The Tehran Bazaar has always been central to the Iranian economy and indeed, to the Iranian urban experience. Arang Keshavarzian's fascinating book compares the economics and politics of the ...marketplace under the Pahlavis, who sought to undermine it in the drive for modernisation and under the subsequent revolutionary regime, which came to power with a mandate to preserve the bazaar as an 'Islamic' institution. The outcomes of their respective policies were completely at odds with their intentions. Despite the Shah's hostile approach, the bazaar flourished under his rule and maintained its organisational autonomy to such an extent that it played an integral role in the Islamic revolution. Conversely, the Islamic Republic implemented policies that unwittingly transformed the ways in which the bazaar operated, thus undermining its capacity for political mobilisation. Arang Keshavarizian's book affords unusual insights into the politics, economics and society of Iran across four decades.
Tracing the political trajectory of the Society of Islamic Coalition Association (SIC) since the Islamic Revolution, this paper explains the party's poor electoral performance and its increasingly ...apparent divergence from its assumed social base, the bazaar (bāzārī) community. The article argues that SIC organization and behavior are influenced by the experiences of the prerevolutionary era and state institutions of the Islamic republic. SIC's initial position of power was associated with its members' long-standing relations with the founders of the regime. However, this ultimately laid the foundation for its unwillingness and inability to develop an institutionalized party structure with a social base. As a consequence, bāzārīs have increasingly been alienated from the party leadership and unable to represent their group interests in institutional politics. The analytical narrative incorporates insights from institutionalist approaches to authoritarian politics and presents a view of Iranian political history that stresses contingency, fluidity, and pragmatism in political decision making by elites.
In the familiar trope, Gulf cities are flashy boomtowns of hype and sand. Somehow less organic or more absurd than their counterparts elsewhere, they are often described as either lodestars or ...nightmares of urban modernity and capitalist development. Prominent historian of the Gulf Nelida Fuccaro has critiqued such narratives as examples of “Gulf exceptionalism.”¹ Ubiquitous in both popular and scholarly discourses, exceptionalist narratives elide the role of Gulf cities as lived urban spaces while sidelining their historical significance. They have also contributed to a tendency critiqued by Ahmed Kanna in the opening to his seminal work on Dubai: “Today it
A War on Multiple Fronts Alahmad, Nida; Keshavarzian, Arang
Middle East report (New York, N.Y. 1988),
01/2010, Letnik:
40, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Lasting from 1980 to 1988, the war between Iran and Iraq was the longest inter-state war of the twentieth century. Yet standard narratives of the war, or of Iranian and Iraqi political history, for ...that matter, barely discuss the war's legacy for the structure of the two states in question or the war's effects upon the exercise of political power. While the war was a military stalemate, the political economy that fed upon it, and in turn kept it going, was anything but stale. Adapted from the source document.
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