The Islamic Republic has been struggling to reform itself for 25 years and each time the experiment has gone awry. Iran's revolutionary theocracy has evolved, but the most problematic aspects of its ideology and institutions have managed to endure since 1979. Can the Iran Nuclear Deal, an agreement crafted through intense dialogue with an old adversary, alter the essence of the Islamic Republic and its turbulent relationship with the world? In Iran Reconsidered: The Nuclear Deal and the Quest for a New Moderation Suzanne Maloney argues that the nature of the Islamic Republic amplifies the threat posed by its nuclear ambitions and animates the most tenacious opponents of the deal. For that reason, the fierce debate that has erupted in Washington over the deal hinges on the prognosis for Iran's future.

This book examines Modern Iran through an interdisciplinary analysis of its cultural norms, history and institutional environment. The goal is to underline strengths and weaknesses of Iranian society as a whole, and to illustrate less prescriptive explanations for the way Iran is seen through a lens of persistent collective conduct rather than erratic historical occurrences. Throughout its history, Iran has been subject to many studies, all of which have diagnosed the country’s problem and prescribed solutions based on certain theoretical grounds. This book intends to look inward, seeking cultural explanations for Iran’s perpetual inability to improve its society. The theme in this book is based on the eloquent words of Nasir Khusrau, a great Iranian poet: “az mast ki bar mast”. The words are from a poem describing a self-adoring eagle that sees its life abruptly ended by an arrow winged with its own feathers—the bird is doomed by its own vanity. The closest interpretation of this idiom in Western Christian culture is “you reap what you sow”, which conveys a similar message that underlines one’s responsibility in the sense that, sooner or later, we must face the choices we make. This would enable us to confront – and live up to – what Iran’s history and culture have taught us.

In the history of Western thought, friendship's relationship to politics is checkered. Friendship was seen as key to understanding political life in the ancient world, but it was then ignored for centuries. Today, friendship has again become a desirable framework for political interaction. In Friendship Reconsidered, P. E. Digeser contends that our rich and varied practices of friendship multiply and moderate connections to politics. Along the way, she sets forth a series of ideals that appreciates friendship's many forms and its dynamic relationship to individuality, citizenship, political and legal institutions, and international relations. Digeser argues that, as a set of practices bearing a family resemblance to one another, friendship calls our attention to the importance of norms of friendly action and the mutual recognition of motive. Focusing on these attributes clarifies the place of self-interest and duty in friendship and points to its compatibility with the pursuit of individuality. She shows how friendship can provide islands of stability in a sea of citizen-strangers and, in a delegitimized political environment, a bridge between differences. She also explores how political and legal institutions can both undermine and promote friendship. Digeser then looks to the positive potential of international friendships, in which states mutually strive to protect the just character of one another's institutions and policies. Friendship's repertoire of motives and manifestations complicates its relationship to politics, Digeser concludes, but it can help us realize the limits and possibilities for generating new opportunities for cooperation.

What does the practice of torture presuppose about human beings and human society? How does one explain a society in which institutional torture persists despite massive changes in government and class structure? What, indeed, are the social foundations of modern torture? In Culture and Modernity, Darius M. Rejali investigates torture in Iran in order to understand and critically reconsider the politics and psychology of modern torture. In a world in which one out of every three governments uses torture, Rejali points to a common past, one shared by Iranians and non-Iranians alike, that supports this practice.“My aim,” Rejali writes, “is to use the study of torture, and of punishment more generally, to unearth deep and important assumptions about society, history, politics, and the ‘good life' that I believe underpin the life of a torturer.”Exploring the four principle explanations of modern torture—those offered by human rights activists, modernization theorists, state terrorist theorists such as Noam Chomsky, and post-structuralists, especially Michel Foucault—Rejali asks, “Do the accounts of political violence that we have developed over the past century have any real… explanatory or even moral significance… in today's world, or are they just consolations in the face of events we cannot fully understand?” His answers lead him to reconsider how Middle Eastern and European history are written and move him to question cherished assumptions about state formation, modernization, and postmodernism. Torture and Modernity is a deeply unsettling book—it contains not only graphic verbal passages, but an extensive photographic essay—yet it is intended to serve as a guide to rethinking current attitudes and reshaping political policies. How people are punished necessarily invokes conceptions of what human beings are and what they might become. A work such as this offers an understanding of what it means to “become modern,” and it is only when this notion of modernity is made manifest and analyzed that one can firmly grasp the prospects for a world without torture.

With the advent of the Trump Administration, relations between Iran and the United States have become increasingly conflictual to the point that a future war between the two countries is a realistic possibility. President Trump has unilaterally withdrawn the US from the historic Iran nuclear accord and has re-imposed the nuclear-related sanctions, which had been removed as a result of that accord. Reflecting a new determined US effort to curb Iran's hegemonic behavior throughout the Middle East, Trump's Iran policy has all the markings of a sharp discontinuity in the Iran containment strategy of the previous six US administrations. The regime change policy, spearheaded by a hawkish cabinet with a long history of antipathy toward the Iranian government, has become the most salient feature of US policy toward Iran under President Trump. This turn in US foreign policy has important consequences not just for Iran but also for Iran's neighbors and prospects of long-term stability in the Persian Gulf and beyond. This book seeks to examine the fluid dynamic of US-Iran relations in the Trump era by providing a social scientific understanding of the pattern of hostility and antagonism between Washington and Tehran and the resulting spiraling conflict that may lead to a disastrous war in the region.

Examining the rapid transition in Iran from a modernizing, westernizing, secularizing monarchy (1941-79) to a hard-line, conservative, clergy-run Islamic republic (1979-), this book focuses on the ways this process has impacted the Qashqa’i—a rural, nomadic, tribally organized, Turkish-speaking, ethnic minority of a million and a half people who are dispersed across the southern Zagros Mountains. Analysing the relationship between the tribal polity and each of the two regimes, the book goes on to explain the resilience of the people’s tribal organizations, kinship networks, and politicized ethnolinguistic identities to demonstrate how these structures and ideologies offered the Qashqa’i a way to confront the pressures emanating from the two central governments. Existing scholarly works on politics in Iran rarely consider Iranian society outside the capital of Tehran and beyond the reach of the details of national politics. Local-level studies on Iran—accounts of the ways people actually lived—are now rare, especially after the revolution. Based on long-term anthropological research, Nomads in Postrevolutionary Iran provides a unique insight into how national-level issues relate to the local level and will be of interest to scholars and researchers in Anthropolgy, Iranian Studies and Middle Eastern Studies.