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
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 Heard on the Hill of Shame It was early afternoon, a bright, crisp Friday in mid-January on the hilltop that lies between Route 34 and the Gaza border, maybe half a mile from Sderot. At the base of the hill lounged journalists and TV crews in foldout chairs, taking advantage of a midday lull in the bombardment. Pop music soun Peter Lagerquist • 5 min read
MER Article The Brothers and the War The shoes thrown by Muntadhar al-Zaydi at George W. Bush during the former president’s farewell tour of Iraq have added an icon to the international culture of protest. During Israel’s wintertime war on Gaza, which, according to the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Health, killed more than 1,300 Joshua Stacher • 18 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
