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This thesis investigates one of Iran's grand narratives, the myth of victimisation, as a tool of the Iranian political elite to achieve foreign policy goals. It studies the leadership of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941-1979), Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq (1951-1953), Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1979-1989), and President Mahmood Ahmadinejad (2005-2013) to argue that the sense of grievance of justice denied has had a cultural provenance, rooted in historical, literary and religious references spanning centuries. Accordingly Iranian leaders have been able to pursue and perpetuate narratives that have served to cast Iranians as victims of foreign intrigue, thus relieving themselves from accountability and inaction. The narrative of grievance has had a resurgence with the rise of populism around the world, but as an ideational catalyst in Iranian politics, where it has been at play for decades, it has received scant attention. The leaders studied in this thesis have each employed this narrative to varying degrees and effects, to cast the world as a battleground between victim and victimizer. This process was most evident in the lead up to and in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, when Ayatollah Khomeini and President Ahmadinejad repurposed the myth of victimisation to launch and export the revolution. While the Shah and Prime Minister Mosaddeq disseminated such myths to extract favourable concessions from foreign powers, mainly the United States and Great Britain. As a result, the grounding of Iran's most exigent foreign policy issues in myths and populist narratives has led to an incongruity between its potential and its current standing in the community of nations.

Narratives of the late Qajar period have considered Iran a country in decline, unable to engage effectively with British and Russian modernity, spearheaded by imperial practices. Yet, in truth, this account requires a re-appraisal. This thesis examines the dialectic between a pre-modern Iran and the modern forces Iran faced and will show how Iran engaged with and applied western achievements which were eventually used in an Iranian paradigm. This thesis focuses on Iran's diplomacy after the First World War and, in particular, Iran's attendance at the Peace of Paris in 1919. It will show that Iran followed a persistent and lengthy pursuit to reclaim territory and was to put forward a nationalist programme which sought a sovereign and independent Iran. This nuanced nationalism, an imperial nationalism, used modern methods and sought integration into the post-war world order. Using previously unused primary sources, this thesis will interrogate Iran's loss of territory and examine how this informed Iran's post-war diplomacy. In doing so it will highlight an under-researched area and show that Iran espoused a far more consolidated nationalistic approach in 1919 which included an increasingly modern and professional diplomatic approach. Modernity and imperialism helped to precipitate the loss of territory, however, the loss of territory informed Iran's distinct nationalism in 1919. An imperial nationalism, which was founded on a framework of empire locked into ideas of sovereignty.

Iran's nuclear program has been a central concern of the international non-proliferation agenda since 2002 and has provoked many debates in political and academic circles. This thesis explores the impact of the personality of three Iranian presidents, Mohammad Khatami, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hassan Rouhani, on decisions made by Iran's leadership on the nuclear issue between 2003 to 2015. A certain degree of continuity, but also change, was observed in the Islamic Republic's decision-making throughout these 12 years. Iranian officials persistently refused to indefinitely halt fuel-cycle activities. However, they showed variable degrees of flexibility and defiance in accepting restrictions on the country's nuclear activities. Realism, constructivism, and domestic politics - three prominent approaches to studying nuclear behaviour - cannot provide a comprehensive explanation for Iran's nuclear decision-making. Situated within the field of political psychology, this thesis demonstrates that the variations in the personalities of the three presidents can explain certain changes in Iran's nuclear decisions unaccounted for by other theories. Employing a mixed-method approach, this research assesses the presidents' political beliefs regarding the nature of the political universe and the best strategy to achieve political goals, as well as their leadership styles based on their need for power, conceptual complexity, experience, and interest in foreign policy. In several ways, including by developing a software to measure the conceptual complexity of Persian-speakers, and by geographically and culturally expanding the research on the impact of individual decision-makers on policies, this study makes advances in the field of political psychology. Furthermore, by providing a nuanced analysis of the nuclear decision-making process, as well as the role of the institution of presidency more broadly and the impact of personalities more specifically, this thesis contributes to a better understanding of Iran, of interest to both scholars and policy-makers.

This dissertation provides an in-depth historical analysis of the motivations and actions surrounding Iran's foreign policy toward Afghanistan in the modern era. The need for this research stems from a significant gap in Western scholarship on the Iranian-Afghan relationship that accounts for any period of the countries' interactions in detail. It is argued here that despite rhetoric to the contrary, successive Iranian governments consistently pursued policies of political, military, and economic interference in Afghanistan as an integral part of Iran's desire to achieve a dominant position of leadership in its region. This persistent approach has been grounded in both the historical experience and the mythology surrounding Iran's once-great status as an empire, which was destroyed by the Afghans and the great powers during the colonial period, and the resultant Iranian irredentism toward Afghanistan that followed. In analysing the course of Iran's policy toward Afghanistan, a defining feature is that it has never been divorced from Iran's competition against the great powers that have continuously been involved in Afghanistan and the region. This work first provides a long-view historical context of the Iranian-Afghan relationship, which demonstrates that since Afghanistan separated from the Persian Empire in 1747, Afghanistan held an important place of relevance in the perpetuation of myths that underpin the persistent ideology of Iranian nationalism, which manifest in an Iranian foreign policy of interventionism toward Afghanistan. This, combined with the continued strategic importance of Afghanistan to the great powers and their encroachment on Iran and Afghanistan, heavily influenced Iran's foreign policy toward Afghanistan. During the Cold War, Iran used the power gained from aligning with the United States to develop political, economic, and military dominance over Afghanistan and leveraged that to successfully attain regional leadership separate from the United States and in competition with the Soviet Union. When the Islamic Republic was created in 1979, despite its ideological and structural differences from previous Iranian regimes, the policy toward Afghanistan and its importance to Iran's wider foreign policy aims, were consistent with previous regimes' motivations. This regime's 'export' of Iran's Islamic revolutionary influence to different Afghan polities during the Soviet occupation was a religious manifestation of the same Iranian nationalist ideology that was primarily concerned with advancing Iran's regional position in competition with the Soviet Union and the United States.

This thesis studied the interaction of American Protestant missionaries with Iranians during the 1960s and 1970s. It focused on the missionary activities of four American Protestant groups: Presbyterians, Assemblies of God, International Missions, and Southern Baptists. It argued that American missionaries' predisposition toward their own culture confused their message of the gospel and added to the negative perception of Christianity among Iranians. This bias was seen primarily in the American missionaries' desire to modernise Iran through education and healthcare, and between the missionaries' relationship with Iranian Christians. Iranian attitudes towards missionary involvement in these areas were investigated, as was the changing American missionary strategy from a traditional method where missionaries had final say on most matters related to American and Iranian Christian interaction to the beginnings of an indigenous system where a partnership developed between the missionary and the Iranian Christian. Freedoms that American missionaries were given under Mohammed Reza Shah to be overt in their evangelistic and discipleship activities, and details of the amount of Christian material propagated, were investigated. As missionaries eventually withdrew from Iran's education and healthcare systems, more opportunities to be involved in Christian and Western activities were given to Iranian Christians. Finally, the state of the Iranian Church after 1979, when American missionaries were expelled from the country, was contrasted with the Iranian Church during the Pahlavi era. This section explained that while Iranian Christians were thankful for American missionaries, they were also resentful because Iranian Christians wanted Christianity to fit better within Iranian accepted norms and practices.

