Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the Iranian student opposition abroad, developed contending narratives of human rights in Iran. While Iranian students worked with Western human rights organizations to highlight the use of torture against political prisoners in Iran, the Pahlavi state responded by embracing a Third World narrative of human rights that emphasized state sovereignty at the 1968 UN International Conference on Human Rights in Tehran. In this lecture, Dr. Roham Alvandi examines how both the Shah and his opponents sought to instrumentalize human rights in the international struggle that sparked the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79.
Lecture: Human Rights and the Global History of the Iranian Revolution
Roham Alvandi, London School of Economics and Political Science
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Dr. Roham Alvandi is an Associate Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2014), which was selected by the Financial Times as one of the best history books of 2014. He has written extensively on the history of Iran’s foreign relations and his current research focuses on global human rights activism and the origins of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. His work has appeared in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Cold War History, Diplomatic History, and Iranian Studies.
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