Books on the topic 'Iranian Actor'

A comprehensive exploration of postrevolution Iranian foreign policy analyzes the country's relations with key nations and regions and the impact of both Iran's domestic situation and the developing global system. Iran's Foreign Policy in the Post-Soviet Era: Resisting the New International Order provides the first truly comprehensive, in-depth survey of Iranian foreign policy, issue by issue and country by country, since the Islamic Revolution. To help readers understand both the what and the why of Iran's role in the world and formulate useful responses to that role, the author provides a detailed analysis of Iranian foreign policy in all its dimensions. The first part of the book places Iranian actions, particularly its relations with the United States and other key players, within the context of the emerging international system, while also showing how domestic developments impact foreign policy. The second part surveys Iranian relations with specific actors, notably the United States and Russia, and with key regions, including Europe, Central Asia, the Arab world, Latin America, and Africa. Providing an antidote to existing preconceptions, this incisive analysis lays an analytically sound basis for shaping policies toward Iran—policies with potentially high payoff in terms of regional security and stability.

This chapter discusses how the breakdown of the Iraqi regime in 2003 led to religious insurgencies in Iraq. Sunni Islamists and jihadists were given the space and opportunity to organize in a way that would have been unthinkable prior to 2003. Within the Shi’i community, Islamists from the Sadrist trend in Iraq, and Iranian backed religious actors, emerged in southern Iraq and in Baghdad. Over the previous decade, religious institutions had begun to play important roles in education, politics, and security. They continued playing this role post-2003; but because the authoritarian controls of the former regime no longer existed, these institutions were often controlled by extremist and sectarian actors. The result was insurgencies launched by the Sadrists, Sunni Islamists, al-Qaida, and eventually the Islamic State.

Iran's criminal courts are notorious for meting out severe sentences—according to Amnesty International, the country has the world's highest rate of capital punishment per capita. Less known to outside observers, however, is the Iranian criminal code's recognition of forgiveness, where victims of violent crimes, or the families of murder victims, can request the state to forgo punishing the criminal. This book shows that in the Iranian justice system, forbearance is as much a right of victims as retribution. Drawing on extended interviews and first-hand observations of more than eighty murder trials, the book explores why some families of victims forgive perpetrators and how a wide array of individuals contribute to the fraught business of negotiating reconciliation. Based on Qur'anic principles, Iran's criminal codes encourage mercy and compel judicial officials to help parties reach a settlement. As no formal regulations exist to guide those involved, an informal cottage industry has grown around forgiveness advocacy. Interested parties—including attorneys, judges, social workers, the families of victims and perpetrators, and even performing artists—intervene in cases, drawing from such sources as scripture, ritual, and art to stir feelings of forgiveness. These actors forge new and sometimes conflicting strategies to secure forbearance, and some aim to reform social attitudes and laws on capital punishment. The book examines how an Islamic victim-centered approach to justice sheds light on the conditions of mercy.

This chapter examines how the Arab Spring was gradually sectarianized, leading to the emergence of more rigid and puritanical sect-based identities and inter-communal conflicts across the Middle East, extending even further outside of the region and across the Muslim-majority world. Using the social movement theory concept of “framing,” it considers how various political and armed actors involved in the Syrian civil war and the conflict in Iraq, including actors such as the Iranian government, Hizbullah, Sunni and Salafi actors in the Arab Gulf states, and Sunni rebel and other militant jihadi organizations such as Jabhat al-Nusra/Jabhat Fath al-Sham, Islamic State, Jaysh al-Islam, and Ahrar al-Sham, have drawn on competing historical narratives and memory in combination with contemporary events to produce a thoroughly modern but also selectively “historicized” social mobilization narrative meant to encourage activism from their target audiences. The ways in which clashing historical memory and narratives are deployed in regional conflicts, which constitutes a form of re-fighting the past in the present, are analyzed. Specific historical references, such as the invocation of Shi‘i legendary heroes of Karbala such as Abu al-Fadl al-Abbas, which are deployed as rhetorical weapons in geopolitical contests over power and political dominance, are also considered.

This chapter shows how identity contestation theory extends to state and non-state actors outside of Turkey, aiding understanding of how identity struggles spill over into foreign policy. It focuses on (1) the Israeli Likud Party’s efforts to shore up hardline, anti-Iran support in the US Congress; (2) India’s foreign policy shifts under the Hindu nationalist BJP; (3) Iranian moderates’ use of the nuclear deal as Western engagement to advance their position back home; and (4) anti-apartheid activists’ normative suasion tactics to force the United States to discontinue support of South Africa’s apartheid regime. The chapter demonstrates how these groups can also use foreign policy as an arena via institutions, diaspora groups, and transnational civil society to circumvent identity-based obstacles back home. These cases include the ongoing diplomacy of Turkey’s Kurdish movement with EU institutions and the Gülen movement’s efforts to spread Turkish Calvinism through its vast institutional network abroad.

This book explains the foreign policy decisions of Iranian leaders, as well as the foreign policy decisions of its neighbors and major world powers. Iran is not treated primarily as a problem to be dealt with by the United States and its friends. There is an effort to understand not only the concerns and policies of the United States and its allies, but also to understand Iranian concerns and policy. Thus, this book is better able than many others to explain the actions, reactions, and interactions of all the relevant actors and to explore the prospects for future war or peace. Mattair provides a comprehensive analysis of Iran's relations with its neighbors and major world powers. He begins with a review of Iran's foreign relations from the time of Iran's founding in the 5th century B.C. through the Islamic era beginning in the mid-600's A.D., and the native dynasties that ruled in more recent centuries as Iran faced challenges from foreign powers such as the Ottoman Empire and Western colonial empires. The rule of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, from 1941 until 1979, is analyzed in detail, covering his efforts to deter aggression by the Soviet Union, forge an alliance with the United States, assert Iran's power in the Persian Gulf, and exercise Iran's economic power, particularly through its oil wealth. The bulk of the book, however, focuses on the foreign relations of the Islamic Republic of Iran since 1979, during the time in which Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors have ruled. The reasons for Iran's early revolutionary activism, its antagonism toward the United States and Israel, and its war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988, are carefully examined. The reasons for international efforts to contain Iran, particularly efforts by the United States, are also analyzed. Iran's more pragmatic policies are explained, as well, including its close relations with Russia and China, its efforts to repair relations with Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states of the Gulf, its cooperation with U.S. efforts to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, and its offer of comprehensive negotiations with the United States in May 2003. Finally, Mattair analyzes the current global debate about whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military action are appropriate responses to Iran's nuclear programs, its role in Iraq and the Persian Gulf, and its resistance to Israel.