World Sociopolitical Studies

While Iran was never formally colonized by Western powers, it’s governing regimes before the Islamic revolution were loyal to both the East and the West;  the country was therefore more or less a de facto colony of Russia, Great Britain, and the United States. One of the most pernicious consequences of such presences can be described as the "colonization of the mind," which has subtle and lasting manifestations. Using Edward Said's four major characteristics of Orientalism (i.e., binary opposition, over-generalization, fear and control, and depicting the Orient as stuck in past primitiveness), the present paper attempts to analyze the self-perception of the Iranians toward themselves to see whether the way they perceive themselves is similar to the Western discourse of the "Orient." In the first step, a number of interviews with a representative sampling of the population under investigation were conducted to develop a questionnaire. The questionnaires were then distributed and 650 responses were collected. The survey was meant to assess the four components of Orientalism as proposed by Said, among the respondents. It also contained questions about the respondents' lifestyle, their perceptions toward nationalism, and media consumption. The results reveal evidence of Orientalist self-perception among the Iranians when they compare themselves with the West.

Ziba Mir-Hosseini employs feminist theory and global human rights principles to promote and implement legal changes to Islamic law to achieve gender equality. She proposes the pursuit of an alternative “sacred spiritual project” as a means to advance gender equality through these legal reforms.To achieve this goal, four underlying assumptions inform her work that are essential for her spiritual project to be successful. (Mir-Hosseini's approach includes: 1) Advocating religion's adaptation to societal changes, prioritizing individual autonomy over religious demands. 2) Applying social constructionism to challenge binary gender concepts and traditional roles. 3) Asserting that Orientalism influenced male scholars' misinterpretation of Islam's sacred texts. 4) Embracing Western individualism to counter Traditionalist or Neo-Traditionalist Islamic teachings while overlooking Western women's sexualization experiences in her pursuit of equality. The possible consequences of her philosophy include that it might aid secularization and syncretic tendencies within the sphere of Muslim women; it might emphasize a personal interpretation of religious texts leading to distrust of male authority; it might intersect with evolving attitudes towards gender roles, family dynamics, and women’s rights within society, which may affect Muslims and their families as a whole. It might contribute to tensions already there among women.

2023 marked the 50th anniversary of the US-backed military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, and installed a military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet. It also marked the 70th anniversary of the US-backed coup against Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. Beyond the parallels of Western intervention directed against sovereign governments, and the imposition of authoritarian US-client regimes, the fact is that Pinochet’s rule signaled a period of closer ties between Chile and the Pahlavi regime. From the establishment of a Chilean embassy in Tehran in 1974, cooperation even reached the field of state terror both at home and overseas, as the Chilean secret police reached SAVAK for advice on repression and Pinochet agents offered collaboration in chasing some of the Shah’s enemies abroad. The triumph of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 put an end to Chilean-Iranian cooperation and diplomatic relations. The Chilean military industry then supported Saddam’s war against Iran by providing weapons to the Iraqi regime - including cluster munitions. Through declassified documents from the Chilean Foreign Ministry, as well as findings by journalistic research, those connections and exchanges, little known by the peoples of both countries, are revisited.

This article examines the theme of cultural imperialism through a case-study of change in nineteenth-century intellectual discourse. It analyzes an Iranian intellectual discourse, which is known, according to the Persian nomenclature, as the discourse of “misery” (badbaxti). The article shows that throughout the nineteenth-century, the perception of Iranian intellectuals changed, rather drastically, from self-confidence to self-immiseration. This argument is grounded in a close textual contrast between two representative texts. Mirza Saleh Shirazi’s Safar-nāme (1815), representing confidence, is contrasted with Siyāḥat-nāme-ye Ebrāhim Beyk or “The Travel Diary of Ibrahim Beg” (1895), which articulated the idea of an incomparable Iranian misery. The author of  Siyāḥat-nāme-ye Ebrāhim Beyk captured this discursive transformation when he wrote: “there is no country on the face of the planet today more miserable than Iran.” The discourse of misery had profound consequences well into the present. Self-immiseration entered popular culture in the Pahlavi period (1925-1979) and intensified in the Islamic Republican period (1979-present). The discourse of misery has captivated modern Iranian consciousness, without necessarily corresponding to social reality.

Formal relationship between Iran and Brazil commenced in 1903 with the signing of the Treaty of Friendship and Commerce. Since then, their bilateral relations have been shaped by political and economic changes in both countries. A pivotal moment after the 1979 Iranian revolution occurred in 2005, when leaders Lula da Silva of Brazil and Ahmadinejad of Iran showed mutual interest in cooperation, driven by Iran's need to balance US threat and Brazil's aspiration to balance US power. However, shifts in the Brazilian foreign policy towards Iran and escalating tensions between Iran and the West impeded further progress. With Lula da Silva's return to power in 2023 and Iranian President Raisi's heightened focus on Latin America, both countries witnessed renewed discussions about the potential for positive balancing between Iran and Brazil. This study delves into the successes and setbacks of Iran-Brazil bilateral approximation through the lenses of positive balancing theory and historical analysis method. During Lula's administrations, Iran's balancing strategy towards Brazil proved beneficial for both nations: Iran sought to counter US threats by fostering a friendly relationship with Brazil, while Brazil aimed to elevate its Global South agenda by mediating in Iran's nuclear program. This engagement also aimed to unite anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist movements under emerging political leaders. Despite these efforts, the US pressure on Iran to halt its nuclear program and on Brazil to limit its influence hindered constructive engagement between the two countries. Nevertheless, slow but steady economic interactions and Iran's inclusion in BRICS provide hope for the restoration of Iran's balancing strategy in Brazil and its reinforcement in Latin America.

This paper is an attempt to reconsider the legacy of universalism of traditional empires from the perspective of systems theory. In the West, the system ideas were already present in ancient Greek/Roman philosophy and developed further since the Renaissance within the domain of natural sciences (anatomy, mechanics or astronomy), whereas they did not develop as much in social sciences and particularly in politics, which lacks a holistic understanding. In the universal empires of the East (such as Iran, China and Russia) the system paradigm developed from the political life of centralized statehood. The core concept of the traditional imperial universalism was a particular understanding of “justice”, not as equality or absence of coercion, but as a certain form of social order. As the Chinese philosopher Xunzi and the Persian philosopher Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, noted, “justice” is primarily an “equilibrium”, that is a way of maintaining optimal interrelationships between different aspects of society within a single political whole. Traditional imperial universalism understood “just order” as a centralized hierarchical order. However, the current state of the systems approach and the complexity theory allows the reconsideration of the legacy of traditional universalism as the principle of totality of organizational connections and hierarchies of “systemic elements”, in the terminology of Russian philosopher, Alexander Bogdanov. It is concluded that the three Eastern thinkers share similar systematic understanding of “justice” as a hierarchically-arranged political order, coordinated on the basis of a single plan, which permits to maintain a dynamic balance.