Iranian Republic

The new man of power in Iran’s parliament

According to an old dictum, the best leaders are those who don’t ask for the job. By such logic, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the fifty-eight-year-old who became the new speaker of the Iranian parliament on May 28, is not very qualified. The conservative soldier-cum-politician has never hidden his ambitions for power. His ascendancy to the top legislative position in the country comes after three failed runs for the presidency in 2005, 2013, and 2017. ...

INTERVIEW: ALI AFSHARI

Ali Afshari is an Iranian human rights activist. Although he no longer lives in Iran, he is a man who has fought, and is still fighting for human rights that are deeply threatened. ...

Iran Warns U.S. on Naval Activity in the Gulf

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps unveiled scores of new and upgraded defensive speedboats with a warning to the U.S. that it won’t shy away from challenging American naval power. ...

WORK: DEMOCRATIZE, DECOMMODIFY, REMEDIATE

Working humans are so much more than “resources.” This is one of the central lessons of the current crisis. Caring for the sick; delivering food, medication, and other essentials; clearing away our waste; stocking the shelves and running the registers in our grocery stores – the people who have kept life going through the COVID-19 pandemic are living proof that work cannot be reduced to a mere commodity. ...

The Twilight of the Iranian Revolution

One night last December, the chief resident physician at a hospital in the Iranian city of Gorgan was asked to consult on a baffling case: a patient was racked with a mysterious virus, which was advancing rapidly through his body. ...

The coronavirus crisis in Iran has opened up an internal fight between the government and its Revolutionary Guard

Iran's elected government under President Hassan Rouhani is embroiled in an internal power struggle against hardline factions of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for control of the country's response to the COVID-19 crisis. ...

IRANIANS TURN AWAY FROM THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC

A little over four decades ago, when a Shia Muslim cleric named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini emerged in Iran and on the world political stage as the head of an unprecedented theologico-political project, few people in the West realized that they were witnessing the gestation of a new ideological challenge to the liberal-democratic worldview. For decades after Khomeini launched his Islamist revolution in Iran, the world’s liberal-democratic states failed to grasp that Islamist radicalism was a direct ideological threat, even though from its inception it had proclaimed Western democracy as its main enemy.1 ...

Iran’s economy and the burden of multiple exchange rates

The Iranian economy has been struggling since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979 for a number of reasons, including the government’s hardline foreign policies that challenge major world powers and their tensions with other countries in the Middle East. ...

Iran: Prosecutions for Protests About Plane-Downing

Iranian courts since late April 2020 have sentenced at least 13 people to prison terms, apparently solely for peacefully protesting the Iranian forces’ deadly attack on a civilian airliner and the government’s initial denial of responsibility, Human Rights Watch said today. The authorities should halt all prosecutions that violate the right to peaceful assembly and protest. ...