Intellectual endeavors are often exercised not in isolation but in collaboration and conversations with other thinkers. This book is no exception as it is the outcome of years of intense intellectual labor and collaboration with insightful, generous, and bright individuals from across educational institutions and countries. First, I want to thank everyone at York University for welcoming me and...

CDA

Following the presidential elections held on June 12, 2009, in Iran, massive protests took place contesting those results declaring the incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadi Nejad the winner by a large margin for a second term. The two Reformist candidates, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Hojatol Islam Mehdi Karoubi, contested the results and called on their supporters to hold a street rally. People...

This chapter is designed to provide a brief overview of key social movements and cycles of political protest since the onset of the twentieth century, events that significantly shaped modern Iran. The movements chronicled in this chapter are periods of heightened sociopolitical uprising and are key to our understanding of Iran. We focus on those events with the intention of historicizing the Green...

The conceptual framework for this book is grounded in critical social theory and is based on the theory of structuration of Anthony Giddens and the theory of communicative action (TCA) of Jürgen Habermas. Structuration theory is a widely tested social theory based on the interactions of social structures and agency (Giddens, 1984), which are at the core of my work. Structuration is an...

In order to investigate the impact of the discourse of the leaders of the two major uprisings in the past four decades in Iran—namely, Khomeini on the Islamic Revolution, and Mousavi, Karoubi, and Rahnavard on the Green Movement, I used critical discourse analysis (CDA). CDA is a well-established critical method in the use of language in relations of power, and while there are various...

The 1979 Iranian Revolution politicized many ordinary citizens and was the scene of active participation of social actors from Marxist and Communist groups such as Fedayian e Khalgh to liberal democrats such as the National Front and various Islamist groups which were discussed in detail in chapter 2—as well as women (most political factions had a chapter specific to...

In this chapter, I will conduct a critical analysis of the political discourse of the two Reform candidates during the 2009 elections. The focus here is on proposed changes to the three different structures of signification, domination, and legitimation. Studying the data reveals that the majority of the changes proposed by the two candidates fell into the category of structures of domination....

In this chapter, I will conduct a critical analysis of the political discourse of Ayatollah Khomeini during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. While the previous chapter established the methodological procedure step by step, in the interest of space, I have eliminated those details and simply focus on demonstrating the discourse analysis. However, please bear in mind the same methodological process was...

The empirical analysis discussed in the previous chapter illustrates the use of systematically distorted communication by both Ayatollah Khomeini and the leaders of the Green Movement. In this chapter, I will offer a theoretical explanation of the impact and implications of distorted communication for the Green Movement as based on the structuration-communicative action framework developed in...

As this manuscript was about to be forwarded to its publisher, a round of protests by Iran’s workers, unemployed peasants, and the poor erupted in late December 2017/January 2018. Security forces attempted to disperse the protesters and were unevenly successful as across the country strikes broke out, the grievances of the protesters common to many of Iran’s subjects: the high prices...

Empirical Observations: Women’s Rights

Empirical Observations: Khomeini—Women’s Rights

Maral Karimi was born in Iran during the transition period between the 1979 revolution and the war with Iraq. The violence, volatility, and vengeance that she witnessed and that touched her life made her acutely aware at an early age of the political conditions of the world surrounding her. Those conditions gave rise to questions that she then carried into her adult life and sent her on an...