Global Iranian Studies Review - GlobIS Review is a bilingual website to review works related to Iran in the field of social sciences in Iran and the world

The editorial asks whether the upheavals since 9/11, the Arab uprisings, and the current war on Iran are giving rise to a “new regional order” in the Middle East. It surveys the role of global powers, the geoeconomics of the Persian Gulf, competing political blocs, and the Israel–Iran conflict, and asks whether regional powers will turn to economic cooperation or to recurrent wars.

Shima Vezvaei reviews Beyrut, Ebrahim Akbari Dizgah’s award-winning blend of novel and travelogue about a seminary-educated writer’s journey to Lebanon to document the life of Imam Musa al-Sadr. Through the narrator’s view of women, Shi’a Islam, and Iran, she reads the book as a window onto how a young generation close to the Islamic Republic’s establishment imagines Lebanon.

Arang Keshavarzian speaks with Naghmeh Sohrabi and Ramyar Rossoukh about the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, founded in 2005 to study the Middle East as an interconnected region. They discuss the history of Middle East studies in the United States, recent regional developments, and the shrinking support for scholars, including those coming from Iran.

Samar Saremi reviews Hamid Ahmadi’s Political Tendencies in the Middle East and Iran’s National Security, which critically examines how the Islamic Republic’s regional policies relate to the region’s intellectual-political currents and to threats against Iran’s national security. She argues that while the book places Iranian nationhood at the heart of national security, it leaves the link between democracy and security unresolved.

Azam Khatam talks with historian Afshin Matin-Asgari, special advisor to this issue, about his new book Axis of Empire: A History of Iran–US Relations. The conversation traces more than a century of US imperial interests in Iran, the commitment to independence among Iranian political currents, and how the war is changing Iranian views of foreign intervention.

Mahmood Monshipouri reviews How Sanctions Work, in which Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez combine oral histories, media analysis, and economic data to trace the effects of sanctions on Iran since 1979. The book shows that sanctions have strengthened the Islamic Republic while impoverishing its population, and the reviewer argues that the recent attacks on Iran make its findings all the more relevant.

Esmaeil Izadi reviews Vali Nasr’s Iran’s Grand Strategy, which reads a century of Iranian foreign policy as a coherent logic of state survival rather than ideology or irrationality. Reframing Nasr’s argument through the lens of the modern nation-state, the review asks whether a durable grand strategy can emerge without reconciling state survival with national legitimacy and inclusive development.

Farideh Shahriari reviews The Political Science of the Middle East, edited by Marc Lynch, Jillian Schwedler, and Sean Yom, which surveys how scholarship after the Arab uprisings rethought authoritarianism, protest, sectarianism, migration, and local politics. She values it as a disciplinary stocktaking, but notes that it offers readers in Iranian studies comparative questions rather than a sustained treatment of Iran.

An excerpt from the introduction to Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century, edited by Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera. Against the “exceptionalist” image of a region trapped by its history, culture, and religion, the editors show how the Middle East has long been shaped by, and has shaped, global flows of ideas, people, arts, goods, and beliefs.

Aidin Torkameh reviews Laleh Khalili’s Sinews of War and Trade, a history of how shipping routes, ports, and maritime infrastructure made the Arabian Peninsula central to global capitalism. Reading the book as a study of the production of space, he finds it especially timely now that the war has put the Strait of Hormuz back in the headlines.