While animal welfare is a growing global concern, there has been very little research into how it is understood in Iran. Cultural, religious, and legal factors influence attitudes and practices in ways not addressed by existing research. This study provides culturally grounded insights for improvement of animal welfare in Iran. Utilising a validated survey tool, we investigated the attitudes of Iranians toward the welfare of farmed, companion, and wild animals. A total of 325 responses were collected. The findings indicate that animal welfare is considered important to Iranians, with the majority expressing interest in improving the welfare practices. Despite varying degrees of familiarity with different animal species, there was a consensus on the importance of enacting laws to protect animal welfare. Most participants agreed that chickens feel pain (92.9%) and emotions (79%), whereas fewer attributed these capacities to fish, with 63.6% acknowledging pain and 59.5% acknowledging emotions. Furthermore, most of the participants agreed that animals should not endure pain in the slaughter process (97.8% agreement). While the majority of participants agreed that pre-slaughter stunning was better for the animals (78.7%), only 51.7% agreed that they would prefer to eat meat from animals that had been stunned; reflecting the traditionally held views regarding the role of stunning in Halal meat production. The results of the current study support previous findings suggesting that concern for animals may be a universal human inclination, although, in Iran, attitudes towards specific species and agricultural practices are also shaped by religious perspectives.

Following the 2020 Karabakh War, the emerging geopolitical realities compelled Iran to recalibrate its South Caucasus policy, prompting a shift away from its longstanding posture of neutrality. Despite the potential for Tehran to engage in cooperation through proposed regionalist projects by other actors, a significant shift towards regionalism in Iran’s approach to the South Caucasus remains elusive. This article delves into two primary sets of factors to understand the reasons behind this absence of regionalism in Iran’s foreign policy towards the South Caucasus. The first set encompasses general approaches in Iran’s foreign policy and the impact of domestic political dynamics on their development. It discusses Iran’s perceived impossibility of aligning with the South Caucasus states, the absence of a robust neighborhood policy, and Iran’s strategic isolation in the region, attributed to its unique political system and the ideological stance of its ruling elite. The second set examines external dynamics, including constant international pressure on the Islamic Republic, Iran’s deep-seated ideological and security attachment to the Arab Middle East, and the fluctuating nature of Tehran’s relations with the West. Collectively, these factors significantly limit Iran’s capacity to craft a coherent strategy for regional integration in the South Caucasus.

What happens when states’ gender identity is endangered? How may a state actor’s gender identity be conceived of and (de)stabilised in the first place? What are the ontological effects of such disruptions? And how do states respond to ruptures in their gender identities or selves? Despite growing attention to gendered narratives in ontological security studies (OSS), the extant scholarship has engaged with gender issues more within states and societies than between them in making sense of state identity and behaviour in international relations. Building upon the existing literature and the theoretical works of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, this article attempts to contribute towards theorising gender more systematically into OSS by demonstrating how it constitutes collective subjectivities and orders imagined state selves in relation to others. Introducing the concept of ontological dislocation, it adopts a non-essentialist performative view of statehood as well as of gender and investigates how states pursue ontological security through gendering themselves and others and what ensues when critical facets of these gendered selves are distorted and disrupted. To illustrate the theorisation empirically, the research focuses on the gender dynamics of Iran’s revolutionary identity and nuclear behaviour to show how destabilisation of gender identity can cause ontological dislocation and lead to a restless scramble to relocate the self.

This article examines diasporic Iranian responses to protests sparked by the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini in September 2022. While Amini’s death galvanized widespread dissent inside Iran, it also spurred diasporic Iranian solidarity, often expressed through the call to “be the voice” of Iranian protestors. I analyze two key practices of diasporic narration: first, framing the Woman, Life, Freedom protests as a “revolution” in social media discourse; and second, the circulation of nostalgic video montages idealizing pre-1979 Iran as a lost era of political freedom. Together, these practices reveal how diasporic narratives may dilute protest demands by fitting them into revisionist frameworks. The conclusion reflects on both the potential and limits of diaspora narration in shaping political memory and understanding.

This article analyzes the diasporic dimensions of the 2022 Jina Revolutionary Momentum and its transnational resonance in Berlin, where more than 80,000 protestors gathered in solidarity with events in Iran. It argues that the momentum is best understood not as a continuation of previous movements but as a revolutionary rupture that generates new horizons of possibility through the politics of care, contrasting fear as the regime’s dominant affective frame. Drawing on affect theory, the article explores how the revolutionary imaginary transformed both the Iranian diaspora and indirectly Berlin itself into sites of revolutionary performance. By situating the Iranian diasporic activism in the city’s longer history as a node for exiled revolutionary activity, the analysis highlights how diasporic activism influenced the national imaginary, fostered transnational solidarities, and reshaped the meaning of Kharej (abroad) from one of exclusion to one of affection within a broader revolutionary geography.

The Iranian economy under the Islamic Republic of Iran has experienced 9 exchange rate shocks since the 1979 revolution. In particular, the shocks intensified with the sanctions on Iran in 2011. Many econometric tests have identified the effects of shocks, but the institutional sources of these shocks are underexplored. The contribution of this paper demonstrates that the Iranian macroeconomic dynamics are shaped by institutional factors. Anfal, the exclusive property of res nullius by the supreme jurisconsult, and the Shiite political capitalism deriving from it, foster parallel institutions, specifically parallel public treasuries, and speculative (hoarding) behaviour among agents, which in turn cause recurring exchange rate crises. Different economic policies of fundamentalists and reformists in the Islamic Republic of Iran are critically assessed, and the importance of constitutional elimination of the religious public finance (Anfal) and the creation of a unified secular public finance system is discussed.

This article investigates the artistic milieu of the Qajar dynasty through a critical analysis of the distinctive and sophisticated style of Mahmud Khan Malek al-Shuʿarā (1813–93), contextualizing his work alongside that of his contemporaries, with particular emphasis on Kamal al-Mulk (1859–1940), the most renowned painter of the period. Through close analysis of selected paintings, this study reveals the layered complexity of Mahmud Khan’s visual language and underscores the broader interplay between Qajar art and European artistic traditions. Although this inquiry does not seek to provide a reading of modern Iranian art, it contends that Mahmud Khan’s oeuvre warrants serious critical attention—especially within non–Persian language scholarship—as a pivotal yet overlooked juncture in Iranian art history and a missed opportunity for articulating a meaningful continuum between Iran’s classical aesthetic heritage and its modern visual expression.

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.