Posts tagged : "Society"

Kourosh Ziabari - Al-Monitor: As the talks to revive the landmark 2015 nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action continue with uncertainty, the administration of President Ebrahim Raisi is stepping up pressure on activists and dissidents in a bid to ensure at least on the domestic front that it is able to rule the roost. Building on decades of experience in the judiciary where he served as chief justice for nearly three years between 2019-2021, Ebrahim Raisi is working with other branches of the government to stifle critical voices and tighten the noose around the media, political activists, artists and other influencers with unconventional views challenging the status quo, including the forlorn state of the...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: The administration of hard-line Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi is busy unleashing a multi-pronged war on people’s lifestyles and privacy. Police vans are deployed to arrest women on the streets dressing in ways deemed to be insufficiently conservative, musical performances are called off intermittingly, and major cinematic productions are not licensed to be screened. Now, the unscathed unofficial spaces for young people to mingle and have fun away from the stern gaze of the authorities are being encroached on. Untitled Café in Rasht – a city in northern Iran known for its rich food culture, luxury shopping centres, upscale districts subsuming voguish clothing retailers and a...

Kourosh Ziabari - TRT World: It was once the largest saltwater lake in the Middle East, and the sixth largest on Earth. Along its fertile banks, civilisations rose and fell. It was the cradle of life, sustaining millions of lives through millennia — humans, animals, birds. It is now dying. Lake Urmia in northwestern Iran is fast on its way to desiccation or drying up. And the emergency management authorities of the West Azerbaijan province have warned as recently as July 14 that more than 95 percent of the highly saline lake’s water has disappeared. This follows a two-decade pattern of annually losing 40 centimetres of its water level. Although officials blame the runaway drying of the lake to the conundrum of climate change and...

Kourosh Ziabari - Al-Monitor: As the administration of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi faces discontent over increasingly difficult economic  conditions, the government is ratcheting up agitprop around compulsory hijab, the Islamic dress code, in what many Iranians say is a bid to divert public attention from the nation’s day-to-day hardships. The government's efforts to enforce hijab rules are divisive in Iranian society with its outward-looking young population and liberal-minded middle class. On July 12, as the government hyped “chastity and hijab week,” thousands of Iranian women pushed the envelope of their traditional social roles and recorded themselves walking around the streets of Tehran and other cities...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: It seems that not a day passes in Iran’s blistering summer without the state media publishing something new about the administration of President Ebrahim Raisi’s plans to counter the alleged corruption of social morality through women’s lax compliance with the government’s strict hijab mandate. Debate on the imperative of observing the Islamic dress code, or hijab, has been ongoing since the advent of the 1979 revolution. There are few priorities, like the way women should dress, that Iran’s theocracy treats as a life-and-death urgency. Not even the desolate state of the national economy, spiralling poverty, unfettered inflation and human capital flight precipitated by the traction of nepotism...

Kourosh Ziabari - The National Interest: More than most countries in the Middle East and West Asia, international attention is gravitating toward Iran, which has become one of the crucial news hotspots of the world. Iran is not garnering interest because of all the fancy things typically associated with it: windcatchers and Persian gardens, millennia-old castles, saffron, carpets, or poetry; rather, it is at the heart of some of the most difficult conversations around nuclear security, terrorism, and human rights. In a 2013 study, Elad Segev, an associate professor of international communication at Tel Aviv University, found that the centrality of Iran coverage in the media organizations worldwide is huge—maybe even outsized. On...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: As the United States Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling has sparked a global debate over abortion, the Iranian people have turned to social media to reject the hardline administration of President Ebrahim Raisi’s aggressive population policy and its baby boom ambitions. In a country of 85 million in which the median age is 31 and almost two-thirds of the population are under 40 years of age, the Iranian government is pushing for resistance against demographic ageing and jumping through hoops to boost the fertility rate. In 2013, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei explicitly demanded that the population should nearly double to 150 million and the...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: In Iran, where social fissures are vividly displayed and routinely reinforced, debate on feminism and equal rights for women is an exclusively polarising stimulus for public contretemps, not only because of the degrading way in which feminist advocates are treated by the state, but also the quotidian clashes which pits feminists against each other. It is quite rare for Iranian feminists to agree on how women rights should be defined and promoted, leaving little room to focus on charting concrete paths in reclaiming the rights of women within a patriarchal society. However alienating and fruitless the intellectual spats tend to be, almost everybody concerned over the dire conditions experienced by women...

Kourosh Ziabari - Foreign Policy: When Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was running for office, he famously said in a May 2021 televised debate how much he deplored the disruption that Iranian children who play online games experience due to the nation’s poor internet infrastructure and weak signals, arguing that he had plans to boost internet connectivity if elected. He made similar remarks about his displeasure that university students are being sealed off from their peers internationally because of the country’s flawed internet services. As simplistic as his youth outreach may have been, Raisi was trying to portray himself as a politician who related to the young population’s sensitivities around sustainable internet...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Nationwide protests over the Iranian government’s decision to cut subsidies on food and basic staples and the ensuing hyperinflation have diminished, but a kerfuffle involving the Islamic Republic and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has heightened tensions globally, driving the US dollar to historic highs in the Tehran market, and rendering the prospects of the revival of the nuclear deal dimmer than ever. The UN nuclear watchdog’s 35-nation Board of Governors passed a resolution on June 8 rebuking Iran for its limited cooperation with the IAEA and the traces of uranium at three nuclear sites about which it has provided insufficient explanations to the world body. Of the IAEA member...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: In today's irreversibly globalised world, international travelling and mobility are not merely deemed a privilege, but a fundamental entitlement the informed and probing citizens of the 21st century assertively expect the governments to provide. To a large extent, the power of the passports people hold illustrates the standing of their countries in the community of nations, the shades of respectful treatment they receive while away from home, and in many cases, the boundaries of their freedoms and prerogatives. Last October, the London-headquartered global citizenship and residence advisory firm Henley & Partners published its quarterly repertoire of the most desirable passports in terms of their...

Kourosh Ziabari - Foreign Policy: In a bid to shore up its wobbly legitimacy, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s administration is appealing to the sizable Iranian diaspora to consider returning to its ancestral homeland and contribute to Iran’s economic, social, industrial, and technological development. As the ultraconservative cleric finds his government hamstrung by its own nebulous economic and foreign-policy agendas, capitalizing on the enterprise and assets of the thriving community of Iranians abroad could serve as a handy remedy to the nation’s myriad challenges. In December 2021, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian announced the administration was preparing to submit a bill to parliament to “support...