Category: Politics

The Holy Family: Iranian Leftists and the Kurdish Movement, Dr. Kamran Matin, August 11, 2024

Kamran Matin is an Associate Professor of International Relations at Sussex University, UK, where he teaches international history, nationalism, and Middle East politics. His current research focuses on the theory of ‘uneven and combined development’, (nation-)state formation, nationalism, and the limits of postcolonial critique. He is the author of Recasting Iranian Modernity: International Relations and Social Change (Routledge, 2013) and numerous articles and op-eds on Kurdish and Iranian politics, and the co-editor of Historical Sociology and World History: Uneven and Combined Development over the Longue Durée (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016) and the director of Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT).

Transition pathology and two protective powers in Iran, Kazem Alamdari, November 12, 2023

Kazem Alamdari, received his Ph. D. in sociology from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urban, his MA in Educational Administration from Illinois State University, and his BS from the University of Tehran in Psychology. He has taught at various universities, including UCLA, CSULA, and CSUN. Alamdari has published Ten books and numerous articles in English and Persian, including:
1. Civil Society: Theories, Contexts, and Experiences, 2015;
2. Why the Reform Failed: A Critical Study of the Eight Year Reform Era in Iran: 1997-2005, 2008;
3. Why the Middle East Lagged Behind: The Case of Iran 2004;
4. The Global Crisis: A Critique of the Clash of Civilizations and Dialogue Among Civilizations, 2003; and
5. a best seller that reached to 19th edition Why Iran Lagged Behind and the West Moved Forward, 2000 – 2014.
His latest articles include: “Global Civil-Society Movements: What the World Social Forum Can Do to Change the World’s Situation,” Sociology and Criminology, 2014, 2:2. His article “Religion and Development Revisited: Comparing Islam and Christianity with Reference to the Case of Iran,” in the Journal of Developing Societies, London: Sage, Vol 20 (1-2), has been one of “The 50 Most-Frequently-Read Articles” in five years, reaching number 2 in January 2005. Alamdari was the recipient of a fellowship from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) in Japan, Kyushu University in 1997. As a public intellectual, he is frequently featured in the media and presents lectures at national and international conferences in different parts of the world.

The fate of secular thought in the amendment to the constitutional law of the Mullahs and intellectuals, Kazem Kardavani, Sep 17, 2023

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کاظم کردوانی، جامعه شناس (از “مدرسه مطالعات عالی علوم اجتماعی – پاریس “) و پژوهشگر و دارای نشان نخل های آکادمیک وزارت آموزش ملی و تحقیقات و فناوری فرانسه، استاد سابق دانشگاه، عضو و دبیر سابق کانون نویسندگان ایران، دبیر سابق کنفدراسیون جهانی دانشجویان ایرانی، عضو مؤسس و دبیر “شورای بازنگری در شیوه ی نگارش خط فارسی”، عضو مؤسس “کمیته دفاع از حقوق قربانیان قتل های زنجیره ای” است. علاوه بر شرکت مستمر در فعالیت های فرهنگی واجتماعی ایرا ن وی سرمقاله نویس و عضو هیئت تحریره ی نشریه های مستقل سیاسی، اجتماعی، و فرهنگی (جامعه سالم، آدینه، کلک، ترجمه و …) بوده است. وی همچنین در حوزه های زبان وادبیات ومسایل اجتماعی وسیاسی ایران به کارهای پژوهشی پرداخته است و پژوهش های منتشر شده او از جمله درباره آثار مارسل پروست، آندره مالرو، آل احمد، شاملو، اخوان ثالث است.

An introduction to the discourse analysis of the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, Mohammad Reza Nikfar, April 16, 2023

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Dr. Mohammad Reza Nikfar, is a philosopher and lecturer at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Iran Academia), as well as the Chief Editor of Zamaneh Media. He has authored many articles and his books in Farsi and German include: “Violence, Human Rights and Civil Society”, “Critique of Political Theology”, “At the Dead-End of Time, Introduction to the Philosophy of Heidegger”, “The Concept of Peace” and “Faith & Technique” among others.

An anthropological perspective on the question of violence in post-revolution Iran, Dr. Chowra Makaremi, April 24, 2022

Chowra Makaremi is a writer, director and anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. She has conducted fieldwork and coordinated several research collectives on border control in Europe. She is working on post-revolution violence in Iran and leading the ERC research program “Off-Site” on this subject. She published Aziz’s Notebook at the Iranian revolution (Gallimard, 2011) and with Hannah Darabi Enghelab Street. A revolution through books 1979-83 (Le Bal/Spector, 2019). She directed the documentary movie Hitch. An Iranian Story (2019, Alter Ego, France, 78 min.).

