Iran's nuclear aspirations increasingly dominate its relations with the United States and Europe. China remains one of Iran's strongest allies on the Security Council, and also its most likely ...supplier of technology and assistance, built on decades of close economic and military relations. Iran is enjoying strong new influence in the Middle East and Asia following record oil profits and Shi'i victories in Iraqi parliamentary elections. Like Iran, China fought for decades to increase its self-reliance and geopolitical influence after painful experiences under European colonialism, which spurred nationalist revolutions.
With China and Iran: Ancient Partners in a Post-Imperial World, John Garver breaks new ground on the relationship between the People's Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Grounding his survey in the twin concepts of civilization and power, Garver explores the relationship between these two ancient and proud peoples, each of which consider the other a peer and a partner in their mutual determination to build a post-Western-dominated Asia. Successive governments of both China and Iran have recognized substantial national capabilities in each other, capabilities that allow the countries to achieve their own national interests through cooperation. These interests have varied - from countering Soviet expansionism to resisting U.S. unilateralism - but the cooperative relationship between the two nations has remained constant.
In his compelling analysis, Garver explores the evolution of Sino-Iranian relations through several phases, including Iran under the shah and before the 1979 revolution; from the 1979 revolution to 1989, a year marked both by the end of the Iran-Iraq war and the beginning of conflict in Sino-U.S. relations; and from 1989 to 2004. China and Iran includes discussion of the current debates at the International Atomic Energy Agency over Iran's nuclear programs and China's role in assisting these programs and in supporting Iran in international debates. Garver examines China's involvement in Iran's efforts to modernize its military, including China's offer of weapons, capital goods, and engineering services in exchange for Iranian oil, suggesting links between this energy exchange and China's support for Iran in political arenas.
In today's political climate, where China is recognized as a rising and increasingly influential global power and Iran as one of the most powerful nations in the Middle East, this book presents a crucial analysis of a topic of utmost importance to scholars and the general public today.
Have the diplomatic efforts of the Obama administration toward Iran failed? Was the Bush administration's emphasis on military intervention, refusal to negotiate, and pursuit of regime change a ...better approach? How can the United States best address the ongoing turmoil in Tehran? This book provides a definitive and comprehensive analysis of the Obama administration's early diplomatic outreach to Iran and discusses the best way to move toward more positive relations between the two discordant states.
Trita Parsi, a Middle East foreign policy expert with extensive Capitol Hill and United Nations experience, interviewed 70 high-ranking officials from the U.S., Iran, Europe, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Brazil-including the top American and Iranian negotiators-for this book. Parsi uncovers the previously unknown story of American and Iranian negotiations during Obama's early years as president, the calculations behind the two nations' dealings, and the real reasons for their current stalemate. Contrary to prevailing opinion, Parsi contends that diplomacy has not been fully tried. For various reasons, Obama's diplomacy ended up being a single roll of the dice. It had to work either immediately-or not at all. Persistence and perseverance are keys to any negotiation. Neither Iran nor the U.S. had them in 2009.
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.
In Farewell Shiraz, Kadivar tells the story of his family and childhood against the tumultuous backdrop of twentieth-century Iran, from the 1905-1907 Constitutional Revolution to the fall of Mohammad ...Reza Shah Pahlavi, before presenting accounts of his meetings with key witnesses to the Shah's fall and the rise of Khomeini. Each of the people interviewed provides a richly detailed picture of the momentous events that took place and the human drama behind them.
Much feminist scholarship has viewed Catholicism and Shi'i Islam as two religious traditions that, historically, have greeted feminist claims with skepticism or outright hostility.Creative ...Conformitydemonstrates how certain liberal secular assumptions about these religious traditions are only partly correct and, more importantly, misleading. In this highly original study, Elizabeth Bucar compares the feminist politics of eleven US Catholic and Iranian Shi'i women and explores how these women contest and affirm clerical mandates in order to expand their roles within their religious communities and national politics. Using scriptural analysis and personal interviews,Creative Conformitydemonstrates how women contribute to the production of ethical knowledge within both religious communities in order to expand what counts as feminist action, and to explain how religious authority creates an unintended diversity of moral belief and action. Bucar finds that the practices of Catholic and Shi'a women are not only determined by but also contribute to the ethical and political landscape in their respective religious communities. She challenges the orthodoxies of liberal feminist politics and, ultimately, strengthens feminism as a scholarly endeavor.
This pioneering study examines a pivotal period in the history of Europe and the Near East. Spanning the ancient and medieval worlds, it investigates the shared ideal of sacred kingship that emerged ...in the late Roman and Persian empires. This shared ideal, while often generating conflict during the four centuries of the empires' coexistence (224-642), also drove exchange, especially the means and methods Roman and Persian sovereigns used to project their notions of universal rule: elaborate systems of ritual and their cultures' visual, architectural, and urban environments. Matthew Canepa explores the artistic, ritual, and ideological interactions between Rome and the Iranian world under the Sasanian dynasty, the last great Persian dynasty before Islam. He analyzes how these two hostile systems of sacred universal sovereignty not only coexisted, but fostered cross-cultural exchange and communication despite their undying rivalry. Bridging the traditional divide between classical and Iranian history, this book brings to life the dazzling courts of two global powers that deeply affected the cultures of medieval Europe, Byzantium, Islam, South Asia, and China.
