This thesis expands the discussion on Iranian national identity into the period of Khatami’s presidency. Within the theoretical and methodological framework of discourse analysis this thesis contends that the multiple constructions of Iranian national identity, which coexist and compete with each other, can be better understood as discourses. The detailed analysis of five discourses of national identity illustrates a complex set of relationships based on the meanings attached to Iran’s Islamic and pre-Islamic identities and how the West is dealt with in the construction of national identity. The first discourse addressed is the Islamist discourse of national identity, which prioritises Iran’s Islamic culture. At the opposite end of the spectrum the Iranist discourse, which is based on the prioritisation of Iran’s pre-Islamic culture, is deconstructed. It is contended that this represents a new indigenous Iranism that is based on a rediscovery of Sasanian Iran as opposed to Achaemenid Iran. Khatami’s discourse is presented as an attempt at a dialogue between Islamism and Iranism. It is argued that the Khatami period is unique in terms of the articulation of national identity because Khatami has combined for the first time ideas, which together form the Islamist-Iranian discourse of national identity, as an official state discourse. These are the combination of Islamic and pre-Islamic culture, the notion of ‘dialogue among civilisations’ and the idea of Islamic democracy. While these three discourses are based on the politicisation of culture, two additional discourses are presented that reject this politicisation. The first is a discourse of civic Iranian national identity and the second is a discourse of cosmopolitan Iranian national identity. It is contended that Khatami and his Islamist-Iranian discourse have allowed the more open articulation, since the establishment of the Islamic Republic, of these constructions of Iranian national identity.

This dissertation opens a multimedia archive of contemporary Iranian films, documentaries, newspaper articles, and political philosophies in order to rethink the complicated relationship between cinema and the Reformist Movement in Iran. The existing scholarship has largely reduced interactions between these institutions to modes of mutual support, noting Mohammad Khatami’s backing of the film industry during his tenure as Minister of Islamic Culture and Guidance (1982-1992) and his liberal cultural policies as president (1997-2005). However, the research presented in this dissertation indicates that Iranian cinema and the Reformist Movement crucially informed one another, and the dynamics of their exchange functioned on an ideological level. More than just benefiting from the Reformist Movement, certain films and filmmakers helped to shape and articulate its emerging political discourse. At the same time, the dialogue between Khatami’s Reformist Movement and Iranian cinema have generated a unique set of aesthetic qualities that includes a revival of mystic love, the use of Tehran as a metaphoric site of social and structural reformation, and reconfigurations of perceptions of time. I examine films that were released during Khatami’s tenure as Minister of Islamic Culture and Guidance, his presidential campaign and presidency in order to interrogate the relationship between film and reform and to theorize the visual language that has emerged to enunciate this relationship. I also consider a film and a music video released two years after Khatami’s presidency ended. They did not benefit directly from his cultural liberalism but nevertheless participate in central reformist debates. Their experimentation with form suggests that the reformist aesthetic possesses a momentum that permits it to develop and transform without explicit contact with the political movement that inspired it. I argue, therefore, that the Reformist Movement marked a change on the political landscape at the same time that it signaled a new trend in the country’s cinematic history. I connect innovations in film to current trends in new media and youth culture and propose a new reformist model for the study of cultural productivity in contemporary Iran, one that moves past the reductive category of “post-Revolution.” / text

The objective of this thesis is to analyze the Khatami Period of 1997-2005 in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Reform Movement that brought Khatami to the presidency and the grounds of the incongruity between the discourse and the outcomes of the movement is examined. The reasons of this incongruity are the focus of this study. The structure of the thesis is as follows: In the first chapter, a brief summary of the history of democracy in Iran is examined, since in Iran without a historical perspective, it is hard to understand the developments of the era. In the second chapter, the state structure and political factions in the Islamic Republic of Iran are described by emphasizing the power centers and struggle between them. The third chapter explains, the social origins and the discourse of the reform movement. Lastly, in the fourth chapter, the Khatami period of 1997-2005 is analyzed. The period is studied in terms of power conflicts among the ruling elites and its reflection on the everyday life of the layman. Economic developments and street politics of the era are also examined in this chapter. International developments of the era are also studied with respect to their impacts on domestic politics.

