Iran's Crisis of Legitimacy

The Iranian revolution—the political realization of the Great Refusal of Western modernization—was a direct consequence a half century later of the forced secularization of the Ottoman Caliphate by Kemal Ataturk. With the superstructure of the Muslim ummah dismantled and replaced by the Turkish nation state, insurgent religious movements, from the (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the Shiite imams of Qum and Najaf, moved into the vacuum to reclaim Islam from the shadow of Western dominance.
Now, history is turning again. Iran has been seized by violent turmoil as it seeks to reconcile democracy and religious rule. Secular Turkey is governed by an Islamist-rooted party. As they struggle to regain their balance, the global economic meltdown threatens a convergence against globalization that joins the Islamist resistance with populist backlashes elsewhere.
Two legendary intelligence agents, a Hezbollah leader, an Iranian dissident philosopher and Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights lawyer and Nobel Laureate, examine this historical turn.     

伊朗核问题再起风波

7月31日,伊朗敦促欧盟在8月1日前提出解决伊核问题的一揽子建议,否则将重启作为铀浓缩活动准备阶段的铀转化活动.欧盟回应伊重启核活动意味双方谈判终结,届时将把核问题提交联合国安理会.8月5日,欧盟三国正式向伊朗提交一揽子建议,支持伊发展民用核能,但要求其终止一切铀转化、提炼和加工活动.     

Concessions on Iran's Nuclear Program Would Help Moderates

As the Soviet Union collapsed and China shifted to the market, it was said that communism was nothing more than the longest road between capitalism and capitalism. It now looks like the Bush‐era neo‐conservatism is similarly a long road back to the realism from whence it departed. The US is now talking with North Korea and Iran instead of preempting them through war. A dissident Iranian scientist, the former top UN arms inspector and a former US secretary of state ponder this state of affairs.     

The Real Issue Is Iran's Emergence as a Regional Power

As the confrontation between the West and Iran over uranium enrichment comes to a head, the internal confrontation in Iran between the partisans of divine sovereignty, allied with the Revolutionary Guard, and popular sovereignty continues to simmer.
In this section, the first president of the Islamic Republic, a leading cleric of the opposition, the Iranian human rights activist and Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi and a former British intelligence agent ponder what lies ahead.     

Iran's Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism: A view from the pulpit

Abstract

This paper examines the Friday prayer sermons delivered by Iran's new leadership to answer the question of whether Iran's Islamic fundamentalism has crested with the death of its spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini in June 1989. The analysis shows that an attempt is underway to articulate the Islamic identity of post‐Khomeini Iran in economic, political, and social relations. The study concludes that although President Rafsanjani is willing to reevaluate Iran's domestic and foreign relations, the totalitarian, Islamic, and revolutionary structure that Khomeini helped build is still intact. As such, the regime's tendencies toward radicalism and export of the Islamic revolution remain unchanged. In this scenario, resort to terrorism by the Islamic Republic in order to maintain its structure and tendencies cannot be ruled out.     

Winning Iran's Election Is Just The Beginning Of Rouhani's Political Struggles

Iran's president may have been re‐elected, but he'll need to win the supreme leader's support and get foreign powers to engage with Tehran to be successful.     

Blueprint for a Green Recovery

As British Prime Minister Gordon Brown notes in this section, we are witnessing the birth pangs of a new global order in this deepest financial and economic crash since the Great Depression. There will be plenty of pain all around for a while. And when the quarter-century leveraged-debt bubble of the United States—the explosion of which detonated the crash—is finally unwound, the new global balance will favor an Asia flush with cash. The G-20 will replace the G-7 as the executive committee of globalization. And, if wise leadership stays the course, there will be a green lining to the recovery as the fiscal stimulus is imbued with an environmental sensibility.     

The Movement for Rule of Law in China

Though not much noticed in the West, a great debate is raging across China today, from the law faculties of its major universities to the Central Party School to the dissident community, over “constitutionalism” and the establishment of rule of law. In the wake of major corruption scandals, there are great expectations that the new leadership under Xi Jinping will respond to social pressure and pursue political reforms that have stalled over the last decade. A leading China scholar, Cheng Li, and the now famous blind civil rights advocate Chen Guangcheng, who dramatically escaped house arrest and fled to the US Embassy in Beijing last year, comment on where this debate is headed and what it might—or might not—produce.     

尼泊尔共产主义运动的发展及其特点

尼泊尔共产主义运动(1949-)与尼泊尔当代历史并行发展,目前已成为该国最为重要的政治力量;尽管出现较晚,但却异军突起,成为冷战后国际共运最为成功的经验之一.本文以一个全新的角度阐述了尼泊尔共产主义运动的产生、发展和现状.作者通过分析指出,宗派主义和功利主义是尼泊尔共运的两大传统,前者导致了分歧与分裂,而后者导致了联合与合并,但大趋势是,从宗派主义到功利主义.从分裂到整合.     

Islamism and Social Movement Theory

There is a new, but still limited, realisation that the perspectives developed by the ‘social movement theory’ can be useful to illuminate aspects of Islamist movements. This is a welcome development. Yet it is also pertinent to point to some limitations of the prevailing social movement theories (those grounded in the technologically advanced and politically open societies) to account for the complexities of sociopolitical activism in contemporary Muslim societies, which are often characterised by political control and limited means for communicative action. The article argues for a more fluid and fragmented understanding of social movements, which may better explain the differentiated and changing disposition of such movements as Islamism. In this context, I propose the concept of ‘imagined solidarities’, which might help illustrate modes of solidarity building in such closed political settings as the contemporary Muslim Middle East.     

社会运动理论的发展

20世纪60和70年代,在美国和欧洲,各种社会运动方兴未艾,风起云涌。社会运动理论也因此在西方流行起来。在美国,这个社会运动的大潮首先是民权运动——即非洲裔美国人争取投票权及其他公民权的运动;这一运动还包括了20世纪60年代早期从加州大学洛杉矶分校开始,随后席卷美国的言论自由运动;还包括反对越南战争的反战运动——这项运动后来成为