SAIS Rethinking Iran: Recent Episodes
SAIS Rethinking Iran
The SAIS RETHINKING IRAN Initiative at Johns Hopkins University focuses on broadening the conversation on Iran in the public sphere by engaging researchers, scholars, activists, artists, and policymakers.
Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply to entire countries, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia. U.S. policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic, but in reality these measures often fail to achieve their intended goals—and their potent side effects can even harm American interests.Backfire explores the surprising ways sanctions affect multinational companies, governments, and ultimately millions of people around the world. Drawing on interviews with experts, policy makers, and people in sanctioned countries, Agathe Demarais examines the unintended consequences of the use of sanctions as a diplomatic weapon. The proliferation of sanctions spurs efforts to evade them, as states and firms seek ways to circumvent U.S. penalties. This is only part of the story. Sanctions also reshape relations between countries, pushing governments that are at odds with the U.S. closer to each other—or, increasingly, to Russia and China.Full of counterintuitive insights spanning a wide range of topics, from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to Iran’s COVID response and China’s cryptocurrency ambitions, Backfire reveals how sanctions are transforming geopolitics and the global economy—as well as diminishing U.S. influence. This insider’s account is an eye-opening, accessible, and timely book that sheds light on the future of sanctions in an increasingly multipolar world.AGATHE DEMARAIS is the global forecasting director of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). She was previously a senior policy adviser for the French Treasury in Russia and Lebanon, working directly on sanctions and other economic and financial issues.For more information on SAIS Rethinking Iran and future events, please visit our website:https://www.rethinkingiran.com/events
In This Flame Within MANIJEH MORADIAN recounts the experiences of Iranian foreign students who joined a global movement against US imperialism during the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on archival evidence and in-depth interviews with members of the Iranian Students Association, Moradian traces what she calls “revolutionary affects”—the embodied force of affect generated by experiences of repression and resistance—from encounters with empire and dictatorship in Iran to joint organizing with other student activists in the United States. Moradian theorizes “affects of solidarity” that facilitated Iranian student participation in a wide range of antiracist and anticolonial movements and analyzes gendered manifestations of revolutionary affects within the emergence of Third World feminism. Arguing for a transnational feminist interpretation of the Iranian Student Association’s legacy, Moradian demonstrates how the recognition of multiple sources of oppression in the West and in Iran can reorient Iranian diasporic politics today.
MANIJEH MORADIAN received her PhD in American Studies from NYU and her MFA in creative nonfiction from Hunter College, City University of New York. She is the former co-director of the Association of Iranian American Writers. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in Fall 2022. Her essays and articles have appeared in Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, Scholar & Feminist Online, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Comparative Studies of South Asian, Africa, and the Middle East, Social Text online, jadaliyya.com, tehranbureau.com, Bi Taarof, and Callaloo. She is a member of Jadaliyya’s Iran Page editorial board and a founding member of Raha Iranian Feminist Collective.
For more information on SAIS Rethinking Iran and future events, please visit our website: https://www.rethinkingiran.com/events
What can we learn about the current era of youth-led radical uprisings when we look across the Middle East? Massive protests—captured on social media—have spilled forth on the streets of major countries in the region for over a decade. Join us for a conversation with renowned sociologist and scholar Dr. Asef Bayat to explore the Iran uprisings and Arab Spring, and what they reveal to us about the profound global shifts in protests and power.
DR. ASEF BAYAT is Professor of Sociology, and Catherine & Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Illinois, he taught at the American University in Cairo for many years; and served as the director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) holding the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. His research areas range from social movements and social change, to religion and public life, urban space and politics, and contemporary Middle East.
Bilateral relations between Riyadh and Tehran have been strained over several geopolitical issues. The two regional rivals broke diplomatic ties in 2016 but have recently engaged in four rounds of direct negotiations to resolve regional disputes. Yemen remains a battleground between the two countries who are seen as supporting opposing sides. However, recent diplomatic developments reflect the potential for improving ties and a possible exchange of diplomats between the two countries. What is the future of Iran and Saudi’s shared leadership of the region and what conditions might need to be met for normalcy in Saudi–Iran relations?
HESHAM ALGHANNAM is a Saudi political scientist and Fulbright scholar. He is a senior research fellow at the Gulf Research Centre (GRC), Cambridge, and a geopolitical expert and strategy adviser to senior executives operating globally. He has written on the political economy of GCC States, Iran’s nuclear program, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and on political conflict between the GCC States and Iran.
MARIA FANTAPPIE is Special Adviser for the Middle East and North Africa region at The Center for Humanitarian Dialogue. Previously, she served as Senior Adviser for the International Crisis Group, engaging with policymakers on Iraq, Syria and the Kurdish issue at some of the highest levels of government in the US, Europe and the Middle East. In 2018, she was seconded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the EU mission in Iraq.
