Analyses
Protests in Iran: A Reflection of the Islamic Republic’s Institutional Crisis
Nicola Pedde 22 January 2026
The history of the Islamic Republic of Iran—established in 1979 following the revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi—is marked by a dense sequence of developments that have progressively altered its political and institutional configuration. These changes, however, have only sporadically been recognized by Western analyses, which have instead tended to perpetuate a more functional and instrumental stereotype based on the image of a monolithic, highly verticalized religious autocracy. While such a characterization was broadly accurate during the first decade of the Islamic Republic, it has undergone a profound transformation since 1989.
  • Immigration: Spain Shows Italy Another Way
    Maurizio Ambrosini 16 February 2026
    The Spanish government has taken an initiative that stands in sharp contrast to the line currently prevailing in Italy and across the European Union, not to mention the United States under Trump’s leadership. While the new European Pact on Migration and Asylum, set to enter into force this June, focuses on restricting the right to asylum and on deporting migrants without residence permits, the Sánchez government is introducing an amnesty expected to apply to some 500,000 people. Spain, moreover, already has 6.6 million legal immigrant residents, compared with Italy’s 5.4 million, within a total population of 48.6 million—around 10 million fewer than Italy’s. If acceptance of immigration were truly governed by quantitative limits (the so-called “tolerance threshold”), Spain should, in theory, have less room for new arrivals and regularizations than Italy and other countries.
  • Anselm Kiefer: “Yes to Rearmament, but I Fear a Militarized Germany”
    Riccardo Staglianò 11 February 2026
    Anselm Kiefer is the artist of ruins. Of memory. Of war. Starting with the one he wages with his gigantic works. “While I paint, my pictures undergo destruction, repair, transmutation. I massacre them, I beat them up… My mind is at war. War is within me,” he confided to Vincenzo Trione in Prologo celeste – Nell’atelier di Anselm Kiefer. But now war is everywhere; from anguished memory, it then became an all-purpose to metaphor and has now returned to being raw news. The rubble, once the backdrop to his German childhood, has become the landscape of Gaza, of Ukrainian neighborhoods, and the destruction seems not to be stopping.
  • Khurram Parvez and the Weaponization of India’s Anti-Terror Law
    Maria Tavernini 3 February 2026
    Khurram Parvez has been in jail for over four years now. His crime? To be a Muslim human rights advocate from India-administered Kashmir who has been critical of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). In November 2021, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested Parvez after having raided his home and office. He was charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), reportedly on allegations of “terrorism funding, being a member of a terrorist organization, criminal conspiracy, and waging war against the state.” Human rights organizations that repeatedly called for his release allege Parvez’s arrest is motivated by his work documenting human rights violations in Kashmir.
  • Staying With Uncertainty: Syrian Intellectual Life in Germany
    Anne-Marie McManus 29 January 2026
    In a recent essay published by Reset Dialogues on Civilizations, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab called on scholars to attend closely to the forms and concerns that shape contemporary Arab thought, locating its newness in the uprisings of 2011 and the ruptures that followed. In his response, included in the broader dossier, Samer Frangie cautioned that the category of “Arab thought” functions as a “historiographical device,” one that has brought together “dispersed, contradictory, and elusive acts of” intellectual production under a shared political horizon. He thus reorients the question towards periodization: is it still meaningful—and for whom—to reinvigorate this category as a way of making sense of the present?
  • Mass Deaths Amid Nationwide Protest Mark a Turning Point in Iran
    Pegah Zohouri 21 January 2026
    The current wave of protests in Iran began on December 27, 2025, in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, where shopkeepers demonstrated against the collapse of the rial, the soaring value of the US dollar, and the rapidly rising cost of living. What initially appeared as economically driven unrest quickly expanded beyond the capital. Universities emerged as early hubs of mobilization, but more significantly, protests spread to provincial towns and smaller cities, where inflationary pressures are most acutely felt. Within weeks, the unrest had assumed a truly national character, encompassing a growing number of provinces and cutting across social classes.
  • Can International Law Withstand Trump’s “Realism”?
    Gaetano Pentassuglia 19 January 2026
    That U.S. intervention in Venezuela runs contrary to international law, or that Donald Trump’s claims to control Greenland are legally specious, is evident to any student of the subject (and not only to academics). The territorial integrity and political independence of a State, the right of peoples to self-determination, the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of States, the absence of any right to use force aimed at coercively changing a State’s government, the fight against drug trafficking through cooperation among States as established by the relevant treaties, the rules on diplomatic immunity and so on, are all elements of a minimal normative and institutional architecture that is widely consolidated and shared by the international community—especially, for some of those principles, starting from the years following the Second World War.
  • Is “Arab Thought” Still a Meaningful Category?
    Samer Frangie 9 January 2026
    Intellectual historians tend to have a certain affinity for periodization, perhaps owing to the historicist roots of the discipline or the demands of academic publication. Thought—this elusive act of “sense making” as Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab defines it in Contemporary Arab Thought—has to be bound in the temporal confines of a period, delimited by a start date and an end date, in order to appear as an object that can be studied. Periodization is a boundary: it renders thought visible and observable as a unitary object, with its discrete assumptions and debates about influences and consequences—in other words, about its relation to what lies beyond those boundaries.
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