Dr Kira Huju is an LSE Fellow in International Relations in the Department of International Relations at LSE. Her work revolves around global order, liberal internationalism and its discontents, and the nature of cosmopolitanism in a hierarchical world. Her regional expertise lies in India and the EU.
Dr Huju’s monograph, The Cosmopolitan Elite: Indian Diplomats and the Social Hierarchies of Global Order, was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. It narrates the birth, everyday life, and fracturing of a Western-dominated order from its margins. Based on 85 interviews with Indian diplomats, politicians, and academics, as well as archival work in New Delhi, the book adopts a critical sociological sensibility to interrogate how members of the Indian Foreign Service have sought to navigate their place in the world. It revisits what it takes to belong among the “cosmopolitan elite” in international society and asks what the experience of historically marginalised actors inside the diplomatic club can tell us about the social hierarchies of race, class, religion, gender, and caste that underpin a formally liberal global order. A related journal article, Saffronizing diplomacy: The Indian Foreign Service under Hindu nationalist rule, was published by Chatham House in the 02/2022 issue of International Affairs.
Prior to joining LSE, Dr Huju was a Departmental Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Oxford. At the Department of Politics and International Relations, as well as at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, she taught classes for The Development of the International System and Contemporary Debates in International Relations Theory, the Modern South Asian Studies Core Course, and Research Design and Methods. She co-convened the doctoral research seminar for the DPhil in International Relations and convened the undergraduate option paper Politics in South Asia for the BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.
Between 2015 and 2021, she completed her MPhil and DPhil in International Relations at the University of Oxford as an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) scholar. During this time, she was a research assistant as well as a teaching aid to Prof Kalypso Nicolaïdis at Oxford’s European Studies Centre. Outside of Oxford, Dr Huju has been associated with the New Delhi office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in India and the Global Governance Unit at Wissenschaftliches Zentrum für Sozialforschung Berlin (WZB) in Germany.
Not available to supervise MPhil/PhD students.