Empires are some of the most visible forms of organized power, through which we can see very clearly how and why power emerges, expands and eventually disintegrates. Such power tends to emerge as people fail to take charge of their own affairs after the collapse of a previous empire, leaving...

We all know that the present Iranian regime systematically uses political expediency to pursue its monopolization of power. But how much is known of the reformists' own political expediency, and at what cost are they hidden from public view? At great cost, if we consider the current struggles of the...

Might we finally be able to dispel the myth of clashing civilizations to make room for new understandings of cultures of democracy? After the collapse of the Soviet Union and sudden vacuum of a political and ideological rival for 'the west,' some theorists predicted the end of history, or at...

There is a voluminous literature about the causes of 1979 Iranian revolution. All aspects of social reality, from socio-economic to political and cultural, have been thoroughly examined. Marxist-oriented sociologists have obviously focused on the economic dimensions of Iranian society: the rise of rural and urban unemployment, rapid immigration, the emergence...

In recent article for The New Republic, Abbas Milani attempts to scare Egyptian revolutionaries from pursuing their goal to fully dismantle the country's dictatorial political structure. He warns: "Egyptian democrats must not be fooled by the radical Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. If and when Mubarak falls, they...

Farid Aichoune, a Tunisian journalist, wrote of the recent protests that "as in Iran last year, protesters set meeting places and exchanged information using social networks, less controllable, such as Facebook. That's when the movement takes on a scale with calls for a general strike, and especially the termination of...

The gap between the reformist leaders of the Green movement and its supporters began to show itself when the initial question 'where is my vote?' was replaced by the chant: 'freedom, independence, Iranian republic'. The incompatibility between the reformist leaders' demands for a re-run of the election and the rank-and-file's...

It is no accident that most Islamic countries are governed by dictatorship, and the blame cannot be placed solely on the dominant powers that support such regimes to secure their own national interest. Politics is the interplay of power and legitimacy, and requires some relative legitimacy in social and cultural...

In the classical text of Iranian mythology, Shahnameh (The Book of Kings), one of the most romantic and symbolically expressive tales is that of Siavash, the son of a mythical king, Keykavos. The king's wife Rudabeh falls for Siavash and tries to seduce him. The son resists the temptation so...

On the 31st anniversary of Iran's 1979 revolution, the Green movement made a mistake. It was a much smaller blunder than that made during the June presidential election, when many people flooded the polling stations in the hope that the regime could be reformed, only to wake up the following...

Thirty one years ago, death was a serious possibility for Iranian protestors confronting the Shah's army. Every day before leaving the house, I thus put a piece of paper in my pocket, detailing my name, phone number and blood group so that if I got shot they might be able...

The democratic revolutionary uprising in Iran has not surprised most experts. Since the late nineteenth century, almost every generation of Iranians has seen at least one major upheaval or revolution. The first revolution for democracy in the Middle East took place in Iran in 1905, most European countries were run...

Leverett and Mann Leverett's argument in the New York Times last week, that there will not ultimately be a revolution in Iran is misguided. Their case is not only divorced from facts on the ground, but based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the present crisis.

There are...

In 1979 Iranians introduced a new form of social revolution. In place of the guerrilla-style armed struggle that had characterized the twentieth-century revolutions in non-western countries, the Iranians modeled a spontaneous nonviolent mass movement. And much to the experts' surprise, in less than 2 years this movement overthrew a dictatorial...

In more than three months following the rigged election that Khatami described as a 'velvet coup', the Iranian regime has been stripped of all shreds of its legitimacy. More than at any other time in its short history, the power of the state is reduced to naked force. As the...