Search

This paper offers some insights into Twitter as a political field, based on Bourdieu's field theory. Networked publics, as agents of this field, are competing overpower by performing networked practices. To investigate this field, we focused on two networked practices: networked framing and narrating. Persian Twitter in 2017 presidential election provides a good context to analyze how such a field is constituted. Combining a social-network analytic approach with discursive and textual interpretations, we analyzed a corpus of 2,596,284 tweets. We identified three main networked publics in the retweet network: reformists, conservatives, and diaspora users. Having identified the most influential users in each community based on PageRank metric, we thoroughly investigated all of their tweets. The results show that ordinary users constituted the major population of conservative and diaspora publics. The reformist community included mostly journalists and to a lesser extent media. Findings also confirm that all networked publics used the same strategies to gain more power in the field. They produced quite the same frames and narratives to compete with each other. Moreover, the battle was more about the routine and electoral debates, not the legitimacy or entity of regime. Hence, none of the networked publics challenged the hegemonic discourse in Iran significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After Musa al-Sadr arrived in Lebanon in 1959, the passive Shi'i community became active, and this activism finally ended with Hezbollah gaining control in Lebanon and serving Iran in its confrontation with Israel. The research literature on al-Sadr and his activities in Lebanon shows that al-Sadr was, and still remains, a phenomenon who, by virtue of his deeds and charisma, elevated the Shi'i population in Lebanon from being a feeble and ineffective community to a proud and dominant one. This article shows how Musa al-Sadr's actions not only inspired the Shi'i revolution in Lebanon but also led to its wider dissemination all over the Middle East, starting with the Iranian Islamic Revolution. It will also describe how both the informal relations and the three different ideologies held by Khomeini, the Shah and al-Sadr finally helped al-Sadr crystallize his own revolutionary formula for political Shi'ism. That is, how al-Sadr's activism and propagating within the Shi'i community in Lebanon two decades before the Islamic Revolution in Iran prepared the community to accept Khomeini's message of a revival of Shi'ism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the challenges of women's activism in Iran using an explanatory-analytical method and the agency-structure theory. The article looks at the variables affecting the mobilization of women activists and political organizations in Iran from 1990 to 2011, and the challenges they had been facing. The hypothesis advanced by this article is that the most important factors influencing the activism of women activists were the different waves of feminism and democratization at the global level, as well as the generational gap, the developments in attitude and cultural aspects, an increase in the level of education, women's access to the Internet, and the relative openness of the political system. The findings of this research are that women's activism in Iran had achievements such as an amplified awareness and identification of rights, an increase of demands, the opposition to sociopolitical discrimination, the relative rise of the presence of women in Parliament, city councils, and executive bodies, and the realization of significant dimensions of social rights; in what concerns the dimension of political rights, the achievements have been much less important. The study also showed that sovereignty obstacles were among the most common challenges faced by women activists, among which we can mention ideological rigidity, pessimism about women's organizations, and the patriarchal-conservative view of governance, weak relationships, strategic and tactical incoherence, and political-intellectual gaps among activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the centrality of political activism in the identity of Iranian refugees and investigates how they perform and incorporate it by considering the interlocked pressure of international politics, personal networks, and the assistance provided by civil society organizations. The case of Iranian political refugees in Italy and Turkey is of particular interest because of the international visibility of the Green movement, the Iranian people’s historical experience of emigration, and the fact that Iran is a subject of great interest for a number of human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It shows how the process of “being a refugee” works not only through classical forms of institutional pressure but also through “unexpected” forms such as NGO efforts to empower refugees politically. Despite the positive value attached to it, in this context political activism can force refugees into preestablished roles, such as “human rights defenders” or “Green movement activists.” Paradoxically, refugees act within a context that dominates them even when it tries to empower them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contains ethnographic reflections on my research among Iranian leftists in exile. I discuss challenges of fieldwork and in-depth interviewing about sensitive topics. I particularly emphasize the dynamics of gaining interviewees' trust in a community concerned about political ramifications of revealing personal and organizational secrets. In this respect, I underline the complications of researching and representing a defeated movement. I also write about the gender implications of my research—a male feminist researching the gender dynamics of revolution and the changing sexual politics of revolutionary collectivities in Iran and abroad. Finally, I raise issues concerning doing sociology in translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]