ADNAN TABATABAI is co-founder and CEO of the Germany-based Middle East think tank Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO). As an Iran analyst he is consulted by European policymakers and businesses on Iran’s domestic and international affairs. Through his work at CARPO, Tabatabai has designed and facilitated track 2 and civil-society dialogue formats between Iran and Saudi Arabia since 2015.
Drying rivers, vanishing lakes, shrinking wetlands, declining groundwater levels, land subsidence, sinkholes, desertification, soil erosion, dust storms, water pollution, biodiversity loss, deforestation and wildfires are among some of the very familiar signs of Iran’s water bankruptcy. With water bankruptcy comes the migration and displacement of people, conflicts, and social and political instability throughout the country. In this seminar, Kaveh Madani will discuss the role of development policies, politics and mismanagement in Iran’s water bankruptcy challenges, exacerbated by droughts, climate change, sanctions, and regional tensions.
KAVEH MADANI is an environmental scientist, educator, and activist with expertise in environmental security and analyzing complex human-nature systems. He has previously served as the Deputy Head of Iran’s Department of Environment, Vice President of the UN Environment Assembly Bureau, and Chief of Iran’s Department of Environment’s International Affairs and Conventions Center.
Join us for a talk with physician and anthropologist Orkideh Behrouzan and Human Rights Watch researcher Tara Sepehri Far on the impact of sanctions on medical education in Iran. The session will be moderated by physician and anthropologist Omar Dewachi.
The last 300 years have shaped Russia-Iran relations as a strategic alliance of convenience. Russia’s current aggression in Ukraine subsequently held hostage the Iran Nuclear Deal to secure its own interests. This critical juncture reflects the history of pressure and tension that have shaped the Iranian experience with Russia. Professor Abbas Amanat will join us to provide a historical account of Perso-Russian relations, especially with reference to the Qajar era and up to 1953.
ABBAS AMANAT is a Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University. He taught at Yale University between 1983 and 2021, and served as the Director of the Program in Iranian Studies at the MacMillan Center. He has written about early modern and modern history of Iran, the Middle East, the Muslim world, and the Persianate world. His book publications include Ahd-e Qajar va Sawda-ye Farang (Qajar Covenant and European Allure) (Mehri Publication, 2021); Iran: A Modern History (Yale University Press, 2017), and Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi’ism (I B Tauris, 2009).
This event is part of Rethinking Iran at SAIS's ongoing programming on the theme of “Iran and the US: A Critical Juncture,” which will include fireside chats, policy forums, and roundtable discussions.
This event is part of Rethinking Iran at SAIS's ongoing programming on the theme of “Iran and the US: A Critical Juncture,” which will include fireside chats, policy forums, and roundtable discussions.
This event is part of Rethinking Iran at SAIS's ongoing programming on the theme of “Iran and the US: A Critical Juncture,” which will include fireside chats, policy forums, and roundtable discussions.
With an unknown future for the JCPOA and Biden continuing to enforce maximum pressure sanctions, how is Iran’s new government looking at Iran’s economy and diplomatic relations? Economic diplomacy experts Bijan Khajehpour and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj join us to discuss Iran’s new President, Raisi.
BIJAN KHAJEHPOUR is a veteran strategy advisor for the West Asian markets and has over 25 years of strategic consulting experience with global companies. He co-founded EUNEPA, a firm providing Iran-related strategic consulting services to European, Eurasian, and West Asian companies.
ESFANDYAR BATMANGHELIDJ is the Founder and CEO of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, a think tank focused on advancing economic diplomacy, economic development, and economic justice in the Middle East and Central Asia, and particularly Iran.
Based on extensive interviews and oral histories as well as archival sources, Women and the Islamic Republic challenges the dominant masculine theorizations of state-making in post-revolutionary Iran. Shirin Saeidi demonstrates that despite the Islamic Republic's non-democratic structures, multiple forms of citizenship have developed in post-revolutionary Iran. This finding destabilizes the binary formulation of democratization and authoritarianism which has not only dominated investigations of Iran, but also regime categorizations in political science more broadly.
SHIRIN SAEIDI is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas. She has published articles in journals including International Journal of Middle East Studies, International Studies Review, and Millennium: Journal of International Studies. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Citizenship Studies.
Challenging conventional depictions of Iranians, the Heartbeat of Iran provides a rich portrait of the lives of ordinary Iranians. Join us for an online Book Forum with journalist, author, and humanitarian Tara Kangarlou.