The Fate of The Iranian Community in The Soviet Great Terror, Prof. Touraj Atabaki, March 13, 2022

Touraj Atabaki is Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History and Emeritus Professor of Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia at Leiden University.
He studied first theoretical physics and then history in Birckbeck College, University of London and then had his PhD in 1991 from University of Utrecht. Atabaki worked at Utrecht University, University of Amsterdam and Leiden University where he held the Chair of Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia. Atabaki’s earlier research interest encompassed historiography, ethnic studies and the practice of authoritarianism in Iran, the Ottoman/Turkey and everyday Stalinism in the Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus. However, in the last ten years his research interest has focused more on the labour history and the history of work and has coordinated a project on the hundred years’ social history of labour in the Iranian oil industry, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for scientific Research. Touraj Atabaki has written extensively on the nineteenth- twentieth century history of Iran, Turkey, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Atabaki has published twenty books and numerous articles and book chapters. His latest books are:
– Social History of the Iranian oil Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
– Victims of Their Faith. The Lives and Fates of Iranian Political Activists and Migrant Workers in the Interwar Soviet Union. Co-author Lana Ravandi Fadaii (Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, 2020) Second Edition.
– Working for Oil. Co-editors Elisabetta Bini, Kaveh Ehsani (London: Palgarve Macmillan, 2018)

Pouya Alimagham, The Limits of Empowerment: Women, Gender, and Revolution in Iran’s Green Uprising, June, 27, 2021

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Pouya Alimagham is a historian of the modern Middle East. He specializes on Iran, Iraq, and the Levant, focusing on such themes as revolutionary and guerrilla movements, imperialism, representation and Orientalism, “Political Islam” and post-Islamism, and the intersections therein.

His dissertation, titled: “Contesting the Iranian Revolution: The Green Uprising,” was the 2016 winner of the Association for Iranian Studies’ Mehrdad Mashayekhi Dissertation Award, which is presented biannually. In the study, he argued that the Green Uprising in 2009 was a culmination of a decades-long history that constituted a post-Islamist paradigm shift in Iran. He harnessed wider regional history as well as Iran’s own revolutionary past in order to underscore his thesis. The manuscript was published in expanded form with Cambridge University Press in 2020. His other articles and book chapters (some in progress) cover the Arab Spring, Iranian protest music, women in Middle East revolutions, sectarianism, and the psycho-history of post-9/11 discourse.

Political Plasticity, Prof. Fathali Moghaddam, April 18, 2021

Prof. Fathali Moghaddam

Fathali M. Moghaddam is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science at Georgetown University, Washington D.C. Since 2014 he has served as Editor-in-Chief, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology (an APA journal).
Dr. Moghaddam was born in Iran, educated from an early age in England, and returned to Iran with the revolution in 1979. He was researching and teaching in Iran during the hostage taking crisis and the first three years of the Iran-Iraq War. After work for the United Nations, he researched and taught at McGill University, Canada, from 1984, before moving to Georgetown in 1990. He has published about 30 books and 300 papers, and received a number of prestigious academic awards.

The Shah, Abbas Milani, Mar 6, 2011

Abbas Milani is the Hamid & Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies and Adjunct Professor at the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. He has been one of the founding co-directors of the Iran Democracy Project and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His expertise is U.S.-Iran relations as well as Iranian cultural, political, and security issues. Until 1986, he taught at Tehran University’s Faculty of Law and Political Science, where he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the university’s Center for International Relations. After moving to the United States, he was for fourteen years the Chair of the Political Science Department at the Notre Dame de Namur University. For eight years, he was a visiting Research Fellow in University of California, Berkeley’s Middle East Center.

Survival Trough Dispossession: Privatization of Public Goods in the Islamic Republic

Kaveh Ehsani is Research Scholar at the University of Illinois in Chicago and a fellow of ISIM at the University of Leiden. He is an editor of the Goftogu Quarterly in Iran and of Middle East Report (Merip) in Washington DC. Currently he is completing a book titled Oil and Society; the Refinery City of Abadan and Urban Modernity in 20th Century Iran (Brill Publishers). His recent publications include “The Urban Provincial Periphery in Iran” in Contemporary Iran, Ali Gheissari ed.; “The Political Structure of US and the Threats to Iranian National Interests” in Goftogu; “The Populist Threat to Democracy” MER; “Rural Society and Agrarian Development in Iran after the revolution” in Critique.

