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This thesis aims to investigate US foreign policies in the post-9/11 world, focusing on the ways in which they affected the Iranian women's movement after Iran was included in the Axis of Evil in January 2002. The focus of the thesis draws on the Bush Administration's decision to use Muslim women's human rights as moral justifications for the War on Terror. The thesis argues that, despite the US commitment to Iranian women's human rights, Iranian women's movement advocates have found themselves in an even more challenging environment. Both the physical and discursive spaces for women's activism has been narrowed due to the increasing violence, deteriorating living conditions resulting from the US/Western sanctions and hardline nationalist-militaristic politics. Drawing mainly on postcolonial feminism, the thesis evaluates how artificially enacted gendered, racial and sexualised exclusions and borders contributed to this. The thesis contends that after 9/11, the Bush Administration's identity became hypermasculinised and this effectively led to the transnationalisation of violence that often materialises itself on the bodies of Feminine Others, which in this case was the Iranian Feminine Other. What further informed the Bush Administration's identity formation and policies was the anxious logic of orientalism. The thesis examines how this orientalist anxiety built and sustained much of the US post-9/11 (in)security imaginary. The thesis makes the argument that orientalist anxiety produced two orientalised bodies, that of the Dark Monster and the already mentioned Feminine Other. This specific framework allows us to complicate the US conceptualisation of the Self as disconnected and unrelated to the Other and how the Self justifies the Other's disciplining and policing via this disconnectedness. The thesis calls for a political vision that engages with difference, alternatives and real life experiences and eventually recognises everyone's right to security.

This thesis examines the evolution of US-Iranian relations between 1961 and 1972 as Washington and Tehran engaged in a contest over modernization. During this period the United States adopted a series of policies that helped to bolster the Shah’s regime by prioritising the need for stability above considerations of economic and political development. Despite the different views of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon about the Shah, there existed remarkable continuity in each of their methods and objectives regarding Iran. While many US officials under each of these presidents considered modernization theory an important concept for understanding the trajectory of history and progress in the developing world, its actual impact on US policy was limited. By focusing their attention on stability, US officials sought to maintain a close relationship with the Shah, who adeptly manipulated American fears of Soviet encroachment to extract concessions regarding military sales and credit. Moreover, as the Shah’s independence from American guidance increased and US influence over Tehran decreased commensurately during the 1960s, the influence of modernization theory in US policy also diminished. This thesis argues that, from the very beginning of the 1960s, this declining influence - of Washington over Tehran and modernization in US policy - led to the United States coming to accept and ultimately embrace the Shah's vision of modernity for Iran.

The overall contribution of this thesis is to develop a conceptualisation of empathy for the security dilemma, and to empirically explore this conceptualisation through a counterfactual case study of US foreign policy towards Iran, 2001-2010. It achieves this in three stages. First, it shows how the concept of empathy has long been implicitly central to security dilemma theorising. In particular, it demonstrates that security dilemma theorists have drawn upon implicit and unspecified notions of empathy in order to answer the crucial question of how security dilemma dynamics between adversaries can be overcome. Second, it addresses this omission by developing a conceptualisation of empathy that speaks to the unique context of the security dilemma. In mediating between different understandings of empathy across a number of literatures, the thesis proposes a conceptualisation that emphasises the importance of reflexivity and notions of difference. And third, it uses an innovative counterfactual methodology to empirically map the dynamics of empathy onto US foreign policy towards Iran. In doing so the thesis shows how empathy can promote cooperation between adversaries in some instances, but can be inhibited by broader contextual factors in others.

This thesis argues that the debate over the relationship between Theory and political practice has reached a dead-end in IR. Most scholars taking part in this debate based their claims on meta-theoretical assumptions, which explains the inability to settle the debate. This logic not only discouraged empirical enquiries, but also undermined reflexivity. Instead, this thesis calls for the translation of these meta-theoretical assumptions into a methodology and into methods to produce empirical knowledge by which to explore the relationships between Theory and political practice on specific issues. To this end, the thesis investigates relationships between American IR academic discourse and senior officials discourse and their effects on US foreign policy towards Iran between 1998 and 2014. The thesis provides a typology to map and to assess the gaps in the debate over the relationship between Theory and political practice in IR. This typology is composed of four ideal-types: Theory to political practice, Theory vs. political practice, Theory as political practice and practice to political practice. The thesis also translates meta-theoretical assumptions drawn from Wittgenstein and Foucault into a methodology to generate empirical knowledge on specific relationships between Theory and political practice. This methodology enables to trace an evolving system of thoughts expressed in the Theory and political practice of the Iranian nuclear crisis and to expose what this system does to US society and foreign policy. Three elements compose this system: the certainty of democratic teleology, the certainty of uncertainty and the certainty of smart power. The thesis claims that IR knowledge production on Iran mostly acted as symbolic knowledge morphing uncertainties about Iran into certainties for US governmental power. Only then could senior officials produce a judgement against Iran and implement disciplinary measures in the form of sanctions, covert actions, and military threats.