Students, faculty and administrators gathered in Cabot Auditorium last night to hear Tufts and Fletcher alumnus Dr. Vali Nasr deliver a lecture entitled "Theocracy, Democracy, and the Conservative Consolidation in Iran."
Sponsored by the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, the speech was part of the Charles Francis Adams Lecture Series.
Nasr is currently a Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, and is the Chair of Research for his department. He is also an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and senior fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Nasr's lecture examined many of the current political and economic issues surrounding Iran, including its relationship with the surrounding region, its power structure and its schizophrenic view of economics. Most importantly, he tried to convey a perspective that would demystify what he called the "enigmatic challenge" of Iran.
To do this he often relied on historic and contemporary analogies to countries such as Russia, India and China.
His talk began with a discussion of the "two images of Iran" - one of an Iran that is "a stable authoritarian regime inspired by Islamic ideology," the other of a state "teetering on the verge of collapse."
He then redirected the talk, claiming that understanding how Iran is actually adapting itself to social pressures is better than deciding which image applies. This process of adapting is more a product of democracy than many believe, according to Nasr. He believes that the most interesting aspect of adaptation is that the debates are taking place "in an Islamic and not a secular regime."
According to Nasr, Iran embraces what he called the "China model," the preservation of authoritarianism with strategic economic reforms. He emphasized the closing of Iranian political space but the opening of the economy.
Nasr's comparison to China extended to the political structure. He told the audience that Iran's president is head of only the executive branch, but that the country is a decentralized theocracy "with multiple power centers with different jurisdictions."
The true locus of final decision-making power is actually the Supreme Leader, or the religious leader for the country, he said. Iran's current Supreme Leader is Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Proceeding along this line of thought, Nasr said that Iran is a "lame Leviathan."
"The perspective of an authoritarian state does not actually fit Iran," he said. The more appropriate term, he said, is "federal authoritarianism."
This unwieldy structure ironically makes Iran more democratic, he said, because the Iranian government uses elections as a stop-gap in the decision-making process.
Nasr continued the China analogy by saying that Iran, like China, wants to be recognized as the preeminent regional power.
America's actions have actually strengthened this desire, according to Nasr. American actions have changed the balance of power by deposing Saddam Hussein and toppling the Taliban. The result, he said, was a power vacuum that led to the rise of Iran.
The audience then entered the conversation with several people asking about the role of the United States.
America must "engage" with Iran even though Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is infamous for his caustic comments concerning Israel and the Holocaust, he said. But at the same time, he said that realistically neither the Bush administration nor Iran is "committed to dialogue."
