MER Article Survival Through Dispossession Since the 2005 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the burning economic issue in Iran has been the privatization of public assets and, more recently, the elimination of subsidies for a vast array of goods and services. Leading figures, including the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hav Kaveh Ehsani • 21 min read
MER Article Change of Power The poet Esmail Khoi once remarked to Ardeshir Mohassess that many of his drawings focused on oppression, depicting both the oppressor and the oppressed as ugly and animal-like. “You seem to suggest,” Khoi observed, “that those who suffer from oppression are no less cruel that their oppressors.” Ard Shiva Balaghi • 3 min read
MER Article Tied Up in Tehran I want to begin with a story. Like the best of stories, it is true. Norma Claire Moruzzi • 17 min read
MER Article The Reformist Moment and the Press The story of Iran’s “reformist moment” of 1997-2005 can be told through the story of the Iranian press in this period. Previously, the Islamic Republic had severely restricted freedom of the press, issuing permits only to newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets that mimicked the hard line of sta Ramin Karimian • 2 min read
MER Article Cultural Policy in the Islamic Republic of Iran Article 2 of the constitution of Islamic Republic of Iran states, “The Islamic Republic is a system based on belief in…cultural independence.” This clause goes on to exalt the “sciences and arts [as] the most advanced results of human experience.” The very next article of the charter calls for Shiva Balaghi • 2 min read
MER Article How Islamic Was the Revolution? Like all revolutions, the 1979 revolution in Iran is too complex to be captured by a single adjective. It has come to be known as the “Islamic” Revolution, for it authored a regime ruling in the name of Islam and with the utopian mission of creating a just and pure Arang Keshavarzian • 2 min read
MER Article Why the Islamic Republic Has Survived Obituaries for the Islamic Republic of Iran appeared even before it was born. In the hectic months of 1979 -- before the Islamic Republic had been officially declared -- many Iranians as well as foreigners, academics as well as journalists, participants as well as observers, conservatives as well as Ervand Abrahamian • 10 min read
MER Article From the Editors (Spring 2009) Tehran, February 9, 1979. The Shah was gone. Iran was governed, if governed is the word, by Shahpour Bakhtiar, a former minister in the cabinet of Mohammad Mossadeq, the nationalist premier whose CIA-engineered overthrow had restored the monarchy 26 years earlier. The country was roiled by massive d The Editors • 7 min read
Current Analysis Bring In the Dead Beating their chests and wearing black, a procession of young men and women filed toward the gates of Tehran’s Amir Kabir Polytechnic University on February 23. The mourners -- drawn primarily from the ranks of the Basij militia and unaffiliated hardline Islamist vigilantes -- were carrying the rema Rasmus Christian Elling • 16 min read
Current Analysis The Song Does Not Remain the Same Starting in the late 1990s, and especially following two stories by CNN's chief international correspondent, the British-Iranian Christiane Amanpour, Westerners were treated to a slew of articles and broadcast reports aiming to “lift the veil” on Iran. Amanpour’s second story revolved around “youth Ramin Sadighi, Sohrab Mahdavi • 13 min read
Current Analysis Yes, We Really Must Talk With Iran If American troops are ever to come home from Iraq and Iraqis are to have a decent chance at peace and prosperity, the United States must open up a new chapter in its Middle Eastern diplomacy. The Iraq Study Group in 2006 made this point when it called for “diplomatic dialogue, without preconditions Charles Knight, Chris Toensing • 3 min read
MER Article Paradise Lost, Gone Shopping Shahram Khosravi, Young and Defiant in Tehran (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Norma Claire Moruzzi • 6 min read
