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1. Sanctions and Postcolonial Statecraft in Iran: Resisting the Iran Libya Sanctions Act and Beyond

Author:
Andrew Thomas
Publication Date:
07-2024
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace
Institution:
Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research
Abstract:
Though economic sanctions are designed to weaken and isolate their target for the stated purpose of policy change, in the case of Iran they have often invigorated its desire to defy Western coercion and domination. Since the Islamic revolution this has led to multiple political standoffs, including notably during the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad administration and the post-nuclear deal standoff with the United States (US). Through sanctions, the West has often been unwilling to accept little less than a grand bargain on Iranian foreign policy, which has informed and contributed to a postcolonial narrative of resistance in the Iranian state. This narrative has served as an integral tool of Iranian statecraft in an effort to bolster the leadership’s legitimacy. By looking at elite discourse and Iranian government responses to the Iran Libya Sanctions Act during Ahmadinejad’s government and the Trump Administration’s Maximum Pressure campaign, this article highlights narratives of postcolonial resistance in Iran’s response to US sanctions, in an effort to explain why sanctions often push them further away from acquiescence to international norms.
Topic:
Post Colonialism, Sanctions, Iran, and Resistance
Political Geography:
Iran, Middle East, Libya, and United States of America

2. Urban Politics in the Middle East

Author:
Mona Harb, Marc Lynch, Jillian Schwedler, Gehad Abaza, and Munqeth Othman
Publication Date:
10-2023
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
Abstract:
Urban politics has received growing attention in the anthropology, sociology, and political science of the MENA region. In line with global trends, questions of scale, territory, flows and connectivities and materialities have come to the fore, with a wide range of creative and novel lines of inquiry connecting the global to the hyper-local and every scale in between. In February 2023, POMEPS partnered with the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut and The Policy Initiative think tank for a workshop in Beirut to bring together an interdisciplinary group of young scholars from across the region to explore questions of urban life, politics, and culture. The papers moved beyond more traditional political science topics such as municipal government, decentralization, clientelistic voting, protests, and clientelism. While those themes certainly operated in the background, the authors assembled in Beirut pushed to shift the lens towards multi-scalar ethnographic modes of inquiry, highlighting the materialities and relationalities of the hyper-local, examining sites and places which concentrate power dynamics.
Topic:
Economics, Migration, Politics, Race, Religion, Sectarianism, Culture, Syrian War, Mobility, Urban, Trade, Music, Transportation, Cities, Heritage, Resistance, Labor Market, Domestic Work, and Urbicide
Political Geography:
Iraq, Iran, Middle East, Tehran, Baghdad, Algeria, North Africa, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Beirut, Cairo, Tunis, and Aqaba

3. Resistance and Counter-Memories in Persian Black Metal

Author:
Pasqualina Eckerstrom
Publication Date:
03-2023
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Harvard Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
Sina Winter, a pioneer of Iranian black metal, was forced to leave Iran because of his music. As the leader of the band From the Vastland, Sina has produced music celebrating the pre-Islamic heritage and Zoroastrian tales. After performing at the Inferno Music Festival in Oslo in 2013 and appearing in the documentary Blackhearts (2017), he was forced to relocate. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), targeted him as a result of his media exposure. In Iran, several artists are persecuted due to their music. In the West, black metal bands tend to be influenced by ancient legends and traditions, whereas in religious authoritarian countries, such practices are often harshly punished. In Iran, black metal is generally considered to be blasphemous. In addition, the lyrical content featured in Sina’s work is controversial, as he celebrates a heritage that the Islamic Republic wishes to eradicate from the collective consciousness. This paper presents some results of my most recent studies looking at how black metal artists in Iran use their art to preserve their ancient heritage and defy social norms.
Topic:
Culture, Social Movement, Music, and Resistance
Political Geography:
Iran and Middle East

4. Iran’s Resistance Axis Rattled by Divisions: Asaib Ahl al-Haq’s Leader Rejects the Ceasefire in Iraq

Author:
Jacob Lees Weiss
Publication Date:
02-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
On December 20, 2020, 21 Katyusha rockets struck the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, breaking an Iranian-sponsored ceasefire in Iraq for a second time (U.S. Central Command, December 23, 2020). The Iraqi security forces later arrested a member of the Iraqi political and militant organization Asaib Ahl al-Haq (AAH), Hussam al-Azirjawi, after finding conclusive evidence of his involvement in the attack (al-Hurra, December 26, 2020). Following al-Azirjawi’s arrest, multiple widely-shared clips on social media appeared to show a large mobilization of armed AAH militants in East Baghdad. A further clip showing masked AAH gunmen threatening to attack Iraqi security forces on command from AAH leader, Qais al-Khazali (al-Arabiya, December 25 2020). These arrests and video clips reveal that AAH has begun to show increasing signs of dissent from the party line set by Iran and its most loyal proxy in Iraq, Kata’ib Hezbollah.
Topic:
Non State Actors, Conflict, Militias, and Resistance
Political Geography:
Iraq, Iran, and Middle East

5. Journal of Advanced Military Studies: Special Issue on Strategic Culture

Author:
Ali Parchami, Ofer Fridman, Neil Munro, W. A. Rivera, Evan Kerrane, Matthew Brummer, Eitan Oren, Katie C. Finlinson, Mark Briskey, Ben Connable, Benjamin Potter, Emilee Matheson, Jeffrey Taylor, and Dr. Jose de Arimateia da Cruz
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Advanced Military Studies
Institution:
Marine Corps University Press, National Defense University
Abstract:
An ironic feature of U.S. strategic culture is a rather distinctive disinterest in the study of our own or others’ strategic cultures. The U.S. security institutions find themselves energized about cultural study during irregular conflicts in which the cost of cultural ignorance is made plain, but they persist in under developing the ability to apply that same cultural acumen to great power conflict and key relationships with allies. During the last 100 years of fighting, U.S. defense institutions have repeated a pattern of investing in cultural study during short bursts of counterinsurgency fighting and then abandoning it along with its lessons learned at the termination of conflict. As a consequence, U.S. planning efforts—including those now being designed for future great power conflict—suffer from an unnecessarily narrow optic and fail to account for the full range of perspectives and plausible courses of action considered by an adversary. America’s allies know it and are frustrated by it. More importantly, U.S. adversaries know it and plan to exploit it. The study of strategic culture accounts for the ways in which the culture of a group, whether it be the constructed culture of a nascent terrorist organization or the enduring culture of a nation, impacts thinking and decision making regarding defensive and offensive approaches to security. Within a complex state like Russia or China, one must account for sweeping national narratives that cultivate collective mentalities and impact decision making but must also include the internal cultures of key organizations within the nation’s security community. These organizations often develop distinctive identities, values, perceptions, and habits of practice that can be consequential in moments when the organization’s leaders wield instruments of state power. In the first section of this special edition of the Journal of Advanced Military Studies (JAMS) on strategic culture, Drs. Ali Parchami, Ofer Fridman, Neil Munro, W. A. Rivera, and Major Evan Kerrane provide strategic culture profiles on key U.S. adversaries: Iran, Russia, and China. Their work reflects the complexity involved in identifying and analyzing the narratives and drivers that compete for dominance across these three strategic culture landscapes. Acquainting ourselves with the multivariate and often-contested internal constructs that produce the behavior of our adversaries helps expand our own thinking about the range of possible and plausible competitive strategies we are likely to see from them. The second section of this issue highlights the utility of understanding not only U.S. adversaries but also American allies and partners. Drs. Matthew Brummer and Eitan Oren examine the effort by Japan’s military leaders to shift their own strategic culture through an influence campaign aimed at altering domestic perceptions concerning the appropriate role for the military and thereby expanding its ability to more actively cooperate with the United States in maintaining peace and stability in Asia. Whether they are successful has direct implications for U.S. alliance constructs in the Pacific and the action that might be reasonably expected from Japan should U.S. conflict with China become kinetic. Katie C. Finlinson offers analysis that benefits U.S. deterrence and nonproliferation efforts. She employs a two-tiered research approach— leveraging both strategic culture and analysis of national role conception—as a useful framework for assessing the propensity of the United Arab Emirates to consider weaponizing civilian nuclear knowledge and infrastructure. Finlinson offers an approach repeatable for other potential over-the-horizon states and demonstrates the interplay between a state’s strategic culture and powerful exogenous factors—like security assurances from the United States and potential nuclear acquisition by Iran—in determining outcomes. Finally, Dr. Mark Briskey offers a look at the aspects of Pakistan’s strategic culture that exist as an outgrowth of its army’s most formative historic experiences and have resulted in deeply entrenched perceptions of self, of key adversaries, and perceptions of the past that must be understood by Western partners seeking Pakistan’s cooperation and partnership in the region. Our third section offers a close look at the ways in which cultural analysis can illuminate policy options on particularly difficult problem sets. One of these is assessing will to fight on the part of both allies and adversaries. Dr. Ben Connable recommends a diagnostic tool developed and trialed by the Rand Corporation that demonstrates promise in advancing the ability of defense institutions to anticipate will to fight in kinetic conflicts but also will to act in consequential ways by great powers engaged in strategic competition. Benjamin Potter, Emilee Matheson, and Jeffrey Taylor follow with applications of the Cultural Topography Framework, an approach to cultural data assessment and application that benefits from the insights supplied by the sort of comprehensive strategic culture profiles offered in section one of this issue and translates these into actionable intelligence against discrete problem sets. Their work, respectively, illuminates policy options for containing a potentially escalatory situation in Transnistria, decreasing violence and looting through a more effective reintegration strategy for former members of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa, and reexamining the value of technological advances in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which may be having a deleterious impact on its deterrence strategy. The special issue concludes with a review essay by Dr. José de Arimatéia da Cruz, which offers readers critical analysis of three volumes of strategic culture scholarship. The articles collected for the special issue demonstrate a range of ways in which the study of strategic culture delivers critical insights to policy planners and strategists. Understanding other great powers on their own terms—the identities they seek to establish or defend, the values that inform their policies, the norms of strategic competition or warfighting that they deem acceptable and effective, and the worldview they espouse (whether an accurate fit with objective realities or not)—prepares policy makers to craft plans and strategies in ways that are tailored for maximum advantage vis-à-vis a particular adversary. Given the steady shutdown of cultural inquiry labs and training facilities across the U.S. defense and security community, it is worth issuing a stern reminder that the advantage of knowing one’s enemy is far more consequential when engaged in great power conflict than in the irregular conflicts in which U.S. institutions have learned its worth. This issue of JAMS is provided as a resource to both reinforce that point and supply a wealth of initial material in advancing it.
Topic:
Nuclear Weapons, War, History, Power Politics, Realism, Strategic Competition, Resistance, Identity, and Strategic Culture
Political Geography:
Pakistan, Russia, Japan, Iran, Middle East, India, United Arab Emirates, and United States of America