Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran

The death of the Islamic Republic's revolutionary patriarch, Ayatollah Khomeini, the bitter denouement of the Iran-Iraq War, and the marginalisation of leading factions within the political elite, in tandem with the end of the Cold War, harboured immense intellectual and political repercussions for the Iranian state and society. It was these events which created the conditions for the emergence of Iran's post-revolutionary reform movement, as its intellectuals and political leaders sought to re-evaluate the foundations of the Islamic state's political legitimacy and religious authority. In this monograph, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, examines the rise and evolution of reformist political thought in Iran and analyses the complex network of publications, study circles, and think-tanks that encompassed a range of prominent politicians and intellectuals in the 1990s. In his meticulous account of the relationships between the post-revolutionary political class and intelligentsia, he explores a panoply of political and ideological issues still vital to understanding Iran's revolutionary state, such as the ruling political theology of the 'Guardianship of the Jurist', the political elite's engagement with questions of Islamic statehood, democracy and constitutionalism, and their critiques of revolutionary agency and social transformation.

About the Author

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford and Postdoctoral Associate at St Cross College, Oxford. He has taught at the University of Oxford, the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and the University of Exeter. Sadeghi-Boroujerdi was Associate Editor at the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies from 2014 to 2017 and is Series Editor of Radical Histories of the Middle East (Oneworld). His writings on Iran have been widely published in academic journals and the international media, including the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Iranian Studies, Digest of Middle East Studies, Middle East Journal, Foreign Policy, Jadaliyya, Al Jazeera, Lobelog, Muftah, Jacobin, and The Guardian.