Iran and Its Neighbors

Iran’s relation to the new state of Azerbaijan to the north is complex. On the one hand the country was for many years a province of Iran. Its people are largely Azerbaijanis with a language and culture close to that of the more larger Azerbaijan section of Iran. Most of the independent Azeris belong to [...]

Promoting Democracy: Rethinking Priorities

The threat of a Kabul court a few months ago to execute a man for converting from Islam to Christianity raised in an especially clear form the contradiction between “democracy” as we understand it and “democracy” as it may reasonably be understood by others.
Democracy was understood by ancient Greek scholars and the Founding Fathers [...]

Limited Authoritarianism

A recent article in the Washington Quarterly (30,1,Winter) by Hen Tov is entitled “Understanding Iran’s New Authoritarianism”. It purports to show how Iran is quickly evolving from a specialized theocratic state into a standard authoritarian regime of the kind that has long characterized the region. He tells us that “a new group of [...]

Iran’s Complex Political System

There is a great deal of talk in the Western media about the anti-democratic or non-democratic nature of the Iranian government. It is surely not the kind of liberal democracy that many in the West think they would like to see in Iran, but it is neither a closed society or a dictatorship. It is [...]