This thesis is a study of the attempts made in the last four decades of Naser ad-Din shah's reign to reform the government and the administration in Persia.

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In 1979, the socio-­political landscape of Iran was transformed beyond recognition. After years of conflict between the Shah and a myriad of political opposition groups, it seemed that the people had indeed triumphed over an authoritarian monarch. As is now widely known, their short lived victory transformed into a systematic programme of terror that turned back on and attacked those that the Islamic Republic deemed contrary to its values. The ‘bloody decade' of the 1980s saw thousands of executions and disappearances under the cloak of the war with neighbouring Iraq. The records of these massacres are still largely unreliable and/or incomplete. The programme of terror in question, that ensued and persists up to the present day, has instigated a sprawling transnational Diaspora with a familiar but rarely divulged public secret. My doctoral thesis comprises two main parts in relation to these events. They are connected by the running theme of alternative narratives of past violence, and a post-­traumatic political activism. This is an intimate ethnography that examines global processes (revolution, Diaspora, transnational activism) from the vantage point of local and particular histories of Lur, former Fadaiyan guerilla fighters in Oslo. In the second part of this work, these histories are located within the collective movement of the Iran Tribunal, a literal attempt to make secrets public and to bring together subjective experiences of violence into a truth-‐telling process. Opening up a new space for critical reflection, this study proposes an alternative lens of analysis of tumultuous historical processes. With regards to their actors, efforts are made to better understand how lives and narratives are ordered around the characteristic disorder of violence, fear and Diaspora itself, and how subjective traumas manifest into collective, and in this case transnational, movements. My ethnography of disordered and interrupted lives works to inform studies of such critical contemporary realities as well as to ethnographically introduce the Iranian Diasporas' public secret of violence for wider anthropological enquiry, and to contribute towards its critical analysis.

The advent of Ahmad Kasravi (1890--1946) and his Pakdini movement represents one of the most important developments in the history of socio-religious thought in Iran in the Pahlavi era (1925--1979). It was one of the greatest home-grown ideological challenges to Shi'ism and Shi'i clergy in the twentieth century. / The present thesis aims to analyze Kasravi's religious ideology. It examines first the historical factors that played a significant role in the development of Kasravi's socio-religious consciousness and his keen interest in religion. Secondly, it explores the intellectual contexts of his religious thought---its origins, the controversial nature of it, the original aspects of it, the reaction of the clergy and intellectuals of the time to it, and its significance and impact on the coming generations. Finally, the key concepts of Kasravi's socio-religious ideology and some major current misunderstandings of them are examined. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

This study investigates the causes of the Iranian revolution of 1978-79. To this end, the different theories of revolution are reviewed in Chapter One. Chapter Two provides a discussion of the historical background of the country and the role the clergy played in shaping its political development. Socioeconomic and political factors which contributed to the outbreak of this revolution are examined in the following two chapters. Finally, an attempt is made to draw some conclusions on whether existing theories of revolution can fully explain the Iranian upheaval of 1978-79 or not. For the preparation of this study United States government documents and Iranian and English language scholarly works were consulted.

Orientador: Omar Ribeiro Thomaz / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-06T11:57:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Cherem_YoussefAlvarenga_M.pdf: 1667068 bytes, checksum: 23d691189fa6ca5fdeeef14108da6208 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006 / Resumo: Durante os dois mandatos Mohammad Khatami como presidente da República Islâmica do Irã (1997-2001; 2001-2005), observou-se um debate intenso e violento na sociedade iraniana a respeito da concepção do espaço político e dos fundamentos da ação política. Uma parte essencial desse debate foi a participação dos estudantes numa incipiente (embora efêmera e limitada) abertura do espaço público. Mas essa política de reforma teve o resultado inesperado de trazer à tona as vozes de contestação da organização normativa autoritária do campo político, expondo as contradições constitutivas do sistema e seu funcionamento ambíguo, e ameaçando por um momento a dominação da elite política religiosa-revolucionária. Essa ameaça ocorreu porque os estudantes agiam segundo uma lógica republicana de igualdade jurídico-política e exigiam a instauração desse padrão, prometido por Khatami durante a campanha eleitoral. Em outras palavras, podemos perceber uma vontade de reformulação simbólico-institucional da divisão público-privado que regia as relações entre o estado e a sociedade do Irã desde o estabelecimento da República Islâmica. A participação de elementos anteriormente excluídos do espaço público e o fortalecimento da sociedade civil fizeram com que fossem contestados a estrutura de poder e o funcionamento enclausurado (privado) do sistema político iraniano, bem como regras não escritas da vida política iraniana. Assim, embora os estudantes tenham sido reprimidos, esse período de abertura relativa nos abre uma perspectiva frutífera para interpretar a pluralidade de concepções de governo, religião e sociedade presentes num país muçulmano, opondo-se a algumas visões do meio acadêmico que se destacam por uma leitura superficial e/ou unidimensional de fenômenos onde se entremeiam cultura e política / Abstract: Islam, legitimacy and political culture: the Iranian student movement in the Khatami government During his two terms as the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1997-2001; 2001- 2005), we have come to witness an intense and violent debate in Iranian society about the conception of the public space and the fundaments of political action. An essential element in this debate was the participation of the students in a fledgling (but ephemeral and limited) opening of the public space. But this policy of reform had the unexpected result of bringing into the open the dissenting voices against the normative, authoritarian framing of the public space, exposing the inherent contradictions of the system and its hazy functioning, and jeopardizing, even if for just one moment, the ascendancy of the religious revolutionary elites. The students¿ coming out in public was a threat because the students acted according to a republican logic of juridical and political equality and demanded the implementation, as promised by Khatami in his campaign of this pattern, and the abolition of the ¿unwritten rules¿ of Iranian political life. In other words, we can notice a will of symbolic and institutional reformulation of the separation between public and private spheres that ruled the relations between state and society in Iran since the establishment of the Islamic Republic. The participation of people who had been previously excluded from public space and the strengthening of civil society increased opposition to the power structure and the closed, private working of the political system. Thus, although the students have been repressed, this period of relative opening opens a promising path to interpret the plurality of conception of government, religion and society in a Muslim country ¿ an interpretation that engages critically some scholarly views of the interweaving of culture and politics that are remarkable for their shallow and/or one-dimensional reading of intrinsically multi-layered phenomena / Mestrado / Mestre em Antropologia Social

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The evolution of the Pasdaran over the past thirty years has brought the group further away from its original role as a protector of the revolution and closer to a parallel, if not competing, economic, political and social institution. In the last decade, conflict dominating the political landscape of the Islamic Republic of Iran has shifted from being defined primarily by the Reformists (Islamic Left) and the Conservatives (Islamic Right), to a multi-dimensional struggle between the Reformists, Conservatives, and Neo-Conservatives, represented by the IRGC and President Ahmadinejad. The IRGC‘s defiance against the authority of the clerics, evidenced by President Ahmadinejad‘s deteriorating relationship with the Supreme Leader, is an indication of a shift in the sources of influence in domestic and foreign policy making and the necessary attempts of the ruling regime to compensate for its loss of control. It appears that the IRGC may be in a position to seriously challenge the authority of the clerics; however, this research hypothesizes that as the organization has evolved parallel to the velayet-e faqih, it does not have the necessary autonomy or cohesion to effectively usurp the rule of the clerics. This study proposes that the competitive disunity that has propelled the growth of the IRGC over the past three decades is prohibitive of the collective consolidation of influence necessary to wrest authority from the clerical regime.

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Doctorat en sciences sociales, politiques et économiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished