Human Rights Guerrillas: Iran in the Long 1970's

Mehdi Bazargan warned judges that his trial would be the last “in which a political group was persecuted for upholding the constitution.” Bazargan stood accused, alongside other leaders of the Liberation Movement in Iran, for supporting the 1963 uprisings that would launch Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s career as a popular revolutionary figure. Five years later, a left guerrilla activist and political theorist named Bizhan Jazani delivered a defense behind closed doors that made intricate appeals to legal precepts outlined in Iran’s constitution, proving Bazargan’s prediction false. Jazani’s trial, more than Bazargan’s, marks a turning point after which revolutionary activism in Iran took on a new character. This lecture describes the shift in Iranian revolutionary activism, focusing on unlikely parallels between then-emergent strategies in guerrilla warfare and human rights advocacy. Developments in Iran reflected patterns in other locales similarly in flux—from Vietnam, Cuba, and Palestine to the United Kingdom, the United States, and the United Nations. But revolutionary Iran did not just reflect global history. It shaped it. Circumstances specific to Iran inspired activism bridging hastily presumed divides between guerrilla warfare and human rights. Revisiting these archives adds to a burgeoning historiography about the long 1970s. Arash Davari is Assistant Professor of Politics at Whitman College and a Visiting Academic Professional at Princeton University’s Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies.

Tags: archived_to_s3flavors_deleted

Date: May 7th, 2020
Speaker: Arash Davari
Department: Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies
Appears In: Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies

Loading

Human Rights Guerrillas: Iran in the Long 1970's

Related Media