Iranian Politics Research Articles

Iran and the rise of its neoconservatives: the politics of Tehran's silent revolution

The election of the hard-line Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Iranian Presidency in 2005 shocked the world. In this compelling book, experts Anoush Ehteshami and Mahjoub Zweiri penetrate the labyrinth of Iranian politics and reveal the forces which brought Ahmadinejad to power. They argue that the power base behind Ahmadinejad represents a kind of Iranian version of American neo-conservativism. Politicians and clerics exiled from influence under the reformist President Khatami have seized their chance to get back in to power and push an uncompromising foreign policy agenda. In an analysis which has major implications for US and EU policymakers, Ehteshami and Zweiri examine this group's agenda on issues like Iraq and nuclear enrichment, and assess its strategies for implementing it. Iran and the Rise of Its Neoconservatives is the essential guide to the politics to this turbulent nation, whose importance to world security has never been more keenly felt.

Religion, Culture and Politics in Iran. From the Qajars to Khomeini * BY JOANNA DE GROOT

Religion, Culture and Politics in Iran. From the Qajars to Khomeini * BY JOANNA DE GROOT

Engaging Iran: the rise of a Middle East powerhouse and America's strategic choice

Iran is poised to re-emerge as the powerhouse of the Middle East in the 21st century. Already taking on massive export and energy diversification projects and working to acquire a nuclear weapons arsenal, Iran is likely to attain the stature of regional power in the coming years, thanks in no small measure to the vacuum created by the chaos in Iraq, which for many years served as a counterweight to Iran in the region. Gonzalez illuminates the path toward a new approach to engagement with Iran. Only then can the United States reap the benefits of a new Middle East. But is a nuclear-armed Iran a direct strategic threat to the United States? While post-revolutionary politics have harnessed anti-Americanism as a matter of policy, Gonzalez argues that this is only a sign of a larger enterprise of democratization; a trajectory of independence, as the author calls it. This trajectory has led Iran to release itself from the shackles of foreign power intervention and has put it closer to home-grown democracy than any other nation in the Muslim Middle East. This promise of democracy, set in the wider scope of Iranian Shi'i jurisprudence and practice, is set to elevate the largest segment of Iranian society-its educated and pro-American youth-to the forefront of Iranian politics. The Middle East is in crisis, and within every crisis lies opportunity. America must not repeat the myopic mistakes of the past. A far-sighted and grand-strategic approach to engagement with Iran promises to open doors to regional stability and political development. Only then can America, as the global superpower, reap the benefits of a new Middle East, with the Islamic Republic of Iran at the helm.

Poverty, inequality, and populist politics in Iran

Despite nearly three decades of revolutionary government rule, poverty and inequality remain the central issues of political debate in Iran. The unexpected electoral victory of Ahmadinejad, the populist candidate in the 2005 presidential election, has been widely attributed to rising poverty and inequity. Using household survey data, I examine the trends in poverty and inequality for the last three decades and show that this thesis is not grounded in facts. Survey data show that poverty has substantially declined in recent years, and is low by international standards and in comparison with pre-revolution years. This finding is consistent with pro-poor policies of the Islamic government, mainly in provision of basic infrastructure such as electricity, safe drinking water, and health. However, the same policies have not been as effective in reducing inequality, which, after an initial decline following the Revolution, has remained basically constant in the post-Revolution period.

Tehran Blues

This informative and timely book, Tehran Blues: How Iranian YouthRebelled Against Iran’s Founding Fathers, is skillfully crafted into elevenchapters that showcase current Iranian politics while drawing insights fromits past. Its author, Kaveh Basmenji, was born in Iran in 1961 and is a journalist,translator, and writer. The book’s main aimis to explore Iran’s presentdayyouths and their growing disillusionment with the rigid mores of thepresent regime. Theirs is a generation whose parents rose up against theShah’s excesses and who now feel distanced from the strict religious ideologyheld by their forbearers of two decades ago. Demanding liberalism andseeking pleasure, the Iranian youths of today are a force to be reckoned with and a potential powder-keg of societal instability.Why has Basmenji chosento focus on them? He answers this question by referring to George Orwell:“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one thatwent before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”Through numerous interviews as well as an assessment of contemporaryIran’s sociopolitical landscape, Basmenji argues that contemporary Iranianyouths are in near-revolt, often openly defying the mullahs and their hardlinereligiosity. His premise is that Iran’s young people are tuning out theirIslamic government and are instead embracing an alternative world of privateparties, personal weblogs, movies, study, and dreaming about movingto the West ...

