Abstract
Thirty-eight years since the Iranian revolution, the debate over the trajectory of Iran’s path to reform remains widely contested. President Rouhani’s surprising victory in the June 2013 presidential elections, in which he ran as a moderate, securing 51 per cent of the popular vote, represented a significant shift in the Iranian political landscape. His re-election four years later, in which he garnered more than 70 per cent of Iran’s 56 million votes solidified Rouhani’s popular mandate calling for change and transformation. This chapter argues that measuring change in Iran using a ‘Western yardstick’ will prove futile and gauges the scope of change under Rouhani by surveying the four core principles that have guided various Iranian presidents since the 1979 revolution: republicanism, development, justice and independence.
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Notes
- 1.
See Ghoncheh Tazmini, Khatami’s Iran: The Islamic Republic (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013).
- 2.
See Volker Schmidt, Global Modernity: A Conceptual Sketch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
- 3.
Ghoncheh Tazmini, Revolution and Reform in Russia and Iran: Modernisation and Politics in Revolutionary States (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 4.
- 4.
Ibid., 105.
- 5.
See Gary Gregg, The Middle East: A Cultural Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
- 6.
Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (New York: Syracuse, 1996), 68–9.
- 7.
Vanessa Martin, Creating an Islamic State (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 126.
- 8.
Mehdi P. Amineh and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ‘Theorizing of the Iranian Revolution of 1978–9: The Multiple Contexts of the Iranian Revolution’, in Varieties of Multiple Modernities: New Research Design, ed. Gerhard Preyer and Michael Sussman (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 162, 173.
- 9.
Ali Mirsepassi, Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 33–4.
- 10.
Fred Dallmayr, Dialogue among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 17–18, 85.
- 11.
Michael Axworthy, Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 328.
- 12.
This is a term used by Richard Sakwa to explain Vladimir Putin’s presidency. See Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).
- 13.
See Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, ‘Iran in World Politics after Rouhani’, Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, Dossiers, 6 April 2014, http://studies.aljazeera.net/en/dossiers/2014/03/2014331104216470679.html.
- 14.
Edward Tiryakian, ‘Modernization: Exhumateur in Pace’, International Sociology 6 (1991): 173.
- 15.
Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 2.
- 16.
Richard Sakwa, ‘The Soviet Collapse: Contradictions and Neo-Modernisation’, Journal of Eurasian Studies 4 (2013): 73.
- 17.
Johann P. Arnason, ‘The Multiplication of Modernity’, in Identity, Culture and Globalisation, ed. Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 132–3.
- 18.
Shmuel Eisenstadt, ‘Contemporary Globalization and New Civilizational Formations’, Journal of Globalization Studies 1, no. 2 (2010): 6, 10.
- 19.
Shmuel Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus 129 (2000): 11.
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Tazmini, G. (2018). Indigenising ‘Modernisation’ in Iran. In: Barlow, R., Akbarzadeh, S. (eds) Human Rights and Agents of Change in Iran. Studies in Iranian Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8824-7_3
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