MER Article The Politics of Subsidy Reform in Iran Although most Iranians forget it today, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005 on a platform of technocratic competence. The clique surrounding his rise to mayor of Tehran and beyond once called themselves Abadgaran, “the Developers.” In a column four months after Ahmadinejad’s election to the Iranian presidency, commentator Saeed Kevan Harris • 14 min read
MER Article All the President's Women Raising eyebrows all around, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced on August 16 that he would nominate at least three women to be ministers in the new cabinet that, unresolved controversy notwithstanding, he will head as president of Iran. It was a step unprecedented in the 30-year history of the Islamic Republic, whose Nazanin Shahrokni • 15 min read
Current Analysis Broken Taboos in Post-Election Iran The on-camera martyrdom of Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year old philosophy student shot dead during the protests after the fraudulent presidential election in Iran in June, caught the imagination of the world. But the post-election crackdown has two other victims whose fates better capture the radical Ziba Mir-Hosseini • 10 min read
Current Analysis Anatomy of a Nuclear Breakthrough Gone Backwards According to the headline writers at the hardline daily Keyhan, October 2 saw “a great victory for Iran” in Geneva. That day, Iran’s nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili had sat down with representatives of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany, the contact group known as the Farideh Farhi • 15 min read
MER Article Ahmadinejad's Nuclear Folly The tumult in Iran since the June 12 presidential election is, without a doubt, the most significant sequence of events in the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution itself. No other occurrence -- not the Iran-Iraq war, not the 1989 turmoil that sidelined Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, until t Farideh Farhi • 12 min read
Current Analysis Tehran, June 2009 The morning after Iran’s June 12 presidential election, Iranians booted up their computers to find Fars News, the online mouthpiece of the Islamic Republic’s security apparatus, heralding the dawn of a “third revolution.” Many an ordinary Iranian, and many a Western pundit, had already adopted such Kaveh Ehsani, Norma Claire Moruzzi, Arang Keshavarzian • 19 min read
Current Analysis An Artist as President of the Islamic Republic of Iran? Something’s happening here. In one of the largest street demonstrations in Tehran since the 1979 revolution, thousands filled Vali Asr Street (formerly known as Pahlavi Street) on Monday, forming a human chain nearly 12 miles long and stopping traffic for nearly five hours. They wore strips of green Shiva Balaghi • 7 min read
MER Article Activism Under the Radar Few would disagree that the 1979 Iranian revolution, despite the massive participation of women, rapidly became a catastrophe for women’s legal status and social position. Under the Shah, Iran had a mildly forward-looking family law limiting men’s rights to polygamy and unilateral divorce, and, at least theoretically, basing Homa Hoodfar • 14 min read
MER Article Foot Soldiers of the Islamic Republic’s “Culture of Modesty” “Simplicity has disappeared,” laments Minoo Shahbazi, energetic at 50, and animated in the cheap manteau and black scarf she wears beneath her chador. Look at her 16-year old son, she says: “He likes to wear famous brand-name clothes. Obviously, I do not agree. He is very different from me.” Fatemeh Sadeghi • 16 min read
MER Article The Islamic Republic's Failed Quest for the Spotless City It is characteristic of modern social revolutions to seek moral improvement of the population, as well as redress of the injustices of the ancien regime. In 1794, Paris echoed with calls to “righteousness”; in 1917, the Bolsheviks denounced the bourgeois decadence of the czarist era. For Ayatollah R Azam Khatam • 14 min read
MER Article Baluchistan’s Rising Militancy Baluchistan, a region long associated with instability and armed conflict, straddles the borders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan is home to the largest number of Baluch, at 5 million, and the largest province of Baluchistan, at 43 percent of the country’s land mass. In Iran, the Baluch, Sonia Ghaffari • 11 min read
MER Article Thirty Years of the Islamic Revolution in Rural Iran Development, or modernization, of the Iranian countryside became an ideological imperative at the very outset of the post-revolutionary period. Both the religious and secular leaders of the Islamic Revolution believed that the deposed Pahlavi monarchy deliberately had neglected agriculture and rural economic development in its efforts to create in Iran Eric Hooglund • 15 min read