Iranian University Students' Politics in the Post-Reform Movement Era: A Discourse Analysis

Based on the discourse analysis of the statements of the university student organizations in the period between 1996–2006, this paper will address the pros and cons of five approaches to politics in the post-reform movement era based on five discourses among university students in the past decade of Iranian politics and their consequences for reshaping the Iranian polity. This article first discusses five socio-political processes, i.e., Islamicization, social differentiation, limited political competition, transformation of Shi'ite authority, and personalization of power, which led to four social and political schisms in Iranian society; inequality; political, social, and cultural discrimination; and secular/Islamist tension. Referring to these schisms, political discourses shape the ideologies and actions of Iranian student movements. These discourses are social justice, tradition, totalitarianism, pluralism, and Islamic democracy. Even if these discourses were no more than intellectual pronouncements by the university students, they have been powerful enough to extend to the Iranian political society.

Becoming Intellectual: The Blogestan and Public Political Space in the Islamic Republic

This chapter seeks to interrogate the possibility that the blogosphere is a significant space for a range of intellectual voices inside the Islamic Republic of Iran. The paper critiques naïve arguments that the blogosphere is totally oppositional by examining some of the religious discourses of ‘embedded intellectuals’. But it also critiques the idea that Iranian intellectual life must be examined solely through the prism of Islam. We explore how more critical voices have gravitated to the web in the absence of other sites for engagement with the regime. Using Gramsci's notion of oppositional intellectuals, coupled with Mouffe's argument about political space, we explore the emergent voices of women as well as the range of mundane economic issues being articulated through blogs and websites. Hence we suggest that Iranian virtual politics is quite robust, for the moment, even while under the censor's gaze. All men (sic) are intellectuals but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals (A. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1971)

Iran's new strategic entity

This article focuses on the two political factions in Iran, the Jihadi (traditionalist combative) and the Ijithadi (creatively interpretive) and their competition and accommodation since the Revolution. The author argues that US-policy and developments in the region have favoured the Jihadis and enabled President Ahmadinejad to act more intransigently and assertively than would otherwise been the case. At a time of profound shift in the sectarian and strategic balance in the region, the challenge for the US and its allies is to widen the arena for Ijithadis within Iranian politics.

Political change in the Arab oil monarchies: from liberalization to enfranchisement

The oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf region have typically been portrayed as patriarchal autocracies characterized by traditional tribal rule that have taken on the characteristics of a modern state. The historical debate on these rentier states has centred on how their substantial oil income since the 1970s has allowed them to pacify their citizenry from making demands for enfranchisement. Power was thus firmly able to rest with the elites. Since the end of the Cold War, winds of change flamed the desire for reform and the late 1990s saw significant political changes. The empirical data indicates that this pace has increased, albeit at differential speeds, within the context of the post-9/11 war on terror. Interestingly, this has been the case despite turmoil in Iraq and a shift to the right in Iranian politics. The fundamental drivers of reform in the Arab oil monarchies continue to be the ruling elites themselves, however. The character of the reforms does appear to be mainly liberalizing rather than democratizing, but developments in some oil monarchies suggest that this process can be viewed as an early or intermediate stage of a wider enfranchisement of civil society.