Passionate Uprisings: The Intersection of Sexuality and Politics in Post-Revolutionary Iran, Pardis Mahdavi, Nov 5, 2006

Dr. Pardis Mahdavi is a trained medical anthropologist with a special interest in socio-cultural aspects of health and healing, gender, sexuality, and advocacy within anthropology. Her dissertation was on the intersection of sexuality and politics in post-revolutionary Iran, and is now in process of becoming a book entitled Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution. She has done research in Iran, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Egypt and New York City. She has worked on projects involving questions of sexual rights and human rights, assisted reproductive technologies and emerging reproductive health changes, and a project on burlesque artists in New York City.

The Crisis of Democracy in Iran and the Heritage of the Constitutional Revolution, Janet Afary, Sep 10, 2006

Dr. Janet Afary received her M.A. from the Department of Literature of Tehran University and her Ph.D. in Modern Middle East History from the University of Michigan , Ann Arbor . She is an Associate Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Purdue University . Dr. Afary is author of The Iranian Constitutional Revolution: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism (N. Y.: Columbia UP, 1996), which was also translated and published in Iran (Bisotoun, 2000) and co-author of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (University of Chicago Press, 2005). She was awarded year-long fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS). She is currently President of the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS-MESA, 2004-2006). She was also past-president of the Coordinating Council for Women in History of the American Historical Association (CCWH-AHA) and President of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS-MESA, 2004-2005)

Islamic Totalitarianism, Imagination or Reality?, Shahla Shafiq, Jun 25, 2006

Shahla Shafiq is a researcher and author. Her publications are on inter-cultural issues, racism, political Islam and immigrants in France. Her doctoral dissertation in sociology is on political Islam, Sex, Gender and Society. Ms. Shafiq has written number of books and articles in both Farsi and French. She is one of the founders of “International Network of Solidarity with Iranian Women”.

The Abortive Birth of a Modern Nation: The Constitutional Revolution in Iran and its Aftermath, Daryoush Ashouri, Apr 23, 2006

Daryoush Ashouri has served as a visiting professor and lecturer of Persian language and literature at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Oxford University, and of political philosophy and political sociology at the University of Tehran.
He is the author of ”An Introduction to Sociology”, “Modernity and Us”, “Dictionary of Philosophy and Political Science”, “Political Encyclopedia” among others. He is also a translator of works by Nietzsche, William Shakespeare and Nicola Machiavelli.

Building the Future of Iran is not an Obligation but our Destiny, Hossein Ladjevardi, Apr 9, 2005

Hossein Lajevardi is the president of Association des Chercheurs Iraniens (ACI). Here is a summary of his professional activities.

Research Project Manager – Iranian Research and Advice Centre

· PhD in Sociology (Demography) from The Sorbonne, Paris – 1978

· Statistics and Demography Specialist – the Centre of Statistics of Iran – 1967-1980

· Senior Researcher – the Social Research and Study Institute, Tehran University – 1970 -1972

· Executive Project Manager, Population Growth in Iran on behalf of United Nations Development and Population (UNDP) -1973 – 1976

· Senior lecturer on Research Methodology, Tehran University and other Universities – 1978 – 1982

· Various Research Projects with French Universities and UN 1982 – 1992

Modernity, Democracy and Republic (Jomhouri), Mehrdad Darvishpour, Feb 19, 2005

Dr. Mehrdad Darvishpour, born and raised in Tehran, came to Sweden as a political refugee 20 years ago. He has a Ph.D. in Sociology. He is working at Stockholm University as a senior lecture and researcher. His dissertation was on immigrant women breaking the traditional family patterns. He is a well-known debater, active in the women’s movement, anti-racist and anti-war movement. He has published many articles on these subjects and appeared on numerous TV and radio shows as an advocate of these issues. He has published a number of articles in Persian, Swedish and English on Islamic revolution, modernity and democracy.

Seminar: Current social, economic and political crises of Iranian society, Javad Tabatabai, Jan 1, 2005

Javad Tabatabai Is born in Tabriz in 1945. He is Professor Emeritus and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Tehran. After pursuing studies in theology, law and philosophy, he earned his PhD (Doctorat d’État) in political philosophy from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, with a dissertation on Hegel’s political philosophy. He has been a guest fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, as well as at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs at Syracuse University. Dr Tabatabai has published a dozen books on the history of political ideas in Europe and Iran. On 14 July 1995, he was decorated as a Knight of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques.