Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic

by Narges Bajoghli

An inside look at what it means to be pro-regime in Iran, and the debates around the future of the Islamic Republic.

More than half of Iran's citizens were not alive at the time of the 1979 Revolution. Now entering its fifth decade in power, the Iranian regime faces the paradox of any successful revolution: how to transmit the commitments of its political project to the next generation. New media ventures supported by the Islamic Republic attempt to win the hearts and minds of younger Iranians. Yet members of this new generation--whether dissidents or fundamentalists--are increasingly skeptical of these efforts.

Iran Reframed offers unprecedented access to those who wield power in Iran as they debate and define the future of the Republic. Over ten years, Narges Bajoghli met with men in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Ansar Hezbollah, and Basij paramilitary organizations to investigate how their media producers developed strategies to court Iranian youth. Readers come to know these men--what the regime means to them and their anxieties about the future of their revolutionary project. Contestation over how to define the regime underlies all their efforts to communicate with the public. This book offers a multilayered story about what it means to be pro-regime in the Islamic Republic, challenging everything we think we know about Iran and revolution.

Genres: Iran, Politics, Middle East, History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Islam

178 pages, Hardcover

Published September 24, 2019

About the author

Narges Bajoghli is Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. She has written for the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, and the Washington Post, and has appeared as a commentator on CNN, NPR, PBS, Democracy Now, and the BBC. She is the director of the documentary The Skin That Burns, screened at The Hague, Hiroshima, Jaipur, and film festivals throughout the United States.

Reviews

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bajoghli invests an enormous amount of time and energy building the insider contacts for researching this book. She gains access to numerous film studios and producers for the Iranian state media, and follows their shifting strategies to make their programs appealing for a whole new largely disenchanted generation:

“‘What you don’t understand,’ Mr. Hosseini said, ‘is that most of our problems stem from the fact that we’ve stopped communicating with the other side. The majority of our society no longer listens to us. THAT is what needs to change, and that can only change if we engage with the other side.’”

“Look, I’ve told you many times these past ten years that we’ve had our share of big mistakes. We’ve censored voices and made people distrust us. But we’re also dealing with a situation in which powerful states are against us and are pouring money into media that our population consumes to make them hate us even more. I don’t know if anyone has figured out how to solve this problem. And it’s not just a problem that we face in Iran.”

[Murtaza]

A very short academic study of the media production apparatus of the Islamic Republic of Iran. If you are interested in media studies you may find this of particular use; but more importantly, by virtue of the author spending a decade with these ordinary regime supporters, she got a more textured understanding of them as people. I would like to read a whole book about the 15-year olds who were swept up into the popular mobilizations for the Iran-Iraq War and the lives that they led after. Many in the Iranian system are aware that their revolutionary ideology has little appeal to the youth. To fix this they have shifted to a more traditional Persian nationalism, made with reference to soil and history. For what it’s worth this book is fine. But there is the seed here of a greater human story that could be told about Iran and its people.

[Mansoor · Rating 1 out of 5]

باورکردنی نیست که انتشارات دانشگاه استنفورد اجازه داده این رپرتاژ در قالب پژوهشی آکادمیک منتشر شود

پی‌نوشت: چرا، باورکردنی هست. بعد از تمام چیزهایی که در 2020 دیدیم

[Darius · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an incredibly interesting and thorough analysis of state media production in modern Iran and the attempts by the men who control this propaganda organ to capture the minds and hearts of a new generation of young Iranians.

As a piece of scholarship that took 10 years of immersed research to complete, Bajoghli's work is a masterful examination of the nuanced and conflicting perspectives from within pro-regime Iranian discourse.

Absolutely recommended for anyone with an interest in Middle Eastern issues/geopolitics or media studies.

Pros:
- Bajoghli does an outstanding job weaving together the human narratives of her protagonists against the wider story of the Iranian political, social and media landscape. Never does one dominate the other or feel clunkily inserted - instead the two run together harmoniously in a way that made the book a captivating read from front cover to back
- The book is written with an objective and balanced perspective - as a social studies scholar, and an Iranian-American with a thorough appreciation of both Western and Eastern culture, the author presents her findings in a way that feels truly unbiased and strictly informative. As a reader I was left feeling as though I had read a piece of academia - it had that kind of purely factual aura. When opinions or inferences were being offered by the author she made this very clear.
- As alluded to above, the media and social landscape in Iran is one that is infinitely more nuanced than a Westerner relying on mainstream media coverage of the Middle East can appreciate - Bajoghli does a fantastic job of teasing out these nuances in a natural way - we get to hear the true opinions of those she researches in her book, contradictions and all
- Concise, easily-digestible explanations of different political/social groups, Farsi terms, cultural concepts etc throughout the book