Mostafa Sho‘aiyan: The Maverick Theorist of Revolution and the Failure of Frontal Politics in Iran

Based on the author's original research, the paper will offer a glimpse into the frontal theory of Mostafa Sho‘aiyan. The paper draws on his life and experience of the National Front in the 1950s as a model for political thought. Next, the paper will show how he tried, through his unique and uncanonical revolutionary theory, to make a revolutionary praxis compatible with frontal thinking. Analytically, Sho‘aiyan's work proves that an ideologically driven concept of national liberation becomes an impediment for frontal politics in a truly democratic way. Sho‘aiyan's works represent a theoretical and existential response to the national liberation dilemma which the Iranian Marxists faced in the 1960s and 70s.

The Development of Social Insurance in Iran: Technical-Financial Conditions and Political Rationales, 1941–1960

This text brings the case of Iranian social insurance (SI) to bear on the processes shaping Iranian politics from 1941 to 1960. It holds that the political needs of upper class rule (1941–51) and of the early autocratic regime (1953–1960) helped to shape SI's nature, extent, and limits. A key objective was to propagandistically use a minimal version of SI to try undermining communist and workers' trade unionist agitation. Iranian SI had two rationales. Although a few workers demanded SI measures during the Constitutional Revolution, the first SI program (1922, 1931, 1933) covered government employees, i.e. was a function of state-building. This paper focuses on a second program, targeting non-government workers. Starting in 1936 (1943, 1949), it was meant to tackle the social and political challenges posed by a nascent industrial working class. However, throughout the 1940s, workers' SI laws remained a dead letter, and the first integrated SI bureaucracy (1953), although ensuring 180,000 people, was in reality quite inefficient.

The pluralistic momentum in Iran and the future of the reform movement

This article explores the pluralistic momentum in Iran. It challenges the state-centric approach to Iranian politics, arguing that contemporary Iranian reformism manifests itself as a trajectory, yet original and indigenous, political culture that feeds into the political process in a bottom-up manner—from society to the state—not the other way around. Assessing the theoretical, methodological and empirical implications of this hypothesis, the article outlines the contours of Iran's reform movement and its interaction with the country's diverse civil society. As long as Iranian politics is driven by the pluralistic momentum, it is claimed, Iranian reformism will elicit political results and—to highly dissimilar degrees—will continue to provoke the silent subservience of central institutions of the state.

Religious Modernity in Iran: Dilemmas of Islamic Democracy in the Discourse of Mohammad Khatami

During the first few years after the election of Mohammad Khatami to the Presidency of the Islamic Republic in 1997, pro-democracy groups and individuals experienced an episode of euphoria and enthusiasm, which soon turned into despair and apathy. As early as the first term of his tenure, Khatami's promises of freedom, civil society and the rule of law were frustrated and blocked from being implemented by the conservative groups within Iran's ruling establishment. Khatami himself proved unwilling to take necessary risks to implement his project of civil society, and his inactions and capitulations resulted in further frustration of many, but not all, of his promises. This chapter attempts to analyze the failures, achievements and some of the possible political ramifications of the presidency of Mohammad Khatami by focusing on his discourse in the context of the intellectual trajectory of the Islamic thought from the revolutionary period to the postrevolutionary reformist phase. The case of Khatami is of particular interest, because he is not only an intellectual, but also a political practitioner who served two terms as the president of the republic. To be sure, his intellectual caliber is not on the same level as that of Soroush and Shabestari; yet, because of his direct involvement in the political fray at the highest level of electoral politics in Iran his discourse and its practical ramifications, as well as the outcome of his political maneuverings, are very much significant. Khatami: The Philosopher President Seyyid Mohammad Khatami was born in Ardakan in the central province of Yazd in 1943. He is the son of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khatami who founded the seminary in Ardakan. Khatami finished his primary and secondary schools in Ardakan and then attended Qom Seminary in 1961. It is noteworthy that before finishing his seminary studies he received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the secular University of Isfahan, a relatively rare experience among the Shii clergy at the time. In 1969 Khatami entered another secular institution of higher education, the University of Tehran, from which he earned a master's degree. Later he returned to Qom seminary to attend philosophical classes of some renowned religious scholars such as Ayatollah Motahhari. Khatami was a political activist in the Islamic movement before and during the revolution of 1979. After the revolution he replaced Ayatollah Beheshti as the head of Hamburg Islamic Center in West Germany for a short period of time.

