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The video explains why Israel views Iran’s mass protests as a potentially destabilizing moment that could trigger Iranian retaliation, regional conflict, or shifts in nuclear and missile threats.

Whereas optimists see the so-called Arab Spring as similar to the revolutions of 1989, and likely to bring about democratic rule, skeptics fear that protest bringing down dictators may simply give way to new dictatorships, as in the Iranian revolution. Existing research on transitions has largely neglected the role of protest and direct action in destabilizing autocracies and promoting democracy. We argue that protest and direct action can promote transitions in autocracies, and that the mode of direct action, that is, whether violent or nonviolent, has a major impact on the prospects for autocratic survival and democracy. We present empirical results supporting our claim that nonviolent protests substantially increase the likelihood of transitions to democracy, especially under favorable international environments, while violent direct action is less effective in undermining autocracies overall, and makes transitions to new autocracies relatively more likely.

In January 1978, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed that \"There is all across our land a growing sense of peace and a sense of common purpose.\" Yet in the ensuing months, a series of crises disturbed that fragile sense of peace, ultimately setting the stage for Reagan's decisive victory in 1980 and ushering in the final phase of the Cold War.

In the late 1970s Iranian student activists in the United States worked to educate the American public on the history of the US-Iranian relationship and the long-term consequences in Iran of the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup that placed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on the Iranian throne. The students directly challenged local and state governments to respect freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, and pushed President Jimmy Carter to keep his promise of injecting human rights into American foreign policy. Iranians studying in the US were not monolithic in thought, but they shared the common goal of liberating Iran from Pahlavi’s despotic rule and creating an Iran free of American intervention and Cold War geopolitics.

This article explores the engagement of the Pakistani Jamaʿat-i Islami (JI) with the Iranian Revolution. I argue that the Islamist JI was drawn to the events because it reflected a core concern and signature idea of Abu ’l-Aʿla Maududi, namely to establish the sovereignty of God (hakimiyya) on earth. My analysis of various travelogues and JI publications from the 1980s demonstrates that JI observers were deeply familiar with internal revolutionary dynamics and Iran's Shiʿi identity. The prospect of seeing a proper Islamic system in action, with potentially global consequences for their cause, initially crowded out any sectarian concerns for the JI. At the same time, certain JI leaders began to voice criticism of what they perceived as rash revolutionary policies that differed from Maududi's careful, irenic understanding of a proper Islamic revolution. They also took note of sectarian messages that damaged Iran's ecumenical outreach. It was, however, the more general geopolitical climate in the Middle East and South Asia which forced the JI to publicly downplay its ties with Iran. By the late 1980s, being accused of harbouring affinities for the ‘deviant Islam’ of Shiʿism was a charge that had to be avoided at all costs in Pakistan and beyond.

From the dawn of the 1978–79 Iranian Revolution until the consolidation of Hizbullah in the late 1980s, a network of Iranian, Lebanese, and Palestinian clerics played a crucial role in spreading the revolution to Lebanon and laying the groundwork for Hizbullah. Whereas the historiography of the post-1979 Iran–Lebanon relationship is overwhelmingly focused on Hizbullah, the present study, by drawing on oral history interviews with these clerics and archival materials, contends that the Iranian Revolution came to Lebanon primarily through these Shi‘i and Sunni clerics, who joined ranks and established the Association of Muslim ‘Ulama’ in Lebanon in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion. This study argues that these clerics modeled their struggle on the ‘ulama’-led and mosque-based example of the 1978–79 revolution, which this paper describes as the Khomeinist script, to transcend sect to seed a revolution in Lebanon and mass mobilize against the invasion. This article concludes that the ecumenical script was highly appealing to non-Shi‘i Islamists, a key factor in the success of exporting the revolution and the rise of Hizbullah in Lebanon.

By focusing on the publications of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH) in the Malayalam language, this article argues that the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution (IIR) marked a rupture from the disenchantments of the 1947 partition of British India and Cold War-centered politics for the Islamists of Kerala. This rupture from the colonial past and a Western-inspired intellectual climate had resonances in the discourse on Islam in Kerala. The Iranian revolution not only imported the idea of Islamism or revolution but also a renewed interest in democracy, modernity and the idea of “Islamist political” to the southwest coast of India. In an attempt to write an intellectual history of emotions related to the IIR, this paper argues that in the case of Islamists, there was a strong tendency to break from the intellectual discourse of the nation-state and begin afresh in politics, and the moment of 1979 provided what they sought for long.

This article explores the roots and the consequences of the 1979 Iranian Revolution with a focus on one of Iran's constituent peoples, the Kurds. It provides historical perspectives on a specific people in relation to the Revolution and aims to enhance historical awareness on the Revolution and contribute to debates around it. It is divided into two main parts. The first part deals with the roots of the Revolution by presenting an overview of social change and transformation during the preceding decades to create a historical foundation, which studies on the Kurds in Iran have usually lacked. The second part deals with the consequences of the Revolution, analysing the autonomy movement, the characteristics of which are closely linked to social change of the preceding decades. Despite the availability of sources on the period, previous scholarship has been devoid of sufficient historical analysis on both the background to, and events which took place during, the Revolution. This article addresses that gap by presenting an analysis of that historical process.