Moslem Ghomashlouyan
Early-Career Fellow 2026–2027

Moslem Ghomashlouyan (born 1993 in Iran) is a sociologist and social anthropologist with an interest in ethnographic fieldwork integrating economic and anthropological research in the Middle East. After receiving his PhD from the University of Bern (CH) in 2025, he began developing a new project centered on investigating economic workaround practices in the face of imperial weaponization of economics—specifically, sanctions. Sanctions attempt to block formal international trade with sanctioned populations and their access to centralized financial institutions, such as international banking and payment systems, as well as stock markets. Sanctions workarounds are employed by both state actors and cross-class segments of sanctioned societies, and include, among others, de-dollarization, cryptocurrency trade facilitated by decentralized finance (DeFi), and smuggling.

In his doctoral thesis, he wrote on smuggling, migration, and gender in Iran's Kurdish borderlands, which won the 2026 Barbara Lischetti Prize for the Promotion of Gender Studies at the University of Bern, and was awarded the 2025 prize for the best doctoral thesis by the University of Bern's Faculty of Humanities.