Research topic
Islamic Revolution of Iran
Boroumand L., Mediterranean Peoples. Paris, CNRS, July-September 1979; 8: 59-76.
Boroumand L., Boroumand R., Social Research, Summer 2000, 67(2): 303-344
For almost two decades, the world saw Iran as a country of believers in a state of mystical unity with a political and spiritual supreme leader. For many, this image, together with terrorism and violence, symbolized the Islamic Republic of Iran. What the world did not know was that this image of unity was made possible and lasting by an unseen, dynamic of exclusion based on the tacitly acknowledged dichotomy between “insiders” and “outsiders.”
Boroumand L.,Boroumand R.,Journal of Democracy. October 2000, 11(4): 114-128.
Once again, a reformist electoral victory has been followed by political setbacks. The key to understanding this paradoxical pattern lies in the unique theocratic constitutional structure of the Islamic Republic.
Boroumand L.,Boroumand R., Journal of Democracy. April 2002, 13(2): 5-128.
Boroumand L., Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 4.2: Summer/Fall 2003.
Boroumand L.,Journal of Democracy. October 2005, 16(4).
Boroumand L., Journal of Democracy. October. October 2007, 18(4).
Observers who focus too much on elections have failed to grasp the maturation of Iranian civil society, even as hard-liners have come to dominate the government.
Boroumand L., Dissent Magazine, online argument, August 18, 2009.
One thing is to blame despots for coercing their victims to confess to crime they have not committed, another is to try to understand and make sens of this recurrent form of state violence. Coercing dissidents to confess complicity in imaginary Western plots is not some accidental abuse. Instead, it flows directly from the very nature of the Islamic regime and its inherent hostility to liberal-democratic nations.
Boroumand L., Journal of Democracy. October. October 2009
When students and other rights activists decided to seize a tactical opening that the regime cynically offered them during the 2009 campaign, they were making a choice that was even more fateful than they knew.
Boroumand L., Journal of Democracy, October 2017.
Wrongly viewed by many media sources as a victory for “reform” and “openness,” the recent presidential election in Iran actually reflected the demoralization and disengagement of the country’s pro-democracy opposition.
Boroumand L., Journal of Democracy, April 2018, 29(2).
A review of Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed by Misagh Parsa.
Boroumand L., Journal of Democracy, January 2020, 31(1)
Iran is in the midst of an ideological crisis. Growing numbers of Iranians are rejecting the religious underpinnings of the Supreme Leader’s rule, and turning their backs on the Islamic Republic. The regime’s only response is harsher repression—a response that will deepen the anger that is bringing everyday Iranians out into the streets.
Background
Four decades ago, when a cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, emerged on the Iranian and world political stage advocating for an unprecedented theo-political project, few, if any, within world’s liberal democracies realized they were witnessing the gestation of a new universalist ideological challenge to liberal democratic worldview. For several decades, liberal-democracies misidentified Islamist radicalism and did not consider it as a direct ideological threat despite the fact that from its inception it targeted Western democracy as its main enemy.
My research on the Islamic revolution of Iran focuses on its syncretic ideology, a combination of modern revolutionary and traditional religious elements, its challenges to liberal democracy, and its meaning within the global history of modern totalitarianism.