Stories Archive | Page 2 of 85

Analyses

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.

Philosophy
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?
Pasquale Ferrara Appointed Executive Chair of Reset DOC
Editorial Board 27 January 2026
International Affairs
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.
International Affairs
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.
Philosophy
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.
International Affairs
Rift Between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi: Yemen at Risk of a New War
Mario Boffo 7 January 2026

The world seems to have taken notice of Yemen—and of the strategic importance of the Red Sea—only after the outbreak of the Gaza crisis, when the Houthis began targeting commercial shipping transiting the area. Yet the events that have unfolded over the past months show that the Houthis are now a deeply rooted reality in Yemen’s own history: a force that controls roughly a quarter of the country, administers its territory efficiently, extracts resources from available fields, manufactures its own missiles and drones with reduced reliance on Iranian supplies, and continues to indoctrinate and recruit in order to expand its ranks and advance its political vision.
International Affairs
Iran: Bazaar Merchants’ Protests Shake the Regime
Renzo Guolo 5 January 2026

The protests over Iran’s economic crisis are putting the regime under severe strain. They risk acting as a detonator for an already highly unstable mix: the heavy impact of sanctions, the collapse of the rial to historic lows against the dollar, and an unprecedented energy and water crisis. These factors, compounded by systemic inefficiencies, are driving inflation to around 40 percent year on year. Taking to the streets are Tehran’s bazaar merchants, a group long decisive in determining whether power in Iran holds or collapses.
International Affairs
The Fragile Balance between Justice and Reconciliation in Post-Assad Syria
Emanuele Valenti 2 January 2026

“They arrived without warning and began killing people based on a single question: ‘Are you Sunni or Alawite?’ If you answered Alawite, you were dead.” Nine months on, Samir, 68, still struggles to talk about what happened last March in Baniyas, a town on Syria’s Mediterranean coast where hundreds of people were killed—almost all from the Alawite community, which until a few months earlier had been the Assads’ core base of support. Across the wider region, at least 1,500 people were killed.
International Affairs
Venezuela and the New U.S. National Security Strategy
Andre Diniz Pagliarini 17 December 2025

For months, U.S. naval forces have been gathering off Venezuela’s coast. The warships, the bomber flyovers, and the rising volume from Washington are not incidental. The likelihood of an actual intervention is not incidental. It is in line with the administration’s recently presented geopolitical priorities. The new National Security Strategy, released earlier this month, explicitly elevates the Western Hemisphere as a central arena of U.S. national security, linking migration, narcotics trafficking, and regional instability to the defense of the homeland.
Philosophy
Pluralism “Anchored in Islam”: A Tribute to Abdulaziz Sachedina
Mohammed Hashas 15 December 2025

On December 3, 2025, the international community of Islamic Studies lost one of its most erudite and humane members: Professor Abdulaziz Sachedina. Like many scholars, I first encountered Sachedina through his writings on Islamic pluralism and ethics—fields closely aligned with my own interest in modern and contemporary Islamic thought. His strong conviction that Islamic teachings are and will remain highly relevant for Muslim and non-Muslim societies, if reasonably and honestly contextualized, is evident in his major works. Among these are The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (2000), Islamic Biomedical Ethics (2009), and Islamic Ethics (2022).