Iran

Charles Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Harvard University Press, 2004). (Persian translation of Chapter 1: فصل نخست.) “The shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, would remain on the throne for the foreseeable future: This was the firm conclusion of a top-secret CIA analysis issued in October 1978. One hundred days later the shah — despite his massive military, fearsome security police, and superpower support — was overthrown by a popular and largely peaceful revolution.” More…

Cultural Jiu-Jitsu and the Iranian Greens, in Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, editors, The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (New York: Melville House, 2011), pp. 7-17. “On June 12, 2009, the day of Iran’s presidential election, we knew something was wrong when the government shut down the opposition’s election-monitoring system.” More (slideshow)…

Reading Weber in Tehran, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 1, 2009. “An unlikely suspect was fingered at the recent show trials of Iranian dissidents: Max Weber, whose ideas on rational authority were blamed for fomenting a ‘velvet revolution’ against the Islamic Republic.” More…

Ignore All the Iran Experts, ForeignPolicy.com, June 17, 2009. “Troops are out in Iran this week, but in many cases the crowds have grown so large that the security forces are standing back and letting them swarm silently and peacefully through the boulevards — just like in 1978.” More…

A Feminist Generation in Iran? Iranian Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3, June 2008, pp. 297-321. “Educated young women are significantly more likely to espouse feminist attitudes of various sorts than other Iranians, including educated young men. In addition, educated young women are significantly more likely to work outside the home, marry later, give birth later, have fewer children, and have more egalitarian marriages than other Iranian women. However, surprising proportions of older Iranians also espouse feminist attitudes, and a majority of respondents in one nationally representative sample of urban Iranians identify themselves as proponents of women’s rights.” More… The survey dataset for this paper is available through the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.