Geography Archives: Iran

The president of the new financial institution, Kurosh Parvizian, noted that this institution is a smart project in the face of the international economic crisis.  The creation of a bi-national fund, which will have a capital of 1.2 billion dollars, will strengthen Venezuela’s strategic alliance with Iran and South-South cooperation. The president of Venezuela, Hugo […]

The presidents of Venezuela and Iran met on Thursday at the presidential palace in Tehran, where they agreed on the need to make a systemic change that allows countries to break free from free trade and promote fair trade and complementary relations between countries. The president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, and his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud […]

  Iranian director Soudabeh Moradian films the daily life of her country, as she sees it, as she lives it, without comment.  A new episode of her chronicles of Iran is broadcast on ARTE.tv each week. Watch five episodes — “The Bus Driver,” “In Front of the University of Tehran,” “To Be 24 Years Old […]

Sofie from Norway Asks What Iranians Would Think about Her Art Project of Having a Woman Pose in Burqa in the Red Light District of Amsterdam Sara in Iran Compares Her Project with Sofie’s Sofie Asks Iranian Women: “Are You Protected in a Burqa?” Sara Answers Sofie’s Question Couscous Global makes and broadcasts movies of […]

Patrick Cockburn is the Baghdad correspondent of the Independent and the author of The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq and Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq. How do you interpret the latest election results in Iraq? Nuri al-Maliki, the prime minister, has obviously done well and so has his […]

A legal battle being waged by Palestinian families to stop the takeover of their neighborhood in East Jerusalem by Jewish settlers has received a major fillip from the recent souring of relations between Israel and Turkey. After the Israeli army’s assault on the Gaza Strip in January, lawyers for the families were given access to […]

Iran’s response to a supposedly conciliatory address March 20 by U.S. President Barack Obama has been met with a torrent of “we-told-you-sos” by the U.S. media. The Los Angeles Times reported that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had simply “dismissed President Obama’s extraordinary Persian New Year greeting. . . .” The Christian Science Monitor […]

  اعتراض دانشجویان پلی‌تکنیک به پروژه دفن شهید Beating their chests and wearing black, a procession of young men and women filed toward the gates of Tehran’s Amir Kabir Polytechnic University on February 23.  The mourners — drawn primarily from the ranks of the Basij militia and unaffiliated hardline Islamist vigilantes — were carrying the […]

Obituaries for the Islamic Republic of Iran appeared even before it was born.  In the hectic months of 1979 — before the Islamic Republic had been officially declared — many Iranians as well as foreigners, academics as well as journalists, participants as well as observers, conservatives as well as revolutionaries, confidently predicted its imminent demise.  […]

“Religious despotism is most intransigent because a religious despot views his rule as not only his right but his duty.” — Abdolkarim Soroush The French philosopher Michel Foucault, at the request of one of Italy’s biggest dailies Corriere della Sera, went to Iran to cover the growing unrest and protests against the increasingly despotic regime […]

It’s been several months since the crisis of capitalism was unleashed on the international level, with its epicenter in financial capital and the US economy.  Now we have more evidence that this crisis will be profound and prolonged, affecting all the peripheral economies — including Brazil. Many analyses of the crisis have been published in […]

In this Briefing, we look at how the US’s agricultural reconstruction work in Afghanistan and Iraq not only gives easy entry to US agribusiness and pushes neoliberal policies, something that has always been a primary function of US development assistance, but is also an intrinsic part of the US military campaign in these countries and […]

  Gauging from the events in Iran’s bazaars, October 2008 had an uncanny resemblance to October 1978.  During the Islamic revolution, bazaaris, responding to the ancien régime’s misconceived scheme to address rampant inflation by identifying and prosecuting alleged profiteers, had organized nationwide closures.  Three decades later, bazaaris in Isfahan and subsequently in Mashhad, Shiraz, Tabriz, […]

The election of Barrak Obama to the office of president of the United States has generated tremendous elation and enthusiasm in the U.S. and around the world.  The rise of Obama has been accompanied by the rise of hope and anticipation that a new and better world is about to begin.  Some Obama enthusiasts have […]

See, also, Hajir Palaschi, “Interview with Shahla Lahiji on Women’s Presence in the Labor Market: No Vocation Must Be Prohibited for Women,” Trans. Yoshie Furuhashi, MRZine, 18 February 2008. The Iranian Revolution and its aftermath have generated many debates, one of which pertains to the effects on women’s labor force participation and employment patterns.  For […]

Thirty years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed equity and social justice as the Revolution’s main objective.  His successor, Ayatollah Khamene’i, continues to refer to social justice as the Revolution’s defining theme.  Similarly, Presidents Khatami and Ahmadinejad, though they are from very different political persuasions, placed heavy emphasis on social justice in their political rhetoric.  Yet the […]

When Israel’s 18th parliament opened today, there was only one Arab woman among its intake of legislators. حنين زعبي Haneen Zuabi has made history: although she is not the first Arab woman to enter the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, she is the first to be elected for an Arab party. Sitting in her home in […]

  Since February 2003, Iran’s nuclear program has undergone what the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) itself admits to be the most intrusive inspection in its entire history.  After thousands of hours of inspections by some of the most experienced IAEA experts, the Agency has verified time and again that (1) there is no evidence […]

2009 marks the 30th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution.  The Revolution ended a symbiotic relation between the US and the Shah, whereby the latter helped to sustain the economic and political interests of the US in the Persian Gulf region and the former helped to preserve the rule of the Shah.  Since the end of […]

  The Middle East has always been a difficult challenge for Western human rights organizations, particularly those seeking influence or funding in the United States.  The pressure to go soft on US allies is in some respects reminiscent of Washington’s special pleading for Latin American terror regimes in the 1970s and 1980s.  In the case […]