This article introduces the concept of the weaponisation of emotion to analyse how emotional responses are strategically cultivated during instances of international political captivity. Using the case of Swedish EU diplomat Johan Floderus’s 2022 detention in Iran, it explores how states manipulate collective emotions – such as fear, outrage, and pride – to pursue political, ideological, or diplomatic objectives. Drawing on intergroup emotions theory (IET), it is argued that emotions are not mere by-products of crisis but deliberate tools of emotional statecraft, shaping public reactions, pressuring foreign governments, and reinforcing domestic legitimacy. Political captivity thus becomes more than coercion or negotiation. It transforms into a symbolic arena where emotional narratives escalate tensions, mobilise identity politics, and generate international support or condemnation. By linking emotion research with security and IR scholarship, this study offers a novel framework for understanding the socio-psychological dimensions of state power and highlights the volatility and strategic potential of collective emotions in global politics.

Iran is one of the most stigmatised countries of the twenty-first century: having been sanctioned by the US since 1979, the Islamic Republic was declared part of the ‘axis of evil’ by President George W. Bush in 2002, and from 2006 onwards, it has been subject to multilateral, comprehensive and wide-reaching economic sanctions. In June 2025, this discursive and economic attack on Iran transitioned to direct military bombardment. For the United States and its allies, Iran is a pariah state. This stigmatisation of Iran is an example of the kinds of practices that contribute to the social construction of the international order, whereby some countries are designated as ‘inside’ and others as ‘outside’ the community of established states. Needless to say, Iran has been placed firmly in the ‘outside’ category ever since 1979. At the same time as accepting and even at times embracing this ‘outsider’ status, however, Iran has also sought to raise its own international standing and to be accepted as an ‘insider’.

A growing body of evidence finds that rural electrification reduces fertility, typically by expanding women’s opportunities outside the home and raising the opportunity cost of childbearing. We examine electrification in post-revolutionary rural Iran, where electricity expanded rapidly but female labor force participation remained low. Using a large panel of villages observed in the 1986, 1996, and 2006 censuses, we show that while Ordinary Least Squares estimates align with the broader literature in suggesting a negative association between electrification and fertility, instrumental variable estimates exploiting elevation-based variation reveal the opposite: villages with longer exposure to electricity experienced higher fertility. This positive effect is strongest in provinces with lower female labor force participation, indicating that the substitution channel emphasized in prior research was weak in the Iranian context. These findings highlight the importance of context in shaping demographic responses to infrastructure and suggest that electrification’s effects on fertility are not universally negative.

The first decade after the end of revolutionary events in Gilan (1920–21) was a period of active attempts by the Bolsheviks, Communist International, and Communist Party of Iran to gain a solid social foothold in Iran. This article, based mainly on Russian archival sources, focuses on the dynamics of the Communist International and Communist Party of Iran guidelines, attempts and features of their implementation, and the relationship between Iranian communists and the Bolshevik and Communist International leadership. This study demonstrates that the main Red efforts between 1922–25 aimed at building an inter-class coalition, in which cooperation with Reza Khan became only a part of these broader efforts. Their failure led the Reds to return to a previously tested course of fomenting agrarian revolution in Iran and repeated fiascos. Throughout this period, the Communist Party of Iran’s leadership did not simply execute directives but instead took an active role in the decision-making process, involved the Bolsheviks in internal party struggle, and challenged high-ranking functionaries of the Communist International.

Antecedents and consequences of employer-supported volunteering (ESV) have been widely studied. Yet, in the literature, few studies have attempted to succinctly assess this phenomenon in non-Western countries. In this regard, the primary purpose of this study is to understand the antecedents and consequences of employee participation in ESV in Iranian organizations. To achieve this, we employed a qualitative method. Fifteen managers from four companies that had experienced participating in ESV programs were chosen as the sample. Having interviewed the managers, we used grounded theory method to interpret our findings. The results revealed that 25 concepts exist. These concepts were divided into five categories: personal conditions; types of employee participation in ESV (core phenomenon); intra-organizational conditions; environmental conditions; and consequences. Finally, these categories formed a conceptual framework. It seems that this framework can be a practical tool for companies intended to run ESVs, in Iran.

