavi is also a teaching fellow for the undergraduate module ‘Law and Society in South Asia’ led by Dr. Kanika Sharma and Prof. Martin Lau. Raghavi’s areas of interest and specialisation include international human rights law, international criminal justice, cultural heritage law, epistemic injustice, the ethics of ethnographic research, and sensory approaches to legal meaning-making. 

Raghavi holds degrees in international law and public policy from Leiden Law School, the University of Oxford, and the National Law Institute University in Bhopal (India). Before commencing her postdoc at SOAS, Raghavi was a doctoral researcher in International Law at the European University Institute in Florence. Her project, supported by the Nuffic-Beurs scholarship awarded by the Dutch government, proposed a multimedia, ethnographic re-articulation of the grammar and politics of cultural rights in international human rights law using counterhegemonic epistemologies. Her doctoral thesis was anchored on collaborative fieldwork with the Irulars, a semi-nomadic community based in southern India.

Alongside the postdoc at SOAS, Raghavi is one of the founding fellows at the Law and Humanities Hub of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. She is also actively engaged as a policy interlocutor through her work with the ICOMOS Working Group on Rights-Based Approaches and as a legislative consultant with cultural rights collectives and culture ministries in India, Kenya, and Italy.

Raghavi takes great interest in teaching, having taught cultural heritage law, public international law, international criminal law, and law and society in Asia at the University of Torino, National Law School of India University, European University Institute, University of East London, Ashoka University, and La Sapienza University.

Her writing has been published in the International Criminal Law Review, Asian Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, and many edited collections of the OUP, Springer, and Routledge. She has also convened several special issues of journals and workshop series on themes including epistemic divides in heritage policy, rethinking ethics review processes, the role of language in anti-colonial legal discourse, and eco-casteism.