Heinz Gärtner and Mitra Shahmoradi discuss their recent book Iran in the International System: Iran between Great Powers and Great Ideas (Routledge, January 2020). They are joined by Abbas Milani who will speak about his chapter in the book. Drawing on Iran’s history and its relations with great powers and its regional neighbors, this book addresses the question of how much continuity and/or change there is in Iranian international relations since the Iranian revolution. The conversation was in English.
Iran has often been at the center of the political debate on both the Gulf region and the transatlantic relations. Following the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Viennese nuclear agreement in May 2018 signed by the five permanent members of the UN-Security Council in 2015, the relationship between Iran and the world entered a new phase. With high expectations within Iran for improved relations with Europe, the authors of this book call for a new and innovative approach to be undertaken by the Iranian leadership towards the U.S. and Europe if Iran is to find a role for itself within regional and international structures.
Professor Dr. Heinz Gärtner is lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna and at Danube University. He was academic director of the Austrian Institute for International Affairs. He has held various Fulbright Fellowships and the Austrian Chair at Stanford University. He was Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington D.C. Among other things, he chairs the advisory board of the commission Strategy and Security of the Austrian Armed Forces and of the International Institute for Peace in Vienna. He is an expert for EU and Euratom programs at the European Commission. He has published widely on issues of international security.
Professor Mitra Shahmoradi is a freelance artist, painter, poet and art educator in Vienna. She has a diploma in painting from the Decorative Art Academy in Tehran (1978). She attended the Farabi University in Isfahan, Master Studies Restoration (1978). She also studied at the University of Applied Arts, Master Class for Painting and Graphics, in Vienna and graduated with the title Magistra Artis (1985). In 2013, she was awarded the professional title Professor by the Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture of Austria. She regularly exhibits her artwork in many Western and Asian countries and teaches art at various institutions. At several Austrian and international events, she reads from her poems in German and Persian, and gives lectures on the history of art and intercultural and interreligious understanding of and through art. She has published poetry and art books which have been translated into several languages, and she appears in a number of art catalogues.
Professor Abbas Milani is the Director of the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has written numerous books including The Shah (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), Eminent Persians, Volume I & II (Syracuse University Press, 2008), Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran in English (Mage, 2004), and most recently in English he edited and wrote the introduction for A Window into Modern Iran: The Ardeshir Zahedi Papers at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives (Hoover Institution Press, 2019).
-Stanford Iranian Studies Program