This PhD study examines the consequences of modernity and modernisation for Kurdish-Iranian society in the twentieth century. It identifies a dual process of socio-economic transformation and homogenisation of culture and identity, the dialectics of which (re)formed the economic, social, political and cultural structures of modern Kurdish society in Iran. As a result, socio-economically, Kurdish society became integrated in modern Iran, whereas it vigorously resisted homogenisation of identity and culture; at the same time, it maintained porous cultural borders with other societies in Iran, and continued to be shaped by mechanisms of modern cultural encounters. The socio-economic transformation of Iran strengthened and created new bonds between societies in Iran, while at the same time resistance and struggle for political and cultural rights became permanent characteristics of Kurdish-Iranian society. During the modernisation of Iran, the era of the 'White Revolution' is distinguished for the profound transformation of Iran it entailed. Therefore, an interpretation of the era constitutes the main concern of this thesis because, building on previous attempts to modernise Iran, the era of the White Revolution was crucial in engendering profound changes in Kurdish society. The theoretical framework of this study is informed by theories of social change and transformation against modernisation theories, and by theories of nation and nationalism which theoretically enable this research to distance itself from national narratives. Significantly, this framework includes a range of cultural critiques, benefits from studies of homogenisation and state formation, and relies on rich scholarly works on the formation of modern Iran, which, when combined, accentuate the cultural, political and social dimensions of modern nation-building in Iran. The result is a multi-dimensional approach to social change in Kurdish society. It is the dynamics of the dual process which continue to (re)form the foundations of Kurdish society in Iran; and it is this approach which I regard as a crucial contribution to both Kurdish and Iranian studies.

Iran's foreign policy is consistent and is fundamentally realist with a revolutionist vision while the means are rationalist is the central argument of this dissertation. I make use of the English Schools three traditions of realism, rationalism and revolutionism in analyzing the speeches of Iranian statesmen to identify the ways in which the dynamics of the three traditions have evolved since 1997 and what it means for interpreting the developments of Iran's foreign policy ventures. I utilize both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis in examining the speeches of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, the presidents since 1997. The quantitative method employs a customized software generating figures that represent the recurrence of realist, rationalist and revolutionist terminologies in all the documents downloaded from the official websites of the Iranian statesmen as well as the United Nations and select news agencies and affiliates. The quantitative phase of the analysis, meanwhile, carefully examined selected statements of the supreme leader and the presidents uncovering the foreign policy argumentations and justifications, which were studied alongside foreign policy actions and classified under the three traditions. The findings suggest that Iran's foreign policy is the same as in the other states of international society – it is consistent and dynamic. It is simultaneously realist, rationalist and revolutionist with each tradition serving a specific purpose, which cannot be disentangled from the other two.

Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, both Austria and Persia were each repeatedly at war with the Ottoman Turks. Diplomats travelled between the two countries in an attempt to forge an alliance against their common enemy. Although the alliance never materialized the relationship broadened to cover other concerns. Despite cultural differences, both countries tried to work together and approached each-other as equals. Contact between the countries exposed both cultures to wider influences. Their changing relationship illustrates the priorities of both parties. This thesis, for the first time, uses primary sources to view the evolution of the relationship over the two century reign of the Safavid dynasty. It charts the course of their diplomatic relationship, examines the turning point in this relationship, and explores why the alliance both sides wanted never materialized. By examining Austria's diplomatic initiatives to the east this thesis helps correct the historiographical imbalance in central European history of concentration on only European affairs, and shows that their understanding of the east was more nuanced than is often credited.

This thesis argues that the laws of waqf in Iran lack modern relevance. Such laws have never been completely modernised, and the waqf system, no longer responsible for the delivery of public goods, still holds a vast array of properties and resources. Many of the ongoing socioeconomic and political disappointments of Iran, which, at the core, are the weakness of the country's private economic sector and its human capital deficiency, stand among the lasting consequences of the deficiency of resources which the institution of waqf has under its control. Traditional Islamic law laid the ground for the economic infrastructure of the Middle Eastern countries until the late 19th century. Among the institutions that contributed to shaping the economy of the region are the Islamic law of inheritance, which inhibited capital accumulation; the absence in Islamic law of the concept of a corporation and the consequent weaknesses of civil society; and the waqf, which locked vast resources into unproductive organisations for the delivery of social services. It is often argued that many of these obstacles to economic development were largely overcome through radical reforms initiated in the 19th century. However, the modern civil law of Iran has kept traditional Islamic law at the core of laws of waqf, and the process of modernisation of its laws remains incomplete.