Three Easy Pieces
Why write on a blog when people will publish your work elsewhere? That’s not the only driving force behind my quietude here, since I am immersed in academic mill grinding, but it is a factor. Nevertheless, here are a few pieces that, while written at various times in the past year, all came out in the last several weeks.
First, a very condensed version of a paper I presented at Cambridge University this summer on pseudo-privatization in Iran’s economy is out in the new Muftah web magazine. The nut of it: Iran has been shifting its state-owned economy to a host of economic players still linked to the state, but this is not the same thing as a takeover of the economy by any single actor (i.e. the Revolutionary Guards). So far, feedback on the piece has been favorable. The actual paper will be published in 2011 in an edited volume on Routledge.
Second, I was asked to write a policy “briefer” on the Iranian bazaars for journalist Robin Wright’s new Iran Primer. The whole book is a repository of the accumulated common sense on Iran shared by the more vocal and well-placed US crew of experts that work on the country. Whether that represents an accurate picture of the country or not, I reserve my judgment. I immediately asked that Arang Keshavarzian write the briefer on the bazaar, since he is the actual expert on it (he did honest-to-god field work in the bazaar in the early 2000s). But he was grinding his own academic mill, so the task was up to me. Given the uninformed suppositions about the power of the bazaar, and the stale thesis of the “mosque-bazaar alliance” that still floats around the aforementioned crew of experts, I took on the job. Most of the piece would not have been possible, however, without Arang’s excellent work. Here is my piece via the USIP site and reprinted on Tehran Bureau.
Lastly, and hopefully not the least of these efforts, I have published a review of Mehran Kamrava’s 2008 book Iran’s Intellectual Revolution in the current issue of New Left Review. I wrote this review in six hours sitting in a hotel lobby in the Iranian city of Ahvaz. The original solicitor of the piece turned it down, and by luck it was circulated to the desk of the editors of NLR, who asked me to expand it for a non-Iranian audience. It is not just a review of Kamrava’s book, but an initial attempt to critically analyze many of the social and political frames in which Iran is situated, in this case by the country’s own intellectual strata. Unfortunately, the entire piece is available subscription only, but you can probably read it in about 20 minutes over a coffee at your local Borders. Or at a library, if you still have one of those things in your town.
A lot has been happening in the Iranian economy recently - subsidy reform, currency moves, bullish stock market runs - and the current coverage in the news is pretty inadequate. I’ll follow up with a post putting some of these events in context, but for now, back to the mill.
