Babak B. and Arash Aramesh

TEHRAN — Iran is responding harshly to the U.S.–sponsored nuclear summit, which opened April 12 in Washington. The state-run media is filled with articles about an impending threat from the West – an attempt to alert Iranian society that, at least according to Iran’s leaders, the country is again a victim of Western aggression.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went as far as to declare that the world leaders attending the summit were “stupid” and “retarded.”

The insideIRAN.org project at The Century Foundation and the National Security Network are convening a year-long advisory task force comprised of North American, European, and Iranian participants, well-connected either to their respective countries’ policy-making on Iran or, in the case of the Iranians, to civil society and the Green Movement. The group aims to improve understanding of the political crisis inside Iran, particularly the state of the regime and the opposition, and to focus attention on policy steps that will be most effective in helping Iranians to reform their political system without empowering the regime against either its own people or other nations. more»

Keyhan Kasravi

BERLIN—Last week, the office of Tehran’s General and Revolutionary Courts announced that thirty individuals suspected of having been involved in organized cyber wars were arrested after a series of complicated intelligence operations in the field of communications technology. This followed a wave of attacks against anti-government websites and blogs by a group called Iran’s Cyber Army. more»

Mohammad Khiabani

Tabriz, Iran—Iranian politicians are always quick to praise Tabriz’s revolutionary credentials. During a November 2009 visit to the city, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recalled, “the people [of Tabriz and Iranian Azerbaijan] are pioneers of the pro-constitution movement, repelling the aggressors and acts of mischief and defending the supreme ideals of the Islamic Revolution.” The uprising of 29th of Bahman (February 19, 1978) in the city was a key continuation of the forty-day cycles of protest that spurred the Iranian Revolution forward. Further back, Tabriz, due to its closeness to Turkish and Russian intellectual circles, was a vanguard of intellectual agitation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the 1891 Tobacco Protest and the 1906 Constitutional Revolution to the 1946 Autonomous Azerbaijan’s People’s Government, Tabrizis have a long lineage of rebelliousness. How does this history resonate in the current, still-simmering political crisis centered in Tehran? more»

Riccardo Redaelli

COMO, Italy—If proper “timing and tuning” are essential during negotiations, over the past decade, neither Washington nor Tehran has managed to tune their political mood into the same wavelength. When the Islamic Republic was ready to enter into negotiations, the White House was not, and vice-versa. more»