Iran’s Peculiar Election: A Historical Perspective

Iran’s Peculiar ElectionA Historical Perspective Abbas Milani (bio) In the present age of democracy, ideas about the "social contract" and the natural rights of citizens have become, much to the consternation of despots, indispensable elements of the common political discourse. Autocrats of different hue and heft—from totalitarian tyrants like Stalin to authoritarian despots like the shah—must pay lip service to the idea of popular elections, incorporating it into their countries' political practices. Employing a combination of force and chicanery, money and muscle, they deform elections into an empty but expedient gesture of public diplomacy, intended largely for consumption abroad, and not for registering and implementing what Rousseau called "the general will." In nondemocratic countries, elections become an instrument for validating the self-serving political designs of the despotic elite. The tortured political history of the twentieth century has shown that elections, rather than being a guarantor of democracy, are merely a necessary tool for democracy—and then only if they are genuinely free and fair.1 Modern Iranian politics provides a good, albeit painful, example of the strange vicissitudes of elections as both an idea and a political practice. The country has witnessed three types of elections, each representing a distinct political philosophy and meant to underlie a different form of governance. Based on the Iranian experience, one can even extrapolate the general proposition that the relative quality of elections in any country is a reliable reflection and a fair measure of the true nature of power in that society. There have been times when the country has experimented with limited but still recognizable forms of liberal democracy: from 1905 to 1907, and again from 1941 to 1953. In such [End Page 23] times, elections were as free as the context of an underdeveloped society—with its high illiteracy, weak sense of civic responsibility, and easily corruptible officials—could allow. At other times, Iranians have experienced periods of modernizing authoritarianism. Such periods covered nearly all of the Pahlavi era (1925–41 and 1953–79), when Reza Shah and his son Mohammad Reza Shah believed that only with an iron grip could they pull Iran out of the vicious cycle of backwardness and poverty. The prospect of democracy and free elections, they believed, had to be sacrificed in the name of economic progress. Most recently, in the years of the Islamic Republic, Iran has been ruled by a would-be totalitarian regime, bent as much on "soulcraft" as "statecraft,"2 and keen on remolding society and the citizenry around Islamic values. In Iran, as in other regimes aspiring to totalitarianism, elections are a necessary nuisance; they are the key element of the regime's democratic façade and a convenient tool for hiding its despotic soul. As Hannah Arendt has shown, totalitarianism, the most pernicious form of dictatorship, is ironically possible only in the age of democracy.3 The Islamic regime has failed to establish a tight totalitarian hold on power not for lack of trying, but because various strata of Iranian society, particularly women and students, have fought vigorously to thwart the regime's attempts to deprive them of their rights. As a political system, the Islamic Republic has from its inception been sui generis. It has uniquely tried to combine, in the constitution itself, the vast despotic powers of an unelected "supreme leader" with the limited democratic promise of a popularly elected president and parliament.4 In the last few years, local councils too have been elected by the direct vote of the people. The Islamic Republic's holding of regular elections sets it apart from many Middle Eastern Muslim countries, and the regime's defenders often see this as one of its important achievements. The regime's critics, however, fault the same regular elections for their undemocratic nature and for their failure seriously to change the structure of power in Iran. Behind the 2005 Election Even in the context of Iran's contested electoral history, the June 2005 presidential ballot stands out. Some have already dubbed it the "Third Revolution," after the 1979 Islamic Revolution itself and the ensuing occupation of the U.S. Embassy, which then–Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (d. 1989...

