The panel seeks to bring conceptual and operational clarity and coherence to Iran's evolving domestic conversation on five major issues unfolding in Iran’s domestic and regional strategic environment as viewed from Tehran’s perspective.
The first paper is an attempt at bringing a rational cost-benefit economic dimension to the Iranian nuclear program by contextualizing it within Tehran’s long-term view toward geopolitics of energy It argues that “while Iran is a major player in global energy, possessing the third largest oil reserves and the second largest natural gas reserves globally, it has monumental problems with energy efficiency and public consumption.” This paper, in challenging the established security climate over Iran’s nuclear program, provides the economic logic behind Iran’s attempts at total indigenization of its nuclear industry.
The second paper turns its focus to Iran’s composite ethnic structure and its implications for forging a full-fledged democratic system in Iran. It addresses the question of why the Iranian opposition has not been able to provide a viable alternative to unite the Iranian people to replace the Islamic regime. It seeks to empirically investigate the role of ethnic minorities, particularly the Kurds, within Iran’s pro-democracy movement since the 1990s. The paper explores the ethnic movements in Iran as providing a pre-existing social and political context for the growth of pro-democracy oppositional movements and argues that a true Iranian democracy and human rights movement needs a more inclusive leadership.
The third paper situates the Iranian green movement within the broader theme of democratization in the Middle East ushered in by the Arab Spring. It argues that while a large body of movement literature links the formation of social movement to either the structural opportunities or rational choice theory, the paper addresses a cultural opportunity, particularly religious opportunities, as a main facilitator or constraints in the formation of the movements.”
The fourth paper addresses the challenges of the Islamic Republic in projecting itself as a unitary actor conventionally conceived in international relations thought and how it has plagued Tehran’s capacity to put forth a monolithic foreign policy front on the international scene.
The fifth paper shifts focus to Iran-US relations and challenges the conventional wisdom on the United States’ image among the Islamic Republic’s political elite. It demonstrates the consistent existence, despite the apparent harsh rhetoric, of an alternative soft context to Tehran’s discourse on the U.S. that views America as a “redeemable” entity.
International Relations/Affairs
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Mohammad Homayounvash
Co-Authors: Reza Sanati
Many observers of the developments in Iran concerning nuclear related matters, , have equated a putative Iranian nuclear program with a determination on the part of Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. The picture, however, is far more complex. In Iran’s case, the rationale for its nuclear industry, both before and after the revolution, is primarily economic in nature. Having signed the NPT, Iran has been building an indigenous top-to-bottom control of the nuclear fuel cycle and all the technological accouterments involved with such an enterprise, to divert its domestic energy needs away from fossil fuels to nuclear. If one compares Iran with a country like France (i.e. similar population size), this makes much economic sense. The World Nuclear Association states that France derives over 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy and that 17% of its electricity is from recycled nuclear fuel. While Iran is a major player in global energy, possessing the third largest oil reserves and the second largest natural gas reserves globally, it has monumental problems with energy efficiency and public consumption. As the US Energy Information Agency has catalogued, though Iran is a “net exporter of electricity, increasing domestic demand has created shortfalls in supply during times of peak energy demand”. While this has been a dilemma for Iran even before the revolution, in conjunction with conflicting pressures of subsidization by the Iranian state and stringent sanctions by the West, naturally forces Iran to look for alternative supplies of energy for its domestic demand, improve efficiency at home, while diverting fossil fuels intended for the home market for export. And as sanctions tighten on Iran, it not only has to look East and South for trading partners, but also is forced to offer those partners discounts to balk at Western aims to isolate Iran economically. Yet, if Iran can exploit even half of what France obtains from nuclear energy, the costs in terms of sanctions and discounted rates for Iran’s consumer base would be more than offset by the savings it obtains at home from nuclear energy. This paper, in challenging the established security climate over Iran’s nuclear program, provides the economic logic behind Iran’s attempts at total indigenization of its nuclear industry.
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Mr. Arash Reisinezhad
Followed by the Arab Spring in 2010, the emergence of the Iranian Green Movement in 2009 heralded a deep transformation within Muslim societies. While a large body of movement literature links the formation of social movement to either the structural opportunities or rational choice theory, the paper addresses a cultural opportunity, particularly religious opportunities, as a main facilitator or constraints in the formation of the movements.