TARA KANGARLOU is an award-winning journalist who has previously worked for NBC-LA, CNN, and Al Jazeera America. Her writing and reporting has also appeared in TIME, Vanity Fair, Al Monitor and the Huffington Post. Tara has spent much time in the Middle East covering the ongoing Syrian conflict - in particular the Syrian refugee crisis and the MENA region at large. As a result of her work in the field, in 2016 Tara founded Art of Hope - the first US nonprofit that's strictly focuses on providing trauma-relief and mental health support through Art Therapy for Syrian refugees and vulnerable host communities in Lebanon.
Following the 1979 revolution, the Iranian government set out to Islamize society. Muslim piety had to be visible, in personal appearance and in action. Iranians were told to pray, fast, and attend mosques to be true Muslims. The revolution turned questions of what it means to be a true Muslim into a matter of public debate, taken up widely outside the exclusive realm of male clerics and intellectuals.
Say What Your Longing Heart Desires offers an elegant ethnography of these debates among a group of educated, middle-class women whose voices are often muted in studies of Islam. Niloofar Haeri follows them in their daily lives as they engage with the classical poetry of Rumi, Hafez, and Saadi, illuminating a long-standing mutual inspiration between prayer and poetry. She recounts how different forms of prayer may transform into dialogues with God, and, in turn, Haeri illuminates the ways in which believers draw on prayer and ritual acts as the emotional and intellectual material through which they think, deliberate, and debate.
NILOOFAR HAERI is Professor of Anthropology and the Program Chair for Islamic Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the author of Sacred Language, Ordinary People (2003), among other works.
Since the end of World War II, the United States has set out to oust governments in the Middle East on an average of once per decade―in places as diverse as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan (twice), Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The reasons for these interventions have also been extremely diverse, and the methods by which the United States pursued regime change have likewise been highly varied, ranging from diplomatic pressure alone to outright military invasion and occupation. What is common to all the operations, however, is that they failed to achieve their ultimate goals, produced a range of unintended and even catastrophic consequences, carried heavy financial and human costs, and in many cases left the countries in question worse off than they were before.
Philip H. Gordon's Losing the Long Game is a thorough and riveting look at the U.S. experience with regime change over the past seventy years, and an insider’s view on U.S. policymaking in the region at the highest levels. It is the story of repeated U.S. interventions in the region that always started out with high hopes and often the best of intentions, but never turned out well. No future discussion of U.S. policy in the Middle East will be complete without taking into account the lessons of the past, especially at a time of intense domestic polarization and reckoning with America's standing in world.
This event is part of Rethinking Iran at SAIS's ongoing programming on the theme of “Iran and the US: A Critical Juncture,” which will include fireside chats, policy forums, and roundtable discussions.
Rakhshan Banietemad is one of the first female film directors in Iran. Edited by Maryam Ghorbankarimi, this book is the first English language study of Banietemad’s films and career with chapters by some of the most prominent scholars of Iranian cinema, as well as younger scholars with fresh points of view. Focusing on questions of aesthetics and poetics, social realism, gender dynamics and the ‘afterimages’ and ‘counter-memories’ of revolution and war, the book also includes an in depth interview with Banietemad herself.
MARYAM GHORBANKARIMI is a filmmaker and film scholar. Her current research is on transnational cinemas and cultures, specifically the representation of gender and sexuality in Iranian cinema. Maryam is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She has also developed a number of new practice based modules in film at Lancaster University.
This book examines the unintended consequences of top-down reforms in Iran, analysing how the Iranian reformist governments (1997–2005) sought to utilise gradual reforms to control independent activism, and how citizens responded to such a disciplinary action. While the governments successfully ‘set the field’ of permitted political participation, part of the civil society that took shape was unexpectedly independent. Despite being a minority, independent activists were not marginal: without them, in fact, the Green Movement of 2009 would not have taken shape. Building on in-depth empirical analysis, the author explains how autonomous activism forms and survives in a semi-authoritarian country. The book contributes to the debate about the implications of elite-led reforms for social reproduction, offering an innovative interpretation and an original analysis of social movements from a political science perspective.
Tracing the use of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder uses extensive archival research in a political, economic, legal, and military history that reveals how a coercive wartime tool was adopted as an instrument of peacekeeping by the League of Nations. This timely study casts an overdue light on why sanctions are widely considered a form of war, and why their consequences are so tremendous.
NICHOLAS MULDER, Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University, is a historian of twentieth-century European and international history. His research and teaching focuses on political economy, international institutions, and war. He also writes about contemporary politics and economics for a variety of publications.
In 1983, the Iranian government banned the personal use of home video technology. In UNDERGROUND, Blake Atwood recounts how in response to the ban, technology enthusiasts, cinephiles, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens forged an illegal but complex underground system for video distribution. Atwood draws on archival sources including trade publications, newspapers, memoirs, films, and laws, but at the heart of the book lies a corpus of oral history interviews conducted with participants in the underground. He argues that videocassettes helped to institutionalize the broader underground within the Islamic Republic.
