Based on an extensive analysis of Persian and Arabic sources and geographic imaging, this paper examines how Iran has instrumentalized reconstruction, development, and aid to promote its geopolitical interests in Syria and how these efforts have mitigated and exacerbated violent conflict and societal backlash locally and transnationally. While helping the Islamic Republic, the Assad regime, and their allies control territory and consolidate power, these efforts have also provoked conflict and backlash in Syria and Iran due to a politicized, exclusive, distributive, and top-down approach. The paper contains significant scholarly implications in the fields of Middle East politics, international relations, and security studies for three reasons. First, Iranian reconstruction, development, and aid highlight the external soft power intervention by Iran to further its geopolitical interests inside the country and wider region. Second, these programs and activities have likely caused or correlated with violent conflict or the risk of renewed conflict in Syria, Iraq, and beyond, even after the declared defeat of ISIS/ISIL and other insurgent groups. Third, these processes and outcomes demonstrate the contextual factors and transnational linkages related to conflict drivers and social backlash in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere. The scholarship on Iranian foreign policy and the Syrian civil war focuses mainly on military and economic assistance as well as ideological indoctrination and religious proselytization. This scholarship has downplayed reconstruction, development, and aid as a soft power mechanism that forges and enhances relations with other countries. Similarly, the literature on the Syrian civil war largely confines Iran’s involvement to the military realm through the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Lebanese Hezbollah, and other Shiite militias that have advised and fought alongside the Syrian Army under the umbrella of the National Defense Forces. This literature excludes the reconstruction, development, and aid institutions of Iran and its clients and partners as a primary means to improve relations with and advance their interests in Syria and beyond.

This paper investigates how the education system in post-revolutionary Iran has played a role in regenerating political elites. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has tried to reconstruct the education system with the aim of creating and expanding the next generation of functionaries and loyalists. In this regard, Ayatollah Khomeini initiated the Cultural Revolution because he feared “the training of the youth in the interests of West or East.” The main purpose of this policy was to purify the education system of Western culture and unite religious education with formal education. A critical component of the Cultural Revolution was the creation of Jahad-e Daneshgahi (Academic Jihad) and the Office for Strengthening Unity, as the exclusive political institutions that were active in the universities during the 1980s. Later, the Student Basij joined these organizations to promote “unity between seminaries (Hawza) and universities” and “the establishment of a great Islamic government.” Alongside these national organizations, specialized schools were founded with the mission of training elites and preparing the next generation of cadres for the Islamic Republic. Imam Sadegh University, Tarbiat Modares University, Mofid University, and the National Organization for the Development of Exceptional Talents (NODET) were among the main education centers designed to groom new elites based on the ideals and interests of the government. This paper examines the successes and failures of these institutions in socializing students and training elites for the political system. Did the majority of new political elites come from these institutions? To what extent did these individuals reflect and espouse the values and ideology of the Islamic Republic? This paper explores the background of these elites and traces their antecedents back to these institutions. The paper also shows that, as an unintended consequence, many of their students, trainees, and graduates rejected the dominant ideology of the state and ended up becoming social activists that opposed it. To conclude, this study argues that, in a complicated and contradictory fashion, the education system, on the one hand, has trained thousands of technocrats for the Islamic Republic, and, on the other hand, has constituted a primary site of resistance to the authoritarian tendencies of the state.

Over the last forty-one years, Iran has been under constant unilateral and multilateral economic sanctions related to military, nuclear, and human rights issues. Although the sanctions have varied in terms of their costs to the economy, they have contracted Iran’s GDP, increased economic stagflation, caused surging unemployment and inflation, and pushed many Iranians below the poverty line. This paper investigates how the two most recent episodes of economic sanctions imposed between 2012-2015 and 2018-2020 have reduced the size of the middle class and increased its vulnerability to poverty. Using a vulnerability-to-poverty approach, this paper defines the middle class as a segment of society with a level of income that is safe from falling into poverty. The lower threshold is identified as a certain percentage above the absolute poverty line which rescues individuals from falling into poverty, and the upper threshold is below a $50 purchasing power parity (PPP). In terms of the absolute poverty line, the paper adopts a basic needs approach by estimating the cost of a bundle of food and other essential goods that is necessary for the physical survival and well-being of one person in each subgroup (urban/rural). The paper also employs a logistic model to estimate how vulnerability to poverty varies among households. Regarding the data source, the paper relies on Iran’s Households Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES), which is administered by the Iran Statistical Center and contains detailed information on expenditures, incomes, assets, employment, and demographics of approximately 38,000 households in both urban and rural areas. This study is among the first to investigate the impact of economic sanctions on the size of the middle class and its vulnerability to poverty in Iran. The study contributes to the literature on both economic sanctions and macroeconomic shocks, specifically how an exogenous shock like sanctions adversely affects various segments of society in different ways and how households react to this shock by smoothing their consumption. The results of the study offer insight into the coping strategies of households faced with economic sanctions. The results also provide Iranian policymakers with options for adopting appropriate protection measures and addressing the problems of the vulnerable segments of society.

Accounting for the discrepancy between the state’s vision of an “Islamic culture” and today’s actually existing popular culture in Iran has led to a proliferation of writings on Iranian media and popular culture in which the latter is bifurcated into two categories of “official culture” and “unofficial culture.” In such writings, the privileging of “cyberspace”/online content or the “underground” culture, and other elite cultural forms that tend to travel easily outside Iran, facilitates the bifurcation of culture rather neatly. Arguing against such views, this paper posits that state’s cultural, media and social policies have created a context in which popular culture, performed in everyday practices, engages and challenges politics on the very terms set by the state. With a sharper focus on the politics of culture, the paper argues that the performance of citizenship is facilitated by the affordances of the technologies of citizenship, a “citizenship” that is constrained, accommodated, subversive, and at times joyful. The performance of citizenship, in the form of self-expression as politics, media activism, subversive “textual” entry points to politics, culture jamming, and semiotic vandalism are all facilitated by the technological affordances of new media and legacy media embedded in the same social space.