This article analyzes various roles of development practitioners (called outsiders) in five different cases of community-based development (CBD) in rural Iran. It provides a review of the literature on CBD and identifies three main types of roles fulfilled by outsiders to support indigenous development processes. These include preparing the ground, activating community-based organizations as participatory institutions, and taking on the role of brokers who bridge the gap between the local community and outside institutions—especially the state and market. From the analysis of empirical qualitative data collected during fieldwork in Iran, the article concludes that while the roles played by the outsiders in CBD interventions there correspond mostly to those identified in the literature, there are differences in their strategies of intervention and activities under each role which correspond with their contextual contingencies. Recognizing this variation is needed to deepen the understanding of CBD practices and help practitioners think about alternative perspectives and approaches.

The present article aims to assess the relationship between the mass exodus of Iranian Christians and the Hispanic world, widening the analytical lens on early 20th-century Iranian migrations. Specifically, the study draws parallels between the humanitarian efforts of the Spanish diplomats during the Turkish occupation of northwestern Persia in 1918 and the subsequent arrival and settlement of Assyrians and Armenians in Argentina in the early decades of the twentieth century. Although numerous publications address the early Iranian diaspora and Iran during the World War I, little scholarly work examines Spain’s humanitarian role in this context or the history of the Iranian diaspora in Latin America. This finding underscores the notion that, in addition to the prominent international actors that have historically been the focus of scholarly inquiry—namely, the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, and Russia—smaller countries also played a significant role in the events that transpired in Iran during those years. Furthermore, this study highlights the Iranian diaspora’s expansion to distant regions, such as Argentina, which has not been extensively researched in the context of Iranian studies. This comprehensive approach serves to broaden our understanding of the global history of Iran in the early twentieth century.

While animal welfare is a growing global concern, there has been very little research into how it is understood in Iran. Cultural, religious, and legal factors influence attitudes and practices in ways not addressed by existing research. This study provides culturally grounded insights for improvement of animal welfare in Iran. Utilising a validated survey tool, we investigated the attitudes of Iranians toward the welfare of farmed, companion, and wild animals. A total of 325 responses were collected. The findings indicate that animal welfare is considered important to Iranians, with the majority expressing interest in improving the welfare practices. Despite varying degrees of familiarity with different animal species, there was a consensus on the importance of enacting laws to protect animal welfare. Most participants agreed that chickens feel pain (92.9%) and emotions (79%), whereas fewer attributed these capacities to fish, with 63.6% acknowledging pain and 59.5% acknowledging emotions. Furthermore, most of the participants agreed that animals should not endure pain in the slaughter process (97.8% agreement). While the majority of participants agreed that pre-slaughter stunning was better for the animals (78.7%), only 51.7% agreed that they would prefer to eat meat from animals that had been stunned; reflecting the traditionally held views regarding the role of stunning in Halal meat production. The results of the current study support previous findings suggesting that concern for animals may be a universal human inclination, although, in Iran, attitudes towards specific species and agricultural practices are also shaped by religious perspectives.

Following the 2020 Karabakh War, the emerging geopolitical realities compelled Iran to recalibrate its South Caucasus policy, prompting a shift away from its longstanding posture of neutrality. Despite the potential for Tehran to engage in cooperation through proposed regionalist projects by other actors, a significant shift towards regionalism in Iran’s approach to the South Caucasus remains elusive. This article delves into two primary sets of factors to understand the reasons behind this absence of regionalism in Iran’s foreign policy towards the South Caucasus. The first set encompasses general approaches in Iran’s foreign policy and the impact of domestic political dynamics on their development. It discusses Iran’s perceived impossibility of aligning with the South Caucasus states, the absence of a robust neighborhood policy, and Iran’s strategic isolation in the region, attributed to its unique political system and the ideological stance of its ruling elite. The second set examines external dynamics, including constant international pressure on the Islamic Republic, Iran’s deep-seated ideological and security attachment to the Arab Middle East, and the fluctuating nature of Tehran’s relations with the West. Collectively, these factors significantly limit Iran’s capacity to craft a coherent strategy for regional integration in the South Caucasus.