BLAKE ATWOOD is Associate Professor of Media Studies and Chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of technology, culture, and politics in the Middle East. For more information on SAIS Rethinking Iran and future events, please visit our website: https://www.rethinkingiran.com/events
THE DISCOVERY OF IRAN offers a fresh perspective on Iranian nationalism, centring its analysis on critical intellectual debates emanating from a transnational experience of community of Iranian émigrés, activists, and scholars in 1920s Weimar Berlin, and later in Iran until the mid 1930s. The book pays special attention to the writings of a particularly innovative activist intellectual, Taghi Arani, to argue that the interwar period was marked by a robust civil society that routinely debated questions of identity, history, and Iran’s place in a rapidly changing world.
ALI MIRSEPASSI is Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University. He is Director of Iranian Studies Initiative at NYU. Mirsepassi was a 2007-2009 Carnegie Scholar and is the co-editor, with Arshin Adib-Moghadam, of The Global Middle East, a book series published by the Cambridge University Press. His recent books include, The Discovery of Iran: Taghi Arani, a Radical Cosmopolitan (Stanford University Press, Fall 2021); and Iran’s Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State (October 2019, Cambridge University Press). His memoir, The Loneliest Revolution: A Memoir of Solidarity and Struggle in Iran, will be published by Edinburgh University Press, March 2023.
Since the senseless death of Mahsa Zhina Amini, Iranians poured onto the streets in rage and mourning. #MahsaAmini and the Kurdish slogan cried out at her funeral, “Women. Life. Freedom” have become the rallying cry for a national feminist revolution that has captured the attention of the world. Join us this Friday at 12 pm ET for a Teach-In with Negar Mottahedeh, Sarah Afshar, Neda Shaban, and Narges Bajoghli on the uprisings and how to understand the historical, media, and artistic context in which they unfold.
NEGAR MOTTAHEDEH is a Professor at Duke University. She is the author of #iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life and Whisper Tapes: Kate Millet in Iran, about women-led demonstrations after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
SAREH AFSHAR is a scholar of Performance Studies and focuses on the aesthetics of everyday life, the materiality of visuality, and digital and new media.
NEDA SHABAN is a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on the history and tactics of the anti-compulsory hijab movement in Iran.
NARGES BAJOGHLI is an anthropologist of media and politics at Johns Hopkins University.
Empirically rich and theoretically informed, CREATING LOCAL DEMOCRACY (Cambridge University Press) is an innovative analysis of political decentralization under the Islamic Republic of Iran. Drawing upon Kian Tajbakhsh's twenty years of experience working with and researching local government in Iran, it uses original data and insights to explain how local government operates in towns and cities as a form of electoral authoritarianism. With a combination of historical, political, and financial field research, it explores the multifaceted dimensions of local power and how various ideologically opposed actors shaped local government as an integral component of authoritarian state building. Ultimately, this book demonstrates how local government serves to undermine democratization and consolidate the Islamist regime. As Iran's cities and towns grow and develop, their significance will only increase, and this study is vital to understanding their politics, administration and influence.
KIAN TAJBAKHSH is Fellow in the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, where he was Professor of Urban Planning and Urban Studies. He previously directed civil society strengthening initiatives for the Soros Foundation in Iran, where he was a political prisoner from 2009-2016. He has previously published The Promise of the City (2001) and Social Capital: Trust, Democracy and Development (2005).
Drawing on spatial and temporal turns that have animated Iranian art scenes since the 1980s, ALTERNATIVE IRAN (Stanford University Press) illuminates the economic, political, and intellectual forces that have driven Iran’s creative class toward increasingly original forms of unconventional artmaking not meant for museums or performance halls. These artworks appear instead in private homes, non-commercial galleries, showrooms with “trusted” audiences, dilapidated structures, buildings under construction, leftover urban spaces, and remote natural sites. Flouting the conventions of the art market and negotiating the regime's ideological protocols, these loosely covert activities offer an enthralling inquiry into what is commonly referred to as critical spatial practice. Throwing into sharp relief Iran's extraordinary art scenes, Karimi further discloses anomalous instances when the state and other powerful agents appropriate the same spatial techniques of loose covertness to bring aspects of the alternative into the limelight, either to better regulate the creative community or to challenge the system from within.
PAMELA KARIMI earned her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009 and is currently an associate professor at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Karimi is the author of Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran (Routledge, 2013) and coeditor of “Images of the Child and Childhood in Modern Muslim Contexts” (Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 2012), “Reinventing the American Post-Industrial City” (Journal of Urban History, 2015), and The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the Middle East: From Napoleon to ISIS (Aggregate, 2016). Her major curatorial projects include Urban Renewal and Creative Economy in Massachusetts Gateway Cities, Stateless, Black Spaces Matter, and Contemporary Iranian Art & the Historical Imagination.