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

Since the early days of 1979, the Islamic Revolution of Iran has been seen as a phenomenon unique in history, one which must be viewed as somehow separate from other political Islamic movements in the 20th century. In chapter 1, this thesis problematizes this interpretation of the Revolution by analyzing it through the lens of an earlier ideological movement, pan-Islamism, and applying methods from the study of conceptual history to draw linkages between this movement and the Islamic Revolution, rooting it more deeply in the region’s political and intellectual history, and casting light on the poorly-understood pan-Islamic aspects of Iran’s Revolutionary ideology. In chapter 2, it applies methodological innovations from the digital humanities, more specifically corpus linguistics, in carrying out a series of five case studies to examine the transformation of Iranian ideology over time, by analyzing a set of five text corpora comprised of individual leaders’ writings and speeches. It further illustrates how theoretical advances in discourse analysis and history seem to be moving towards the same point, and how the application of corpus linguistic methods advances these bodies of theory. Chapters 3 through 7 comprise the case studies, which are, in order: Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, the two Supreme Leaders; Ali Akbar Hashemi Rasfanjani, Mohammad Khatami, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the three Presidents since 1989. These chapters illustrate through analysis of the textual data how each political leader has adapted the received political discourse to the exigencies of their times, and how pan-Islamism itself has remained a consistent, albeit dynamic, linking thread running through the period 1979-2009. By studying pan-Islamism in the Iranian context, we can explain several features of Iranian political discourse which otherwise seem incomprehensible, and better situate the Islamic Republic within the political and discursive transformations taking place at the regional level of the Middle East, and the global level of the Muslim umma.

The thesis "Attempt at Democratic Transition in Iran 1997-2000" analyzes the developement of restricted liberalization and democratization, which was started in Iran in Spring 1997 by election of reformist presidential candidate Muhammad Khatami into office. The essay looks on theese events as a result of the longer cultural change which occured in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and as a consequence of the cleavages which split the Iranian political space into several different streams. The thesis uses a theoretical perspective based on the idea that Iran, in the course of 20th century, constantly evolved in the form of modern national state for which the Islamic revolution was but a regime change, which replaced one authoritarianism for another with a different ideology. Based on this perspective the events after the Khatami election are analyzed in terms of the transitologic theory through which the essay examines the specific dynamcis of political contest between the softliners who push for a democratization of the regime and the hardliners who take pains to preserve the authoritarian practice based on the theory of "The Rule of the Jurisconsult" articulated first by the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini.

This study examines the decision making process in Washington which led to the current non-existence of political and economic relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States. The study examines the U.S.-Iran relationship at three levels-of-analysis: the individual, state, and system levels. From a geopolitical perspective, Iran and the United States have often been natural allies that pursued similar policy goals. After 9/11, the U.S. entered Afghanistan and Iraq which further necessitated the reengagement of Tehran. Iranian regional clout would play a vital role in stabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan and without Iran's assistance; peace will not likely be realized in those states. Amongst the most compelling reasons for Washington to engage in meaningful dialogue with Tehran are: terrorism, the war on drugs, the Iranian sponsorship of militant groups, and Tehran's pursuit of a nuclear program. The study concludes that rapprochement should occur in two phases. The first being cooperation in areas of mutual concern such as the war on drugs. The second phase promoting confidence building methods, which would lead to a strategic partnership based on mutual interests.

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / Throughout history, threats emerging from Iran's frontiers have significantly influenced its security policies towards Iraq. Given Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, Iran's security environment has changed a great deal. Does Iran have a strategy for post-Saddam Iraq and, if so, what is it? With few exceptions, Kenneth Waltz's Realpolitik and balance-of-power theories have guided Iran's security policy decisions. The combined effects of Iran's formative history, individual and institutional agendas, and national interests form the foundation for a Realpolitik strategy aimed at preventing a resurgent "anti-Teheran" government in Iraq. Pragmatism, consensus, influence, and competition appear to be the watchwords for an assertive strategy built upon military prudence and cross-border, multi-disciplined engagement. Iran is putting its internal political and economic house in order so as to achieve greater effectiveness in the pursuit of its national interests vis-a-vis Iraq and the United States. While an alliance is unlikely, there is alignment with the U.S.-led coalition's strategic interests in Iraq. / Major, United States Marine Corps