Iran Today: What’s Behind the Headlines
Thirty years after the revolution that transformed Iran into an Islamic republic, the country is back on the front pages. One day the news is about the country’s nuclear program, the next its regional policies, then its fiercely contested political arena. What’s behind these multi-layered confrontations and conflicts, and how do they feed on each other? Who—or what forces—controls Iran today, and what does the future hold? If the United States is going to engage Iran, how should we do so, and what can we expect?
Farideh Farhi, an internationally known Iran analyst, calls the recent presidential elections in Iran “the most significant sequence of events in the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution.” She will examine how Iran’s foreign policy, especially as reflected in its nuclear program and the confrontation it has engendered, intersects with its intensely contested domestic environment, highlighted by the June 2009 election and the protests and repression that followed.
Farhi is the author of “States and Urban-Based Revolutions: Iran and Nicaragua” and writes frequently on contemporary Iranian politics. She lived and worked in Iran between 1991 and 1998. She is an independent scholar and an affiliate member of the graduate faculty of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
Link to a recent article in “Middle East Report” similar to the talk she will give:
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer252/farhi.html
Link to a 2005 article:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-irandemocracy/article_2420.jsp