Debates on gender, war, and revolution in the Middle East are not new. The question of gender in the region has moved the imaginaries of academics, administrators, policymakers, journalists and activists throughout the decades, if not centuries. There is a similarly vast amount of literature on war and revolution in a region that has often been seen, and continues to be seen, through a lens shaped by a disproportional focus on conflict and violence. Many have brought the two perspectives together, discussing the nexus of gender, war, and revolution in the Middle East. This article is the introduction to a roundtable, which consists of three articles on gender, revolution, and war in Afghanistan, Iran, and Syria and contributes to this long-standing tradition of debates on the topic, offering unique perspectives on an oft-discussed area. Together, the three articles that make up this roundtable stand out for the broad range of their methodological approaches, their challenging of dominant approaches and simplifying binaries, and their efforts to highlight and counter the sidelining of marginalized perspectives.

What happens when states’ gender identity is endangered? How may a state actor’s gender identity be conceived of and (de)stabilised in the first place? What are the ontological effects of such disruptions? And how do states respond to ruptures in their gender identities or selves? Despite growing attention to gendered narratives in ontological security studies (OSS), the extant scholarship has engaged with gender issues more within states and societies than between them in making sense of state identity and behaviour in international relations. Building upon the existing literature and the theoretical works of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, this article attempts to contribute towards theorising gender more systematically into OSS by demonstrating how it constitutes collective subjectivities and orders imagined state selves in relation to others. Introducing the concept of ontological dislocation, it adopts a non-essentialist performative view of statehood as well as of gender and investigates how states pursue ontological security through gendering themselves and others and what ensues when critical facets of these gendered selves are distorted and disrupted. To illustrate the theorisation empirically, the research focuses on the gender dynamics of Iran’s revolutionary identity and nuclear behaviour to show how destabilisation of gender identity can cause ontological dislocation and lead to a restless scramble to relocate the self.

This article examines diasporic Iranian responses to protests sparked by the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini in September 2022. While Amini’s death galvanized widespread dissent inside Iran, it also spurred diasporic Iranian solidarity, often expressed through the call to “be the voice” of Iranian protestors. I analyze two key practices of diasporic narration: first, framing the Woman, Life, Freedom protests as a “revolution” in social media discourse; and second, the circulation of nostalgic video montages idealizing pre-1979 Iran as a lost era of political freedom. Together, these practices reveal how diasporic narratives may dilute protest demands by fitting them into revisionist frameworks. The conclusion reflects on both the potential and limits of diaspora narration in shaping political memory and understanding.

This article analyzes the diasporic dimensions of the 2022 Jina Revolutionary Momentum and its transnational resonance in Berlin, where more than 80,000 protestors gathered in solidarity with events in Iran. It argues that the momentum is best understood not as a continuation of previous movements but as a revolutionary rupture that generates new horizons of possibility through the politics of care, contrasting fear as the regime’s dominant affective frame. Drawing on affect theory, the article explores how the revolutionary imaginary transformed both the Iranian diaspora and indirectly Berlin itself into sites of revolutionary performance. By situating the Iranian diasporic activism in the city’s longer history as a node for exiled revolutionary activity, the analysis highlights how diasporic activism influenced the national imaginary, fostered transnational solidarities, and reshaped the meaning of Kharej (abroad) from one of exclusion to one of affection within a broader revolutionary geography.