Iran’s Peculiar Election: The Conservative Wave Rolls On

Iran’s Peculiar ElectionThe Conservative Wave Rolls On Vali Nasr (bio) In June 2005, Iranians went to the polls in what proved to be the most intensely contested of the nine presidential elections that the Islamic Republic has held since 1980. The 2005 vote was also the first to go to a runoff, as the June 17 first round ended with no candidate having surpassed the 50 percent threshold needed for an outright victory. In the June 24 second round, Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ahmedinejad was elected president with 62 percent of the vote against former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The official turnout reported for both rounds was around 60 percent, which is relatively highfor Iran, albeit far below the highwater-mark 83 percent turnout that was recorded during the presidential balloting of 1997. The election marked the second transfer of the presidential office from one occupant to another since the 1989 death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic. The election result was dramatic. Ahmedinejad is a hard-line conservative populist and the first Iranian president since 1981 not to hail from clerical ranks. His win confirms the conservative consolidation of power, and stands in marked contrast to the popular choice in the 1997 election, whose record turnout brought to power reformist Mohammad Khatami. The 2005 election marked a transition of power to the postrevolutionary and even post-Khomeini generation, a new demographic cohort whose values have begun to define the tenor of Iranian politics. At the same time, the vote seemed to signal a shift of momentum away from the affluent or middle-class part of this cohort (particularly [End Page 9] its youth culture, so prominent since 1997), and toward the poorer classes and their discontents. Indeed, it appears that Ahmedinejad owes his presidency to lower-income voters. The 2005 campaign was one of the most dynamic and innovative that Iran has ever seen. It brought to the fore not only intense debates over various conceptions of government and social organization, economic development, and foreign policy, but also experimentation with new language and political styles. It involved new methods—many openly borrowed from the West—such as focus groups, targeted advertising, image management, and sound bites. Despite the dynamism of the campaign, however, the outcome of the election opened new political fissures and raised serious concerns about the prospects for democracy in Iran. Khatami's Legacy The reformist landslide that brought President Khatami to office in 1997 sparked high hopes for democratic change and radically altered the character of Iranian politics.1 Diverse forces had converged to elevate Khatami, a middle-ranking cleric with a knowledge of German and a fondness for phrases such as "the dialogue of civilizations." Among his strongest supporters were reformists within the regime who felt eager to free government decision making from clerical oversight and to stop Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his conservative backers from gathering all power into their own hands. Many of these reformists had been extremist ringleaders during the Islamic Republic's early days, only to find themselves on the losing side of power struggles with the ascendant conservatives in the 1990s. Intraregime reformists formed the heart, soul, and sinews of Khatami's campaign and political movement. Along with the dialogue of civilizations, Khatami spoke of democracy, civil society, and an improved place for women, and delivered his message in a new and moderate style. All this struck a potent chord with the middle class, students, academics, and civil society, the sources first of the high turnout that swept him into office and then of the intellectual support that backed his administration. The secret to Khatami's success as a campaigner had been his ability to unite the intraregime reformists with those in civil society. But Khatami and his lieutenants were never able to transform this winning electoral coalition into a coherent force for prodemocratic governance. The intraregime reformists behind Khatami focused too closely on the cultural and political demands of the middle class that had grown so much in size and influence during the 1990s, and neglected the socioeconomic demands of the poor—an omission that would come to haunt the reform...

Iran's presidential election

The election by a landslide of the hard-line mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as president of Iran on 25 June 2005 surprised most observers. Yet, as the dust has begun to settle, it has become apparent that Ahmadinejad’s electoral success reflected a greater degree of planning and calculation on his part than had hitherto been appreciated, and that his campaign showed a better grasp of the changes that have taken place in Iranian politics and society than Ahmadinejad’s opponents were able to demonstrate.

The conservative consolidation in Iran

Over the past eight years, Iran's conservative leadership has effectively tightened its hold on power, thwarting aftempts at political reform. It has centralised decision-making, strengthened the Revolutionary Guard, invested in new strategic weapons, built ties of patronage and effectively used economic levers to assert control. The conservatives' consolidation of power now constitutes the framework of Iran's power politics, which will in turn determine the nature and scope of internal political developments after the 2005 presidential elections, the country's response to outside pressures regarding the nuclear issue, and the kind of government which is likely to evolve in the Islamic Republic.

