In this revised and expanded version of Nikki Keddie's work, Roots of Revolution, the author brings the story of modern Iran to the present day, exploring the political, cultural, and social changes of the past quarter century. Keddie provides insightful commentary on the Iran-Iraq war, the Persian Gulf War, and the effects of 9/11 and Iran's strategic relationship with the US. She also discusses developments in education, health care, the arts and the role of women.

'Iran Modern' offers a timely exploration of the cultural diversity and production of avant-garde art in Iran after World War II and up to the revolution, from 1950 through to 1979.

A masterfully researched and compelling history of Iran from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first

The election of Mohammad Khatami as President, the prospect of renewed dialogue between Tehran and Washington, and the display of popular rejoicing that greeted the nation's football team's qualification for the 1998 World Cup have shed light on aspects of everyday life in post-revolutionary Iran which have often been overlooked in the West. Through the Iranian example, this text reviews the debate not merely about political Islam, but also about democratic transition and its relation to social change.

Today’s Iran is rarely out of the headlines. Labelled by George W Bush as a part of his ‘axis of evil’ and perceived as a real nuclear threat by some, Iran is increasingly seen as an enemy of the West. And yet for many Iran remains shrouded in mystery and incomprehensible to Western analysis. Modern Iran offers a comprehensive analysis and explanation of political, social and economic developments in Iran during the 20th century. Since it first published in 2003 Modern Iran has become a staple for students and lecturers wishing to gain a clear understand of the history of this strategically important Middle Eastern Country. The new edition will bring us up to dateand will include: an analysis of the successes and failures of the Khatami Presidency; an examination of the effect of 9/11; the rise of the Reform Movement and the efforts to promote Islamic Democracy; the resistance to democratisation among the hardline elites.

How deadly cholera pandemics transformed modern Iran. Pandemic cholera reached Iran for the first of many times in 1821, assisted by Britain's territorial expansion and growing commercial pursuits. The revival of Iran's trade arteries after six decades of intermittent civil war, fractured rule, and isolation allowed the epidemic to spread inland and assume national proportions. In A Modern Contagion, Amir A. Afkhami argues that the disease had a profound influence on the development of modern Iran, steering the country's social, economic, and political currents. Drawing on archival documents from Iranian, European, and American sources, Afkhami provides a comprehensive overview of pandemic cholera in Iran from the early nineteenth century to the First World War. Linking the intensity of Iran's cholera outbreaks to the country's particular sociobiological vulnerabilities, he demonstrates that local, national, and international forces in Iran helped structure the region's susceptibility to the epidemics. He also explains how Iran's cholera outbreaks drove the adoption of new paradigms in medicine, helped transform Iranian views of government, and caused enduring institutional changes during a critical period in the country's modern development. Cholera played an important role in Iran's globalization and diplomacy, influencing everything from military engagements and boundary negotiations to Russia and Britain's imperial rivalry in the Middle East. Remedying an important deficit in the historiography of medicine, public health, and the Middle East, A Modern Contagion increases our understanding of ongoing sociopolitical challenges in Iran and the rest of the Islamic world.

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.