Strengthening the civil society in Iran was the hallmark of President Mohammad Khatami’s reformist government from 1997 to 2005. NGOs were nurtured under the Ministry of the Interior, and student movements and organizations flourished in state and private universities across the country as well as on the national level. Despite the harsh crackdown of political student movements after the events of July 1999, less-political organizations both inside and outside of universities expanded, in many cases gaining control over domains which were for long tightly held by the government. Yet with the change of the political tide and the rise to power of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2005, the glamorous civil society soon perished. Previous research on the Iranian civil society has focused more on political organizations and particularly student movements such as Daftar Tahkim Vahdat, which due to the nature of their cause were subject to crackdown by conservative centers of power even during the Khatami era. This paper however, will examine the case of the less-famous National Assembly of Cultural Student Organizations (Majame’e Kanoun-haye Farhangi-Honari) which came into prominence during the Khatami era and was highly influential on student life in universities across the country. A democratically-elected umbrella student association, Majame’ and its member organizations (Kanoun-haye Farhangi-Honari) were highly influential on the cultural climate of university campuses and student art/entertainment consumption over the last years of Khatami’s government. In many universities, Kanouns took charge of matters and made decisions regarding events on campus which had always been under the direct control of university officials. This period saw the unprecedented rise in the numbers of Hollywood movies screened, and controversial plays and concerts performed on university campuses across Iran. Using in-depth interviews with organization members and leaders, this paper looks into how NGOs were nurtured under Khatami’s government in order to create a pseudo-civil society, and how this civil society quickly faded from the public sphere once governmental support was withdrawn. Instead of looking at political student organizations which were subject to direct crackdown due to the nature of their activities, the paper focuses on cultural organizations which were not considered a direct threat to the new establishment but still shared the former group’s fate soon after. Through this, it hopes to shed light on the relationship between state and civil society in contemporary Iran and the consequences of such a relationship for the democratic process.

From traditional Marxian and Weberian concepts to the post-Marxist French school of thought, especially Foucault and Bourdieu, numerous developments and shifts have happened within the sociology of intellectuals. “Cultural field of production”, “new epistemic communities”, “decline of the public intellectuals”, and so forth have been coined as new notions and concepts. Most of the studies on post-revolutionary Iran, especially on intellectual climate of the country, have concentrated on the religious reform, religious intellectuals, and their contenders. However, as time passed the Islamic Republic of Iran’s socio-political structure as well as its intellectual milieu have become rather complex, diversified, and nuanced. Based on the qualitative content analysis method and the new theoretical developments within the new sociology of intellectuals, this article argues about the latest intellectual communities’ developments, especially in the post Reform Movement Iran. The hegemonic impact of religious intellectuals from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s gradually waned, and new intellectual communities as well as different layers of neo-leftist (Farhadpour, Rokhdad Project, and so forth), Persianate/nationalist (Tabatabae), spiritualist (Malekian), economically oriented (Renani, Maljoo, and Ghaninejad) intellectuals, as well as Musavi’s circle (Institute for Religion and Economy) emerged within the country. This article argues that in addition to the religious, secular, nationalist, and leftist intellectuals including public or academic ones in opposition side of the political and intellectual spectrum, the political establishment to some extent has been able to produce its own intellectuals (i.e., Afroogh, Kachooyan). Moreover, another shift within the political establishment can be adduced; congruous to the increasing complexities of the I. R. of Iran in its totality, other attached scholars to the political establishment have experienced new transitioning intellectual horizons (i.e., Jafarian). Surprisingly enough, and in contrast to the gradual centralization of the political establishment and opposition including some public/activist intellectuals (i.e., Hajjarian) within the country, radicalization of the different layers of public intellectuals could be traced. Religious iconic intellectuals, especially the second generation which sometimes referred to as the founding fathers of the Reform Movement, as well as staunch critics of religious intellectuals, mainly neo-leftist ones, and other public intellectuals (i.e., Ghaderi) have been radicalized.

