The Department of Arabic Language and Cultures presents

AraBooks: Literature, politics, society and the arts from the Arab world, the Middle East and its diasporas

Political Participation in Iran from Khatami to the Green Movement
Associate Professor Paola Rivetti (Dublin City University)

Abstract

Between 1997 and 2005 Iranian reformist governments sought to utilize gradual reforms to control independent activism. While the governments successfully ‘set the field’ of permitted political participation, part of the civil society that took shape was unexpectedly independent. Despite being a minority, independent activists were not marginal: without them, in fact, the Green Movement of 2009 would not have taken shape. Building on in-depth empirical analysis, the author explains how autonomous activism forms and survives in a semi-authoritarian country.

About the speaker

Paola Rivetti is an Associate Professor in Politics and IR at the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University. Her research interests focus on the government of societies and polities in the Middle East and North Africa. She is the author of Political Participation in Iran from Khatami to the Green Movement (2020), and co-editor of Islamists and the Politics of the Arab Uprisings: Governance, Pluralisation and Contention (2018) and Continuity and change before and after the Arab uprisings: Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt (2015).

Join online via Zoom.

For more information, contact: Dr Lucia Sorbera – lucia.sorbera@sydney.edu.au

About AraBooks

AraBooks is a seminar series curated by the Department of Arabic Language and Cultures. It hosts a series of talks by scholars, writers and artists whose scholarship and artistic productions focus on the Arab World, the Middle East and its diasporas. Each semester we explore a thread through the discussion of a series of books and in conversation with their authors.

Upcoming sessions

• Thursday 6 May: Mariam Farida – Religion and Hezbollah: Political Ideology and Legitimacy (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2020)
• Thursday 13 May: Maria Frederika Malmström – The Streets Are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi’s Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019)
• Thursday 20 May: Safdar Ahmed – Still Alive. Notes from Australia’s Immigration Detention System (Melbourne: 12 Panels Press, 2021)
• Thursday 27 May: Samuli Schielke – Migrant Dreams: Egyptian Workers in the Gulf States (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2020)

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