Enmity and Revolution in Iran

This lecture is a work of interpretive political history that charts the Islamic Republic’s postrevolutionary trajectory through the organizing prism of enmity. While most histories of modern Iran emphasize ideology, religion, geopolitics, or authoritarianism, this talk argues that enmity – both as a political practice and a psychological disposition – has functioned as the central axis around which the Islamic Republic’s internal consolidation and external projection have revolved. From revolutionary fervor to institutionalized grievance, from foreign threat inflation to the suppression of domestic dissent, the politics of enmity animates the regime’s symbolic vocabulary, policy decisions, and collective self-understanding.

Hussein Banai is an Associate Professor of International Studies in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the (co)author of several books on Iran’s political development and US-Iran relations, most recently Hidden Liberalism: Burdened Visions of Progress in Modern Iran (Cambridge, 2020) and Republics of Myth: National Narratives and US-Iran Conflict (Johns Hopkins, 2022).

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