A comprehensive but concise overview of Iran's politics, economy, military, foreign policy, and nuclear program. The volume chronicles U.S.-Iran relations under six American presidents and probes five options for dealing with Iran. Organized thematically, this book provides top-level briefings by 50 top experts on Iran (both Iranian and Western authors) and is a practical and accessible "go-to" resource for practitioners, policymakers, academics, and students, as well as a fascinating wealth of information for anyone interested in understanding Iran's pivotal role in world politics.

Examines the last forty years of Iranian and Middle-Eastern history through the prism of the Green Uprisings of 2009.

This book examines the emergence and development of the 2009 Green Movement in Iran. The approach emphasizes the context and the local and historical specificities in which mass oppositional movements arise, develop and conduct their operations. Meanwhile, it foregrounds an account of multiple modernities that work to transcend modernist assumptions. The volume describes and analyzes the power modalities—disciplinary, biopolitical, and sovereign—employed by the Islamic Republic to governmentalize the masses. Bearing a triangular methodology, the book consists of six semi-structured interviews with authorities and activists who participated in the pivotal events of that period; discourse analysis focusing on the Iranian constitution and the relevant government policy documents and speeches; and archival analysis. These provide the historical background, perspectives and insights required to analyze and explicate the conditions responsible for the emergence of the Green Movement and to grasp how collective action was enabled and organized. Marking a particular historical phase in the development of a home-grown democracy in post-revolutionary Iran, the Green Movement is transforming the country’s political landscape. This book is a key resource to students and scholars interested in comparative politics, Iranian studies and the Middle East.

A definitive collection of essays and documents on the movement behind Iran's mass protests Since June of 2009, the Islamic Republic of Iran has seen the most dramatic political upheaval in its three decades of rule. What began as a series of mass protests over the official results of a presidential election—engendering the slogan “Where is My Vote?”—has grown into something much larger, indeed the largest political protest since the 1979 revolution. The Green Movement has been described as “an Iranian intifada,” a “great emancipatory event,” a “grassroots civil rights movement a century in the making,” and “something quite extraordinary, perhaps even a social revolution.” What are the movement’s aims—are they revolutionary, reformist, or something else altogether? Does it have a chance of fundamentally changing Iranian politics or removing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from office? This momentous anthology explores these critical questions and others by assembling the key statements, communiqués, manifestos, interviews, and debates to have emerged from this vibrant social movement—many of which are translated and published here for the first time. This indispensable volume is the first to bring together the leading voices and key players in Iran’s Green Movement, providing an intellectual and political road map to this turning point in Iran’s history and a vital resource for the study of Iran, social movements, and the future of the Middle East.

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.

The Green Movement protests that erupted in Iran in 2009 amid allegations of election fraud shook the Islamic Republic to its core. For the first time in decades, the adoption of serious liberal reforms seemed possible. But the opportunity proved short-lived, leaving Iranian activists and intellectuals to debate whether any path to democracy remained open. Offering a new framework for understanding democratization in developing countries governed by authoritarian regimes, Democracy in Iran is a penetrating, historically informed analysis of Iran’s current and future prospects for reform. Beginning with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Misagh Parsa traces the evolution of Iran’s theocratic regime, examining the challenges the Islamic Republic has overcome as well as those that remain: inequalities in wealth and income, corruption and cronyism, and a “brain drain” of highly educated professionals eager to escape Iran’s repressive confines. The political fortunes of Iranian reformers seeking to address these problems have been uneven over a period that has seen hopes raised during a reformist administration, setbacks under Ahmadinejad, and the birth of the Green Movement. Although pro-democracy activists have made progress by fits and starts, they have few tangible reforms to show for their efforts. In Parsa’s view, the outlook for Iranian democracy is stark. Gradual institutional reforms will not be sufficient for real change, nor can the government be reformed without fundamentally rethinking its commitment to the role of religion in politics and civic life. For Iran to democratize, the options are narrowing to a single path: another revolution.

The protests following Iran's fraudulent 2009 Presidential election took the world by storm. As the Green Revolution gained protestors in the Iranian streets, #iranelection became the first long-trending international hashtag. Texts, images, videos, audio recordings, and links connected protestors on the ground and netizens online, all simultaneously transmitting and living a shared international experience. #iranelection follows the protest movement, on the ground and online, to investigate how emerging social media platforms developed international solidarity. The 2009 protests in Iran were the first revolts to be catapulted onto the global stage by social media, just as the 1979 Iranian Revolution was agitated by cassette tapes. And as the world turned to social media platforms to understand the events on the ground, social media platforms also adapted and developed to accommodate this global activism. Provocative and eye-opening, #iranelection reveals the new online ecology of social protest and offers a prehistory, of sorts, of the uses of hashtags and trending topics, selfies and avatar activism, and citizen journalism and YouTube mashups.

Recent Iranian history has been full of unexpected turns. Whether it was the 1979 revolution, which resulted in the establishment of the first ever Islamic Republic in the history of the Muslim world, the rise to power of the reformist movement in 1997, or the emergence of the Green Movement, an opposition movement that took shape spontaneously in the days immediately following the presidential elections in June 2009, the world has been taken unawares at every juncture. This book brings together essays that both speculate on the import of the developments of 2009 and shed light on the complexities and the ever-changing dynamics of post-revolutionary Iran.

The Current Controversies series examines today's most important social and political issues; each volume presents a diverse selection of primary and secondary sources representing all sides of the debate in question.;; Each anthology is composed of a wide spectrum of sources written by many of the foremost authorities in their respective fields. This unique approach provides students with a concise view of divergent opinions on each topic. Extensive book and periodical

This book explores how the children of Iranian immigrants in the US utilize the internet and develop digital identities. Taking Los Angeles—the long-time media and cultural center of Iranian diaspora—as its ethnographic field site, it investigates how various web platforms are embedded within the everyday social, cultural, and political lives of second generation Iranian Americans. Donya Alinejad unpacks contemporary diasporic belonging through her discussion of the digital mediation of race, memory, and long-distance engagement in the historic Iranian Green Movement. The book argues that web media practices have become integral to Iranian American identity formation for this generation, and introduces the notion of second-generation “digital styles” to explain how specific web applications afford new stylings of diaspora culture.