This paper explores the cultural meaning of social media in Iran by examining the process in which the media become a field of political ideology. This work based on about 2 years anthropological fieldworks at Tehran and Shiraz in Iran. Now the New Media such as social media, satellite communication systems, and smart phones lead the discourses that threaten the current Islamic authority. Iranian authorities systematically suppress freedom of opinion and expression by imprisoning bloggers, journalists, and editors. Therefore, broadcasting remains the most rigid institution in Iran, being in the middle of conflicts between the conservatives and the reformists. In spite of the limits imposed on freedom of expression, the Iranians participate in making transnational discourses concerning human rights or democratization in private spheres through the social media. The social media has become the alternative public sphere where the Iranians can communicate and make their own world. SNS users generate a field where they can express their own self-identities. In this respect, “liking Facebook” can be viewed as a significant Cultural Revolution and resistance. The public sphere in Iran is now transient, decentralized, and multiple. The new public sphere is open in both physical and virtual spaces (Amir-Ebrahimi, 2009:333). From these perspectives, I argue that the private sphere is appropriated as a public and social space. Furthermore, I emphasize that on-line media and SNS function as an “imagined community” and a “space of solidarity and resistance.” The visible or invisible war between the state and citizen has begun in urban space. The new media have become the arena in which the state and the recalcitrant citizens struggle against each other. I intend to reveal the sphere of new media, with their alternative and political culture of the mass. I will examine how the Iranian urbanites living in Tehran create their own community within the Islamic republic through SNS and smart phones. This is achieved by the collective enjoyment of illegal popular culture and communication with the outside world using new media and technology in private space. My work will explore the state’s strategy of a “soft war” against the global media. I have found that the secular and reformative people play hide-and-seek with the repressive regime. In this context, this paper aims to examine how recent trends of globalization and trans-nationalism communicate and conflict with the specific socio-political context of Iran as an Islamic state.

This paper examines the formation of the Iranian railway workforce in the early twentieth century to demonstrate the importance of transnational connections with Iran’s surrounding world, such as the Caucasus and the Persian Gulf, to understand the process of nation building. Iran was a latecomer to the age of railways. Only in 1938 did the Pahlavi state complete the Trans-Iranian Railway, the first extensive railway in Iran, and the symbol of Pahlavi success in rejuvenating the nation. Yet, because the Railway Organization needed such workers as locomotive drivers, repairers, and various kinds of skilled workers for maintaining and operating the completed sections, the formation of the railway workforce had already begun in the 1920s. Existing scholarship sees railway projects in Iran within the framework of the tensions between railway imperialism and Iranian nationalism. Thus, the Iranian state project of the Trans-Iranian Railway is seen as a triumph of the nationalist regime of Reza Shah Pahlavi. This framework is reflected in brief references to labor formation in the railway industry, which considers only Iran and the “West.” Thus, the narrative starts with the hiring of Western managers and railway engineers as well as the dispatching Iranians to the “West” to study railway-related subjects, particularly during the 1920s. This phase is followed by the establishment of railway schools in Iran by the Pahlavi state, which led to the formation of the indigenous workforce by the time of Reza Shah’s abdication in 1941. This paper demonstrates two ways in which the transnational flow of labor contributed to the formation of the first generation of railway workers in Iran. Firstly, by using mini-biographies of rank-and-file railway workers published in the 1940s, it demonstrates the transnational labor flow between northwestern Iran and Anatolia, the Caucasus, and southern Russia before the establishment of the Pahlavi Dynasty. Secondly, by using archival documents from the British Library in London and from the Majles Library in Tehran, it shows the large presence of Indian and Iraqi railway workers in the 1920s, until that presence dwindled by the late 1940s. Therefore, this paper resituates Iran in multiple regional networks using the case of labor formation in the railway industry and rectifies the historiographical tendency to overemphasize either the nation or the interaction between Iran and the “West” as a framework to understand technological projects.