Estranging the Familiar: "East" and "West" in Satrapi's Persepolis

PERSEPOLIS: THE STORY of A CHILDHOOD (2003) is Marjane Satrapi's highly acclaimed coming-of-age story set in revolutionary Iran. It is part of a new wave of autobiographical writing by diasporic Iranian women, which includes such authors as Tara Bahrampour (Too See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America, 2000), Gelareh Assayesh (Saffron Sky: A Life Between Iran and America, 2002), Firoozeh Dumas (Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Lip Iranian in America, 2003), Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, 2003), Roya Hakakian (Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran, 2004), and Azadeh Moaveni (Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Lip Iranian in America and American in Iran, 2005), not to mention Satrapi's own sequel Persepolis 2: Tire Story of a Return (2004), and Embroideries (2005). These women are using the autobiographical form, one virtually unheard of for Iranian women authors until recently, to help them come to terms with the 1979 Iranian Revolution and their new lives in the diaspora. As a means of mapping out the complexities and contingencies of identity, autobiography has been accorded a privileged status in postcolonial and diasporic contexts, and these texts can be viewed as part of this recent trend. (2) However, the use of the autobiographical genre has traditionally been discouraged in Iran, particularly for women. As Farzaneh Milani and Afsaneh Najmabadi have observed, autobiographical stories have been perceived as a form of metaphorical unveiling as indecorous as physical unveiling. (3) Nonetheless, diasporic Iranian women writers have recently been using the genre to challenge the stereotype of the self-effacing, modest Iranian woman and to write themselves back into the history of the nation. Where Persepolis differs from these other Iranian diasporic autobiographies is in its use of a child narrator and of another Western form, the comic book. This unique combination produces a text that regularly juxtaposes the familiar with the alien. At the moment that the text promises the comfort of stable meaning, it effects a slippage that subverts expectations and undermines its promises. These slippages take on a potent political charge in the context of a long-standing and fraught history of Middle Eastern (particularly Iranian) and Western (particularly American) relations. Satrapi's text offers a significant intervention in this highly polarized era of East/West relations. Her text plays the increasingly mobilized stereotypes of the Islamic Republic as oppressive and backward against the Western conviction over its own progressive liberalism in ways that contest both of these scripts. The 2003 English edition of Persepolis (translated from the French) has attracted a degree of attention that does not compare to the reception of other recent books by diasporic Iranian women, with the exception of Azar Nafisi's bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Reading Lolita is, in many ways, the antithesis of Persepolis. While Persepolis defies easy categorization, Lolita places itself squarely within a conservative, canonical Western literary critical tradition. While Persepolis forces the Western reader to work hard to understand the complexities of contemporary Iranian political and social dynamics, Lolita serves up the usual fare of the oppression of Iranian women under a fundamentalist state for the uncritical consumption of Western readers. While Persepolis challenges Western preconceptions of Iran and Iranian women, Lolita merely reinforces them. The following passage is characteristic of Nafisi's style of representation. In it, she imagines one of her female students making the trip home from their clandestine literature class in the author's house. The young woman, Sanaz, veils herself and her demeanour changes from spirited to downtrodden: You might notice that her gait and her gestures have changed. It is in her best interest not to be seen, not to be heard or noticed. …

The Changing Approach to the Text: Iranian scholars and the Quran

My points of departure for this study are the following questions: how have Shiite scholars been reading the text that is, the Quranic text during the past 50 years? Is it possible that they were guided by a particular cognitive interest? Can it be assumed that they may have projected certain intentions onto the text? Is there a chance that the point of view chosen by them as interpreters has predetermined the outcome? And, last but not least: has the approach to the text changed since the revolution of 1979? I will argue that it has changed a lot. Having experienced a theocratic system some scholars intend to give the Quran another standing in life and society.

Post-revolutionary politics in Iran: Continuity and change

Post-revolutionary politics in Iran: Continuity and change