This paper explores three currents in Iran’s contemporary intellectual landscape. Each of these promotes divergent outlooks and analyses of the present state of Iranian intellectual thought. However, I argue that the underlying epistemological outlook of these three currents vacillates between two extremes: that optimistic epistemology (as described by Karl Popper), which is the notion that humans can discern the truth of reality and thus be free, and pessimistic epistemology, an underlying disbelief in human’s ability to discern truth. As such, these three intellectual trends all may be undermining to a limited but growing trend towards critique, critical thinking, and more specifically, critical rationalism in the Iranian intellectual and political scene. The three trends this article discusses are the following: First, the post-Marxist/post-modern literature proffered by a group of young authors and translators primarily identified with the thinker Morad Farhadpour. Their work appears via articles, classes, public seminars, and, most prominently, translations (favored writers to translate include Alan Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Zizek, Slavoj, and Theodor Adorno). Second, I explore the promotion of neoliberal-economic intellectualism offered by a number of authors, prominently Musa Ghaninejad, who argues that the solutions to Iran’s contemporary social ills lie in a redoubled focus on economic success rather than any intellectual effort. Lastly, I examine the theories of Seyed Javad Tabatabai, a prolific scholar of Islamic and political philosophy who also offers public classes. In order to tease out the tensions and underlying similarities between these three intellectual trends, I examine their thinking around three core topics: 1) Iranians’ relationship with “the West” and, accordingly, their relationship with modernity, 2) the proper role of the intellectual and the value of intellectual activity, and 3) the social responsibilities assigned to the average citizen/consumer of these respective theories. Research for this paper is based on ethnographic research in Tehran over the course several months, including participant observation in relevant classes and seminars, interviews with individuals involved in promoting each of these three outlooks, and analysis of relevant articles and books. I ultimately suggest that these three trends may pose a potential threat to the growth of critical thinking, and more significantly, to the tenuous hope that has appeared on the Iranian sociopolitical scene in recent years.

The Iranian Green Movement (2009–2012)—which emerged as a response to the results of the 2009 presidential election—accused the government of election fraud, yet decided to become involved in the presidential election of 2013. In this paper I aim to explore why a social movement that began with the slogan “where is my vote?” decided to become involved in the electoral process when we know there wasn’t any change in the election procedures or any signals of political opening. To this end, I analyzed essays, interviews, and parties’ pronouncements published on JARAS, an influential website of the Iranian Green Movement. I argue that the Iranian Green Movement framed the election beyond its traditional meaning as a conventional form of politics. For them, the election was not just an election, but also a form of contentious action and an opportunity to rebuild networks of resistance. This creative cooptation of elections—a major form of institutionalized action—challenges the dominant dichotomy of protest/conventional politics in the social movements literature. In this paper, I go beyond theories that view institutionalized and non-institutionalized actions as complementary, instead arguing that the creativity of a social movement can extend repertoires of contention to include what has been known as institutionalized, conventional politics.

This paper looks at women’s experiences of embodiment as an analytical perspective in understanding gender policies in a context of social and political changes in Iranian society. The purpose of this paper is to look at the construction of normalised female sexuality in women’s narratives and to discuss that how internalising sexuality as ‘natural’ has helped the legitimization of sexual norms and hierarchy of gender relations. In order to highlight the relationship between the contemporary social and cultural transformations in sexuality and sexual politics and women’s personal experiences, I conducted ethnographic research amongst two generations of women in Tehran: those born in the 1950s and those in the 1980s. Through an inter-generational approach I discuss the contradictory definition of womanhood in Iranian context and how women’s embodiment is constructed in intersection with different discourses on women’s sexuality. In contrast to the literature in which women’s agency is simply represented through their acts of resistance against the authoritative institutions such as the Islamic state, here I discuss how women’s personal narratives highlight the complexity of their positionality that cannot be easily reduced to the binary of defiance/compliance. Based on my ethnography, I address the questions such as how Iranian women define virginal body, sexual pleasure and womanhood. Therefore I discuss the ways in which they negotiate, challenge or reproduce the concepts of normal/natural female sexuality in their everyday experiences. I will argue that amongst these two generations women’s bodily experiences, their sources of learning about sexuality, their awareness of their rights to pleasure and their image of womanhood have shifted hugely due to changes in sexual politics of Islamic Republic. In general, this paper underlines the necessity of moving beyond the binary framework in reading women’s sexual experiences. It also evaluates the question of social or political reform through sexual liberation in Iranian society.