This volume is based on the assumption that Iran will soon obtain nuclear weapons, and Jacquelyn K. Davis and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff Jr. develop alternative models for assessing the challenges of a ...nuclear Iran for U.S. security. Through three scenario models, the book explores the political, strategic, and operational challenges facing the United States in a post--Cold War world. The authors concentrate on the type of nuclear capability Iran might develop; the conditions under which Iran might resort to threatened or actual weapons use; the extent to which Iran's military strategy and declaratory policy might embolden Iran and its proxies to pursue more aggressive policies in the region and vis-à-vis the United States; and Iran's ability to transfer nuclear materials to others within and outside the region, possibly sparking a nuclear cascade. Drawing on recent post--Cold War deterrence theory, the authors consider Iran's nuclear ambitions as they relate to its foreign policy objectives, domestic politics, and role in the Islamic world, and they suggest specific approaches to improve U.S. defense and deterrence planning.
By exploring topics such as the Internet, print press, advertising, satellite television, video, rock music, literature, cinema, gender, religious intellectuals, and secularism, this unique and ...wide-ranging volume explains Iran as a complex society that has successfully managed to negotiate and embody the tensions of tradition and modernity, democracy and theocracy, isolation and globalization, and other such cultural-political dynamics that escape the explanatory and analytical powers of all-too-familiar binary relations.
Featuring contributions from among the best-known and emerging scholars on Iranian media, culture, society, and politics, this volume uncovers how the existing perspectives on post-revolutionary Iranian society have failed to appreciate the complexity, the paradoxes and the contradictions that characterize life in contemporary Iran, resulting in a general failure to explain and to anticipate its contemporary social and political transformations.
The puzzle of how a vibrant civil society has continued to thrive under a theocratic Islamic state in Iran has long baffled many scholars and analysts of Iranian politics. This wide-ranging collection of essays by a group of young scholars, based mostly in Iran, provides the most informative analysis of this complex relationship between the society and the state in Iran by exploring the role of the media (including the press, television, cinema, the internet, etc.), music, popular literature, and gender relations. It offers fresh perspectives on the contemporary Iranian political culture—as well as politics of culture—in the postrevolutionary period and should be of great interest to students of Middle East politics, communications theory, and cultural studies.
Ali Banuazizi, Professor of Political Science, Boston College, and Past President of the Middle East Studies Association
Iran is often seen as a series of frozen images, with angry clerics and anti-American shibboleths being the byproducts of a stultifying theocratic order. In this path-breaking book, a different Iran comes to life, as a number of authors challenge the prevailing impressions. From the politics of the internet to disquisition of religious discourse in the seminaries, Media, Culture and Society in Iran opens new vistas into this most complex of countries. For anyone interested in understanding the Islamic Republic, its tribulations and contradictions, its promises and ideals, there is simply no better guide.
Ray Takeyh, Council on Foreign Relations, author of Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic .
If the world needed any reminder that Iranians, like any other people, are busy resisting domestic tyranny, defying globalized imperialism, and mapping out the contours of their own place in history, Mehdi Semati's judiciously edited volume is here to respond to that need. Through a succession of brilliant first hand accounts on media, culture, and civil society in Iran, the essays capably collected in this volume cut through the mind-numbing clichés that think tank analysts and their native mis-informers have fed the public at large. The rambunctious Iranian press, a thriving internet culture, the politics of its youths, their arts and music, the importance of satellite TV, a globalized cinema, the inner dynamics of a grassroots women's movement, and innumerable other minutiae of a struggling cosmopolitan culture come to life in this unprecedented and deeply informative book. Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, Author of Iran: A People Interrupted
Living with Globalization and the Islamic State: An Introduction to Media, Culture, and Society in Iran Mehdi Semati Part 1: New and Old Media in Iran 1. The Iranian Press, State and Civil Society Gholam Khiabany 2. The Politics of the Internet in Iran Babak Rahimi 3. Youth, Politics, and Media Habits in Iran Kavous Seyed-Emami 4. The Language of Rock: Iranian Youth, Popular Music, and National Identity Laudan Nooshin 5. The Politics of Satellite Television in Iran Fardin Alikhah 6. The Iranian Moral Panic over Video: A Brief History and a Policy Analysis Mahmood Shahabi 7. Sociolinguistic Aspects of Persian Advertising in Post-Revolutionary Iran Mohammad Amouzadeh and Manoochehr Tavangar 8. Trends in Contemporary Persian Poetry Alireza Anushiravani and Kavoous Hassanli 9. Iranian Émigré Cinema as a Component of Iranian National Cinema Hamid Naficy 10. Iranian Cinema and the Critique of Absolutism Zohreh T. Sullivan Part 2: Religion, State, and Culture 11. Fundamentalism, Gender, and the Discourses of Veiling (Hijab) in Contemporary Iran Fatemeh Sadeghi 12. Religious Intellectualism, Globalization, and Social Transformation in Iran Abbas Varij Kazem 13. Secularization in the Iranian Society Yousef Ali Abazari, Abbas Varij Kazemi and Mehdi Faraji Part 3: Epilogue 14. Whither Iran? Majid Tehranian .
Mehdi Semati is Associate Professor of Communication at Eastern Illinois University, USA. His writings on international communication, cultural politics of global communication, popular media and cultural studies, media and terrorism, and Iranian media have appeared in various academic journals and books.
