In a book that will grip scholars of global social movements and the Middle East and policymakers, Navid Pourmokhtari deploys a nuanced reading of Foucault on power and resistance to great narrative effect in tracing the history of the 2009 Iranian Green Movement.
John Foran, University of California, USA
In this timely and informative book, Navid Pourmokhtari addresses some of the most pressing questions about the Iranian Green Movement that emerged in 2009. This is an essential read for anyone wishing to understand the great struggle within Iranian society for democracy and social justice.
Ramin Jahanbegloo, Jindal Global University, India
Navid Pourmokhtari enlists Michel Foucault to provide a careful and original account of Irans 2009 Green Movement as a broad-based civil rights movement. This book gives an excellent account of the Green Movements history and some possible futures for Iranian social and political life.
Corey McCall, Penn State University, USA
Pourmokhtaris fascinating book presents a Foucauldian analysis of Irans 2009 Green Movement, a movement of movements which sought civic rights and democratic accountability. To do so, he also adroitly analyzes the disciplinary project of the Islamic Republic and everyday forms of resistance to it.
Jeff Goodwin, New York University, USA
The Green Movement of 2009 in Iran introduced a new generation of popular uprisings of the 21st Century. Navid Pourmokhtaris book is a welcome addition to a growing literature on one of the most remarkable political movements in the Middle East and beyond.
Asef Bayat, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
More than a decade after the rise of a major civil rights movement in Iran, this book is the most mature and balanced assessment of what happened when millions of Iranians poured into their streets demanding liberation from tyranny and freedom to be integral to the democratic aspiration of their homeland. About half a dozen volumes and countless learned essays later, Pourmokhtaris seminal study is a living testimony that social uprisings and the manner of reading them for the posterity are the engine of history. A superb book and an indispensable work of scholarship.
Hamid Dabashi, Author of The Fox and the Paradox: Iran, the Green Movement and the USA
Irans Green Movement
This book examines the emergence and development of the 2009 Green Movement in Iran. The approach emphasizes the context and the local and historical specificities in which mass oppositional movements arise, develop and conduct their operations. Meanwhile, it foregrounds an account of multiple modernities that work to transcend modernist assumptions.
The volume describes and analyzes the power modalitiesdisciplinary, biopolitical, and sovereignemployed by the Islamic Republic to governmentalize the masses. Bearing a triangular methodology, the book consists of six semi-structured interviews with authorities and activists who participated in the pivotal events of that period; discourse analysis focusing on the Iranian constitution and the relevant government policy documents and speeches; and archival analysis. These provide the historical background, perspectives and insights required to analyse and explicate the conditions responsible for the emergence of the Green Movement and to grasp how collective action was enabled and organized.
Marking a particular historical phase in the development of a home-grown democracy in post-revolutionary Iran, the Green Movement is transforming the countrys political landscape. This book is a key resource to students and scholars interested in comparative politics, Iranian studies and the Middle East.
Navid Pourmokhtari (PhD) teaches Politics at the University of Alberta and Grant MacEwan University. His research interests lie in the areas of international relations and comparative politics, with a special focus on mass oppositional movements, peace studies and international security studies. His most recent publications have appeared in Third World Quarterly, Sociology of Islam, Jadaliyya, the Journal of Human Trafficking and Foucault Studies, amongst others.
Iranian Studies
Series editors: Homa Katouzian, University of Oxford and Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, University of Toronto.
Since 1967 the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS) has been a leading learned society for the advancement of new approaches in the study of Iranian society, history, culture and literature. The new ISIS Iranian Studies series published by Routledge will provide a venue for the publication of original and innovative scholarly works in all areas of Iranian and Persianate Studies.
Persian Calligraphy
A Corpus Study of Letterforms
Mahdiyeh Meidani
Iranian National Cinema
The Interaction of Policy, Genre, Funding and Reception
Anne Dmy-Geroe
Judeo-Persian Writings
A Manifestation of Intellectual and Literary Life
Edited and Compiled by Nahid Pirnazar
Foreign Policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Between Ideology and Pragmatism
Przemyslaw Osiewicz
Secularization of Islam in Post-Revolutionary Iran
Mahmoud Pargoo
Irans Green Movement
Everyday Resistance, Political Contestation and Social Mobilization
Navid Pourmokhtari
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/middleeaststudies/series/IRST
First published 2021
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2021 Navid Pourmokhtari
The right of Navid Pourmokhtari to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-0-367-74445-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-74446-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-15788-5 (ebk)
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This work is dedicated to the uncelebrated multitudes, especially the Bahais of Iran, who have sacrificed so much to create a better world, and to my wife Shadan and daughter Mouness, who are the light of my world.
In June 2009, in the immediate aftermath of Irans tenth presidential election, there appeared on the streets of Tehran and other major Iranian cities something unprecedented in the thirty-year history of the Islamic Republic: immense crowds, comprised mostly of students, women and youth, engaged in spontaneous forms of collective action against what was widely perceived to be election fraud. Over the course of the next nine months, urban streets and squares would echo with cries of
