After Khomeini:Iran Under His Successors

The Green Movement in Iran contains Hamid Dabashi’s most important writings on the Iran’s June 2009 election, its tumultuous aftermath, and the characteristics and aspirations of the emerging Green Movement. These analyses range from close analysis of the nature of the events to the Green Movement’s historical background and future political consequences. The writings have been modified and updated for book publication.

The volume presents Dabashi’s account of the events since June 12, 2009—the Election Day itself—and his recap of highlights of the build-up period to the mass protests. He provides insightful background for events on the ground, dealing with debates about the credibility of the election. He then discusses political continuity in Iran, as well as the characteristics of the Green Movement. Dabashi argues that the reaction of the custodians of the Islamic Republic to the charge of the election being a fraud only affirms its lost legitimacy, and casts the system as being neither "Islamic" nor a "republic."

Dabashi also comments on U.S. politics and its relations to Iran and the Green Movement, pointing out shortcomings in American media culture. The role of the Iranian opposition in the Green Movement and American political policies, the political and economic consequence of the U.S. sanctions against Iran, and the way these may be interpreted by Iranian society are all viewed from an enlightening perspective. Dabashi argues that the Iranian regime, suffering deeply from legitimacy issues, makes use of its bureaucratic, economic, and political leverage to stage a show of support and project division among the people.

First published in 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential Provincializing Europe addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of modernity in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is built into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty. Measured against such mythical standards, capitalist transition in the third world has often seemed either incomplete or lacking. Provincializing Europe proposes that every case of transition to capitalism is a case of translation as well--a translation of existing worlds and their thought--categories into the categories and self-understandings of capitalist modernity. Now featuring a new preface in which Chakrabarty responds to his critics, this book globalizes European thought by exploring how it may be renewed both for and from the margins.

Based on more than thirty extended reporting trips to Iran, including the turbulent aftermath of the disputed June 2009 election, Scott Peterson’s portrait is the definitive guide to this enigmatic nation, from the roots of its incendiary internal struggles to the rise and slide of Iran’s earthshaking 1979 Islamic Revolution.

This prize-winning American journalist with unparalleled experience in Iran takes us there, inside a country where an educated and young population is restlessly eager to take its place in the world; where martyrs of the "sacred" Iran-Iraq War are still mourned with tears of devotion; where the cultural and religious forces of light and darkness are locked in battle. Peterson brings stunningly alive the diversity within Iran—from the hard-liners who shout "Death to America" to the majority who comprise the most pro-American population in the Middle East.

Let the Swords Encircle Me gives voice to Iranians themselves—the clerics and the reformers, the filmmakers and the journalists, the True Believers and their Westernized and profane brethren—to understand the complexities of Iran today. Through dedicated and in-depth reporting, Peterson shows how every word, image, and sensibility in Iran is often deliciously unexpected and counterintuitive. Ideology matters. So does "resistance." And azadi: freedom.

Peterson deftly holds a mirror up to both sides of the U.S.-Iran conflict. Americans and Iranians, he writes, share a belief in their own exceptionalism and "manifest destiny" (which for Iran includes its nuclear ambitions) and frequent need of an "enemy" in political discourse. The same elements that have locked the United States and Iran in the most vicious of struggles—stretching back to the 1953 CIA coup in Tehran and the 1979 U.S. Embassy hostage saga—are the same ones that could one day make Iran and the United States the most "natural" allies in the region.

In this critical and personal account, Peterson illumines the latest episodes of Iran’s century-old quest for democracy and freedom. He explains how the Islamic Revolution—launched as a beacon of justice and resistance for Iranians and all the world’s Muslims—has not lived up to its ambitious promise. He shows how the violence of 2009 damaged the regime’s legitimacy and marks the start of an irreversible decline.