Scholarship on religion and politics has been vacillating between those who ascribe to actors a set of fixed theological characteristics that determine their behavior, and those who focus on their strategic interests and view their ideology as a poor predictor of their action. This paper instead aims to demonstrate how elites instrumentally and interactively construct religious doctrines in the context of political uncertainty. It focuses on religion not as an independent variable, nor a constitutive factor, but a strategic construct. Breaking binaries such as secular/radical and drawing on the “extreme” case of post-revolutionary Iran, I explain that religious narratives are neither historically given, nor accidental, nor unidirectional, nor do they occur after behavioral change. Rather, religion is a strategic tool, crafted to advance elites’ particular interests at a specific time and place. I use newly collected primary documents to process-trace the evolution of religious doctrines in Iran against the background of domestic and international politics. I argue that political actors employ a diverse range of religious ideologies to generate mass compliance, prevent elite defections, and manage the state’s external security threats. This paper contributes to the literature on the non-material sources of authoritarian regime durability and the broader rationalist-constructivist debate on the relationship between religion and politics by demonstrating how ideational factors are constructed to correspond with the vicissitudes of elite competition.

Shortly after the Islamic Revolution of Iran, Iraq initiated a war against the revolutionized country. Along with the professional but severely debilitated pre-revolutionary army, a second body of Iranian combatants found themselves fighting the Iraqi army: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The Corps was just a young revolutionary institution rooted in the religious-ideological groups that had played a significant role during the Revolution itself. Rigid structure, efficient planning and decision-making capability, trained staff, and formal processes of granting authority are known as essential characteristics of successful armed forces. Yet, clearly lacking such features, the IRGC got heavily involved in the war alongside a classical army and even achieved military successes in the second year of the war. How did this nonprofessional and disorganized military body survive the ultimate pressure of international combat and secure military achievements? What informally accepted principles filled the void of a classic military structure and training, and how? This paper examines about 80 wartime diaries and memoires written by the IRGC veterans of different ranks, in an attempt to disclose the internal flow of interactions, interpersonal relationships, and collective understandings that kept the nascent organization together and endowed it with military creativities of its own. Where there is no externally observable order, the personal narratives under study provide an insider’s view of the organization’s consolidation and everyday functioning in the first two years of war. Findings show that the Guards relied on two intertwined assets. On one hand, the large, all-volunteer rank and file’s religiously-inspired revolutionary fervor provided them with a strong sense of solidarity as well as a selfless readiness—know among them as “will to martyrdom”—to take extreme measures on the battlefield. On the other hand, commanders shared and understood this spirit, which allowed them not only to gain the soldiers’ deep trust, but also to adjust their institutionalization efforts so that this shared fervor was not “disenchanted” away. Hierarchy was kept at minimum in the spirit of brotherhood, self-identification with the Islamic Revolution and its underlying Shi’a culture was considered the highest merit, decision-making was religiously inspired, and Islamic rituals and ethics were deployed as organizing elements. In short, it was the rank and file’s Islamic-revolutionary spirit combined with the commanders’ attempt to preserve this spirit throughout institutionalization that allowed the Guards to operate quite successfully in the first two years of the war.

Between 1870 and 1910, there was a surge in the production of regional histories and geographies throughout Iran. These texts reflect strong local and regional identities through their narration of space and place, as communities bound together by a common history and culture, commodities and curiosities, and the sacred and poetic. Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Mana Kia, and others have suggested that medieval Persian local histories reflect something of a “proto-nationalism” as far back as the Mongol period, but relatively little attention has been paid to the ideological aspects of their 19th and early 20th century counterparts. This paper will apply insights from postmodern geographers and critical theorists like Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Mike Featherstone to investigate space as an ideological construct in these texts and the relationship between spatial imagination and the politics of identity. The prevailing argument among intellectual and cultural historians is that nationalism was introduced to Iran by Europeans as a totalizing ideology and an aspect of modernism, which subsequently out-competed various particularlisms like tribalism, sectarianism, and regionalism. The local histories of Kashan (1871), Kirman (1874), and Isfahan (1877) will be explored in this paper as alternate entry points for viewing the politics of identity beyond the elite communities of Tehran and their transnational networks. A brief discussion of two annotations and commentaries on the local history of Kirman in the first decade of the 20th century will be included to offer some temporal depth to this discussion. I will argue here that regionalism was not outcompeted by nationalism, but was rather a critical component in its creation. Being Kashani or Kirmani or Isfahani was not contrary to being Iranian, it was an aspect of one’s Iranianness. This is particularly strongly reflected in two texts from the early 20th century that are largely commentaries and annotations of the 1874 history of Kirman. This brings into question the interplay of the global and the local in the changing ideological landscape of the late 19th century, as well as how Iranians produced, rather than received, new forms of identity as active agents of change.