Writings

Published by the Atlantic Opposition to women’s rights has helped fuel authoritarian movements in Russia, Hungary, Brazil, and the United States. That the same is true in South Korea, which is holding an early presidential election tomorrow, is perhaps less well known. There, the role of anti-feminists is particularly stark, helping to put women’s issues at the very…

Published by National Days after a huge explosion rocked Shahid Rajaee Port in the southern Iranian city of Bandar Abbas, some of the fires continue to rage. Authorities say it could take up to three weeks to put them all out, but the economic, social and political reverberations from the blast are likely to last much longer.…

Published by Al Majalla Offering both carrots and sticks is standard procedure in diplomatic negotiations, but US President Donald Trump takes it to new heights. Whatever else he might prevaricate on, he has always been consistent on Iran, giving it two options: Either agree to a deal that assures the world you are not building…

Published by the National Late March is happy season in Iran as the festival of Nowruz marks the end of winter and the start of a new calendar year. But the government of reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian had little to celebrate even as it marked its first Nowruz, having received blow after blow last month.…

Published by Perry World House A few months into the second Trump administration, its differences with the first are evident. One major difference concerns the balance of power between various forces inside the Trump camp. The second administration is more willing to be disruptive, but that also means its internal workings are more stable. To…

Published by the Atlantic In the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, repeatedly rejected the U.S. president’s offer of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, just as he had during Trump’s first term. Tehran would not talk to this U.S. administration, Khamenei insisted. And even if it did…

Published by the Atlantic Donald Trump loves letters. We know this from his first term, when he exchanged 27 letters with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in the course of 16 months and wrote a particularly memorable missive to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In his second term, he has already found an unlikely new pen pal: Iranian Supreme…

Published in the National With a reputation for making dramatic pronouncements, Mohammad Javad Zarif’s resignation as Iran’s vice president for strategic affairs earlier this month – his second in seven months – didn’t raise many eyebrows. One expert even joked about it, saying: “Life is what happens between two Zarif resignations.” Many expected the veteran career diplomat…

Published by the Atlantic Sadegh Zibakalam is in trouble again. The retired 76-year-old professor of political science was already serving an 18-month sentence for criticizing the Iranian regime. He came out on medical furlough—only for Tehran’s prosecutor to start investigating him again. Now Zibakalam, one of Iran’s best-known public intellectuals, whose combined followers on Instagram, Facebook, and X total almost 2…

Published in the National The list of grievances Iranians hold against their security forces is so long that it’s hard to predict which ones could lead to protests at any given moment. A recent impetus was a brutal murder that doesn’t seem to be political at the first glance but, like many things in Iran,…

Published in Majalla US President Donald Trump has long had a consistent position on Iran: He doesn’t want to change the country’s rulers, but he does want to change their behaviour, chiefly to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon. In order to get there, he is intent on bringing back his first-term policy of maximum pressure,…