This article examines the food culture of the Iranian diaspora in the United States to emphasize how politics intruded on the lives of Iranians (rather than the ways in which Iranians engaged in political activism). The immigrant experience is defined by an effort to assimilate, dissimulate, and exert one's unique character onto the landscape of a host society. In the United States, Iranians struggled with competing impulses, which presented unique challenges in the food industry. In an effort to formulate and offer an “authentic” dining experience against the backdrop of an alternatively hostile and orientalizing Anglo-American clientele, Iranians nimbly accommodated both the political pressures from Iran and the transforming demographics of their restaurant patrons and cookbook readers.

How do secular and religious national role conceptions (NRCs) influence interstate rivalry? To explore this, we examine the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia, two theocratic states. Drawing on scholarship that integrates power politics and religion, we examine how instrumental motivations shape religion-based policymaking. Using semantic network and regression analyses on data from eight official Twitter/X accounts of Iranian and Saudi foreign policy officials (2015–2021), we find that both states’ officials strategically use secular and religious NRCs in response to foreign policy roles adopted by their rival. Our findings underscore the coexistence of these NRCs and their selective application in managing rivalry. Methodologically, the study contributes to foreign policy analysis research by employing quantitative semantic analysis of social media data. It also offers a novel lens for understanding Iran-Saudi competition and the broader intersection of religion and foreign policy.

Through the paradigmatic case of post-revolutionary Iran, this article argues critiques of power-laden human rights politics epitomised by Makau Mutua’s 2001 ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviors Metaphor of Human Rights’ when combined with states’ anti-imperialist victim branding, and uncritical anti-imperialist solidarities give rise to a reactionary politics I call the ‘Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviours metaphor of human rights’. Here, anti-imperialist-branding states and their constructions of culture are recast as victims, and the state is treated as synonymous with the population it rules. Western imperialism, the human rights corpus, and those deploying human rights conceived of as extensions of Western imperialism are recast as the savages. Finally, leftist thinkers, anti-imperialist thought, and the resisting victim state and its constructions of Indigenous culture become the saviors. This politics eclipses local populations’ agency and lived experiences by (1) diminishing the moral weight of both the state’s transgressions and the human rights paradigm, (2) interrupting a sustained focus on the anti-imperialist-branding state’s acts of subjugation, (3) defining non-Western populations through essentialist notions of their culture as traditional saviourism does (but valorising rather than vilifying it), and (4) adhering to notions of moral complexity which deny or obscure the elements of moral clarity encompassed.

This article centers on tsarist Russian officials’ understandings of and approaches to the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905–11). Although these officials relied on fragmental information and reflected internal discoordination in their dealings with Iran over the course of the revolution, a diachronic shift marked the policies they formulated in response. Although many of them attempted to navigate the Constitutional Revolution’s complexity in its early phases, they tended toward the use of force as unrest continued, culminating in the Russian invasion of northern Iran in December 1911. Uncritically confident in their exercise of power, Russian officials proceeded without considering alternative courses of action or the potential costs of military engagement in the revolution’s final stages. This heavy-handedness reflected continuity with the tsarist government’s crackdowns on socialists in the Caucasus after the Russian Revolution of 1905, and presaged its repressive, self-defeating responses to uprisings across the Russian Empire from 1912 to 1917.

1911 to 1935 was a chaotic, yet foundational, period in the transformation of the police force in Tehran and Iran more broadly. The nationalization of modern Iranian policing can be traced back to this time period. This article explores the role of nationalism and anti-imperialism on policing, how the structure and process of policing underwent transformation, including how police were recruited, trained, and deployed. Localized and decentralized policing was slowly abandoned in favor of an integrated national force, with policing through mediation being replaced with the exercise of power in a top-down and center to periphery manner. Education of police officers also underwent transformation, as new strategies were pursued to create a modern nationalist Iranian police force.

