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This project explores the power dynamics within the Iranian political system, asking what accounts for the rise and fall of a president's power relative to the other dominant formal and informal institutions in Iran. Comparing perspectives that focus on charisma, ideology and political bargaining, I argue that the relative power of the president is contingent on a variety of institutional and behavioural factors which define his ability to bargain within an institutional structure of overlapping spheres of control. Within this study, I challenge the traditional emphasis on process as a point of departure for analyses, and stress the need for a change in orientation to effect or output. Finally, I argue that the extensive factionalism within Iranian politics defines the political system and is integral to the cost-benefit calculations of various actors within the institutional matrix of the state.

No description available.

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.

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