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

We have been programmed to think of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a seamless collection of zealous and brutal true believers who represent and promote the values of the Iranian Revolution. That is not always wrong, but how would it look if you could sit in on their private meetings where they shared their own doubts and questions? That is precisely what Narges Bajoghli -- an American woman of Iranian heritage with degrees in anthropology and film making from NYU -- did for ten years. Amazingly, she was accepted into the all male universe of IRGC film makers who crank out propaganda movies for the Iranian public. In this very short and readable account, she takes us inside the official curtain and lets us watch the interaction of a very human group of people who share their uncertainties about their country, their government and their own work. It is very seldom that a rigorously academic book (more than half its pages are footnotes) is presented so simply as a series of stories that are immediately accessible to almost any reader. The purpose of this book is simply to inform. Bajoghli does not try to persuade you to change your view about the IRGC or Iran, but you can hardly come away from this book without a deeper appreciation of the humanity of those who are normally viewed only through the lens of "the enemy." It is a remarkable achievement of scholarship.

[KP · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book may be relatively short, but it packs in a whole lot of information!

[Navid Molaaghaei · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most interesting books I’ve read on Iran lately. Since nobody believes in the Islamic Republic propaganda anymore, the regime’s cultural media producers are in a constant and anxious fight about how to frame their work. While older generations are adamant about focus strictly on non-religious nationalist sentiments, younger producers are more ideologically brainwashed and follow the orthodox line of the Supreme Leader. Shockingly (although not as much for anyone who has family the country’s outside upper classes), the propaganda of the former can actually be effective among people if they can hide the fact that it’s state propaganda. Bajoghli’s access to and interviews with 200 IRGC and Basiji members is mind-blowing and her voice active and well-aware of any dangerous water she might be entering. Although diaspora media is preferred by most likely most of Iranians, the strategies of regime propaganda can’t be ignored. At the very least they tell us what state the current regime is in, which is very welcome given that we usually see it through the repressive lens. For me, one word can describe it: anxiety! Anxiety of a nation that is tired of a state that can’t fool them, a state that is desperate to create stories to get the people on their side. Bajoghli concludes, convincingly, “contestation in the IR is not just between the regime and the people or between older generations and the young. Instead […] this research reveals a multi-layered story that complicates existing understand of what it means to be ‘pro-regime’ in the IR.”

[Eric Randolph · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant little book giving a much more nuanced view of pro-regime officials than is normally found -- though given its extremely rare access to these people, the only disappointment is that more wasn't done with the material .

[Matthew Petti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bajoghli set out to write an anthropological study of pro-government movie producers in Iran, but she ended up creating a work that is about much more than that. By spending years in pro-government circles, Bajoghli learned about the concerns that motivate Iran's conservative elite.

Even though these people hold state power, they feel jealous of and besieged by the country's liberal elite, who are often richer and more connected to international sources of prestige like education and travel. The conservative elites, many of whom came from a lower-class background before the revolution and made great sacrifices for their country, feel that they are losing the youth to slick media produced in Los Angeles and London.

Bajoghli also shows that many Iranian government supporters are quite critical of the system's flaws, even if there are some red lines they won't cross, and the Reformist project is a real one.

[Zeb Kantrowitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is book that should be thought of as a reference work. The author spent 10 years(on and off) in Revolutionary Iran. She reports on how the media is used to try to manipulate the people especially as to the great luck they have to be living in an Islamic Republic.

Though Bajoghli does spent time of how the Ayatollahs have take control of the media, she mostly spends her time discussing how slowly, the media learns how to adjust to the new rules. Like anyone living in a dictatorship, the media people learn how to kow-tow to the government by making the types of print/media/films that is expected of them. At the same time they learn how to use the equipment during times they are not 'watched' they produce the kind of stories they want and smuggle them out of the country.

Gives a different view of what is actually going on in Iran.

[Parisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

ممنون از راحله برای معرفیش و من هم این کتاب را توصیه میکنم.
کتاب راجع به سیاست گذاری فرهنگی صدا و سیما خصوصا بعد از سال 88 هست که اعتماد مردم به رسانه ی ملی و فیلم ها بیش از پیش از بین میرود.
نویسنده طی جلسات متعدد و همراهی هایی که با فیلمسازهای انقلابی انجام میدهد گزارشی از روند بحث‌ها و تفکری که پشت فیلم سازی با این مضامین وجود دارد ارائه میدهد.
برای من که دوستانی با تفکرات مشابه فیلمسازهای کتاب هم داشته ام مجموع نوشته‌ها برایم تاییدی بود بر اندیشه‌ها و گمان‌هایی که به سیاست های پشت پرده فیلم‌ها داشتم.
به طور مثال به طور کاملا واضح میگوید که بعد از سال 88 آنها مینشیند در جلسه و با خودشان تصمیم میگیرند که خب حالا که دیگر حنایمان رنگ ندارد میهن پرستی را بیاوریم زیرمجموعه جمهوری اسلامی و قهرمان پروری ملی.
.بله همه ی این ها حقیقت دارد و خب کاش حداقل بدانیم که چه خوراکی به جامعه و ما تزریق میشود.

[Carlos · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a stunning book. I've always been curious about Iran but have found it so confusing to understand from following the news. This book is smart, extremely well-written, and a pleasure to read. I felt like I was in Tehran with the author getting to know the world she's describing for us. I read academic books a lot, but rarely do I read ones I recommend to non-academics because of the fluency of the text and how well-explained it all is. I recommend this book to anyone who is curious about Iran--you'll come away with a deeper understanding than anything else you'll read on post-revolutionary Iran.

[Yngve Skogstad · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the surface an ethnography of regime-loyal media producers in the Islamic republic. On a more fundamental level,the book deals with how (revolutionary) states reproduce themselves across generations. The book also problematizes the common conception of what it means to be pro-regime in Iran today. It adds some much-needed nuance to the dominant notion of a fairly monolithic group of people and internally coherent organizations. My only critique is that if you take the privileged access the author got into account, it's a little disappointing the book wasn't any longer. That being said, I have a feeling that this isn't the last we'll hear from Narges Bajoghli.

[Wilmer Rezvani · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is, more than anything else, objective and balanced. As someone witha good appreciation of both Western and Iranian culture, the author presents an unbiased and informative pitcure. The media and messaging landscape is much more sophisticated and complex than most Westerners apprecciate. The explanations are easy to grasp even for those unfamiliar with the social/cultural nuances of Iran. Narges Bajoghli's writing is very captivating while being sufficiently "academic" with well researched and presented facts.

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

The flow and layout of this book are not great. But still, you get an incredible first-hand look into the IRGC attempts through the film to persuade and relate with the younger generation (and there is a huge gap!) I also like how she paints a picture of how nuanced Iran is. We tend to think of Iran in the black or white, pro-regime and anti-regime. But it is a complex place and she shows that well.

[Kim Shively · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great ethnographic account of the complicated views and positions of media producers in Iran who produce propaganda supporting the Iranian regime. It's easy to think that such people and the various institutions they come from would be relatively homogenous in their views, but that is definitely not the case. A good teaching book for those interested in the modern Middle East, media studies, and the production of nationalism (and contestations of nationalism as well).

[Julien Neter · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating little book! I will freely confess that I hold fairly little interest in the field of media studies. However, though its stated goal is to study pro-regime media producers in modern-day Iran, the book goes much further that and gives a nuanced, balanced view at how pro-regime people think and act in Iran, way beyond stereotypes.

[Holly Dolezalek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intriguing glimpse into the thinking of the people who are producing videos and other content to promote the Iranian regime. It explains that those who support the *regime* don't necessarily support the *government.*

[The Contented · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating study on the management of media narratives in a post-revolutionary society.

Very insightful, and, suddenly (only a few months after publication), hugely topical.

An additional star for the objective approach to the subject - just because I’ve never seen anything like it.

[Alan Eyre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good on contemporary Iran society

[Rob Lewan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was an informative book but there were so many characters this book presented, which was great, but there would have been better separation between these characters.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Approachable but rich text that challenged my long-standing assumptions about Iranian politics and state-society relations.

[Hoda Nedaeifar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably for an individual who has lived most of her life in post-revolutionary Iran (myself), most of the content is familiar/known. But what struck me was the way the writer approaches her subject matter, her integrity in expressing opinions, and her straightforward and absolutely clear language (goes with my fav. motto “simple but not simplistic”). Unfortunately oftentimes the works in area studies contain some inexact/detached information. Here, however, it is clear that the writer has LIVED this research. I also appreciate how the book tries to stay away from structuring binaries and arguing against an ideology, instead focusing on nuances and complexities. Certainly recommended for Iranian studies scholars.