This article examines the challenges of subject formation within state-building efforts by analyzing Keyhān-e Bachcheh-hā (Children’s Universe), a widely circulated Iranian children’s magazine during the post-revolutionary period. Through analyzing the magazine’s content from 1979 to 1989, when the Islamic Republic was consolidating its power and building institutions, this study reveals how the publication served as a key informal education platform, attempting to create politically conscious yet ideologically compliant young citizens. While the magazine aimed to cultivate revolutionary consciousness through anti-imperialist rhetoric and Islamic values, it simultaneously imposed rigid behavioral and ideological boundaries to produce what I term “docile revolutionary children.” The research demonstrates how political themes permeated every aspect of the magazine—from stories and poems to puzzles and contests—transforming it from an entertainment platform into a vehicle for political socialization. Through examination of revolutionary and wartime discourses, gender representation, and the promotion of social humility, this study argues that Keyhān-e Bachcheh-hā embodied a fundamental tension in the state’s vision of ideal citizenship: the simultaneous demand for revolutionary agency and absolute submission to clerical authority. This research contributes to our understanding of how post-revolutionary states employ cultural institutions to shape young citizens and the inherent contradictions in such efforts at political socialization.

This essay considers the “great” status of Shah ‘Abbās I, the most consequential Safavid ruler, by comparing European descriptions to his portrayal in the Persian-language sources. While both depict him as energetic, resolute, and unadorned in attire and demeanor, European sources present him primarily as an empire builder while Persian-language works focus on his role as a warrior on horseback, fighting external enemies and putting down domestic revolts. Neither accounts ignore the violence that came with absolute power, but while Europeans viewed such violence as an unfortunate byproduct of power, Persian chronicles celebrate ‘Abbās as a ghāzi warrior, merciless in his efforts to root out heretics and unbelievers. The surviving image of the shah as a “great” ruler was first reported by European visitors and is primarily a composite of the way they depicted him – as a Renaissance prince and determined empire builder who remained close to his subjects and their concerns.

This article challenges the dominant narrative of AI in Iran as a symbol of national success and technological sovereignty by examining its materiality. The Iranian government often underscores AI’s role in countering sanctions and securing national interests. However, this national narrative overlooks the complex realities of AI’s implementation. By examining the material endpoints of AI – such as data centers, supercomputers, and digital labor – this article reveals a fragmented vision of AI, one that is entangled with global neoliberal practices. The analysis uncovers the sociopolitical and economic forces shaping AI in Iran, arguing that it reflects both the nation’s ambitions and its vulnerabilities, offering a nuanced perspective on AI and its role in contemporary Iranian society.

Semiotic indeterminacy describes the basic observation that signs are always unstable and open to interpretation. As such, semiotic indeterminacy can become a resource for the strategic pursuit and exploitation of political goals. In this article, I examine the role and multiple dimensions of semiotic indeterminacy in nuclear nonproliferation, the global governance project to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Taking as an illustrative example the controversy around the nuclear program of the Islamic Republic of Iran, I demonstrate that when the transparency practices implemented to close down on the semiotic indeterminacy of nuclear materials fail, nuclear verification turns from a techno-rational project into a moral-evaluative one with the aim of uncovering the hidden intentions of a state. This transduction of one semiotic register into another derives from transparency’s dual tradition as both a rationalizing imperative as well as a moralized norm of sincerity. Attending to the semiotic dimensions of liberal forms of governance offers a new perspective on its contradictions.

By examining the history of the Ahvāz pipe mill in the 1960s and 1970s, this article investigates the manner in which competing understandings of Iran's modernizing trajectory among Pahlavi officials were bound up with the material aspects of steel, such as weight, volume, and form. The mill was built to provide pipe for the First Iran Gas Trunkline, a sprawling system intended to gather, refine, and transport natural gas to Iranian cities and the Soviet Caucasus. Officials overseeing the project debated whether the mill's design should prioritize serving the pipeline project or, more ambitiously, establish a new pipe rolling industry able to serve domestic and regional markets. Argued in this article is the significance of attending to infrastructure and materiality in understanding Iran's twentieth-century history of developmentalism.