Given the fact that mediating between opportunities and concrete mobilization efforts are the shared meanings, the article seeks to empirically investigate the main religious, here Islamic, factors that drive protests. Considering that movements tend to cluster in time and space precisely because they are not independent of one another, the paper goes deep down in the way that a major Islamic event, Ashura, has had an effective impact on later social movements, particularly among the Shiite. In other words, the Muslim revolutionaries have attempted to map their understandings of their own situations onto the general framework first put forward by Ashura as their Master of Protest Frame (MPF). Additionally the weak idea of the state in Islamic political philosophy, along with the importance of ‘Amr bil Marouf and Nahi anil Monkar’, has functioned as an inspiring opportunity for Muslim oppositions to challenge the dominant order. These factors have had a key role in the construction of the collective identity, which shaped the movements’ strategies and was, in turn, shaped at various points over the course of the movements’ evolution.
However, Shari’a has not been fully interpreted as the source of opportunity for revolutionaries; rather, the notion of ‘Fitnah,’ along with the appreciated position of order within Islamic Ummah, is in the center of constraints for successful formation of any operation against any dominant regime within Muslim society. Hence, the paper tracks down the effective usage of Islamic rhetoric by the dominant regime, Islamic or Secular, to dismantle and suppress their sub-state rivals. Notwithstanding the regime type, and more importantly the way that people see their regimes’ linkage with Islam do really matter. Finally and to place this theoretical framework in recent events and in a more generalizable analysis we employ a cross-national analysis, with a focus on Iran 2009.
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Since the birth of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Iran’s narrative of the United States has centered on conflict, hostility and defiance. But along with this enduring and institutionalized narrative, there has always existed an alternative conversation centered on a “redeemable” America with which Iran could live. The prevailing scholarship on U.S.-Iran relations has argued that a softer, less negative outlook on the United States was predominantly evident or pronounced during the brief period of the Mohammad Khatami presidency, associated with the rise of the reformist movement in Iran, and reflected in Iran’s burgeoning press during this period. This paper argues, however, that the alternative vision of the United States existed from the beginning and throughout the life of the Islamic Republic, regardless of which political faction has been in charge of the country, and even, or perhaps especially, during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The paper further contends that this alternative narrative is not based on abstract thought, but has consistently been linked to real world policy context and critical moments in U.S.-Iran Relations, and as such provides a prism through which an alternative relationship with the United States has been contemplated or envisioned. The paper is based on a systematic content analysis of the speeches, interviews, and writings of Iran’s leaders and ruling elite throughout the Iranian political spectrum from 1979 to the present time.
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Mr. Nima Baghdadi
The basic assumptions of Realist account of International Relations give credence to this fundamental idea that state is a unitary actor; say, “the state speaks with one voice”. This means that irrespective of multitude of voices, not necessarily congruent, within the sphere of domestic politics, the ultimate result is a single policy that enacts and legitimates a certain type of approach to a given situation that a state needs to deal with within the sphere of international politics. Obviously, this idea that state is a unitary actor is prerequisite to another realist assumption that states are rational. This is so because rationality in this sense alludes to the identification of goals and preferences and determining their relative significance and this necessitates the ability of the machinery of state to produce foreign policies that converge at one point. A state cannot speak with one voice if such a convergence is not in place. My observation of recent Iran prompted me to reconsider the realist notion that state is a unitary actor. Iran, I would argue, has shown in recent years that the dynamic of domestic forces at work can have a significant impact on the status of the state outside, in terms of the ability to have the posture of a unitary actor. This has happened due to the aggravated tensions within the body of the state elites. The domestic politics of Iran in recent years proved to lack the capacity of accommodating these aggravated tensions and this led to the entry of these disagreements, sometimes fierce in nature, to the venue of foreign policy making of the state. In this paper, I would start with showing how these controversies found their ways to the new venue; then, I would elaborate on the ramifications that this transformation has for the state in terms of security, and I would end with a revisit of the realist idea of state as a unitary actor. This research provides a picture of a state whose entanglements in domestic politics yield consequential results for it in international domain.
