The Resilience of Populism in Iranian Politics: A Closer Look at the Nexus between Internal and External Factors

This article seeks to demonstrate that the resiliency of populism in Iran cannot be fully explained by internal variables alone. In contrast to many existing approaches, we argue that a combination of internal and external factors have contributed to the longevity and the resilience of Islamic populism in the country. The United States' hostile policies toward Iran — especially under Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump — have contributed to the rise of a nationalist- populist backlash intended to safeguard the survival of the Islamic Republic.

Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes the main arguments of the book, with a focus on the unevenness of redistributing mobilities through the railway project. It also considers the need to reframe chronology in Iranian historiography, followed by a note on the continued importance of rail infrastructure in Iranian politics today.

Where is Iran? Politics between State and Nation, Inside and Outside the Polity

Three powerful spatial dynamics are at work in the analysis of a country’s political orbit. One is the classic remit of the international relations between states. The second is the mainstream remit of political analysis, the national dialogue – sometimes open, often constrained – between the state and its inhabitants. In addition, the third is the cross-border space between the state and its citizens who – as diaspora, exiles, and migrants – live in other countries. Too often, each is analysed in isolation, part of the intellectually unedifying division of academic work. In this chapter, we explore where contemporary Iranian politics exists and how it is played out through each of these political geographies.

The Defence of National Identity as a Revolutionary Concept: Gharbzadigī, Islamic Modernisation, and Anticolonialism

The framework of Iranian national identity has been the cornerstone of the discourse of different social groups that aimed to establish their hegemony over the ‘imagined community’ of Iranians. The difficulty in determining the territorial delimitation of identity, as well as the process of creation-assimilation of a unitarian paradigm of identity characterised, and still characterises, Iranian politics. Therefore, the interdependence between domestic and foreign affairs and national identity can be explained under the lens of the struggle of hegemony of dominant powers and, specifically, through the theoretical framework of specific traditional or organic social groups that developed their political discourse around the different shades of Iranian ‘nationalism’.

Iran’s Islamic Revolution

The Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran was decisive in reshaping and reframing both Iranian politics and the Middle East, as we know it. This chapter investigates the historical framing of the Islamic revolution as a result of the politicization of the religious discourse in Iran from the early 1940s through the late 1970s and the steady emergence of the idea of an Islamic government as an alternative to the oppressive structure of Western modernity. The Islamic revolution marked the re-enchantment and remystification of politics in an allegedly disenchanted world. The chapter reveals two versions of revolutionary Islam, the clerical and the messianic, and their role in the framing of revolutionary politics. Whereas in clerical Islam the modern state was seen not as substantially corrupt but as an indispensable instrument for the establishment of the Islamic government, in messianic Islam the contemplation and reconstruction of history aimed at building a new past, hence a quite different future.

Iran's regional relations after 2000 (Study in relation between Iran and Arab countries)

Relations between Iran and the Arab countries have seen a real fluctuations ranging from support, if not the coalition to tension limit the severance of diplomatic relations, and then the war, since the success of the Islamic revolution in Iran, and fears of the spread of Shiism, and export it to neighboring Arab countries, which are dominated by Sunnis. If the Iranian politics before the Islamic revolution has been characterized Bastbdadah Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi), the leader of the pro-Western, this policy after the Islamic revolution had known Jdida.ovi turning point of this study to review these policies in the two pre-Revolution and Beyond two sections.