Ahmed S. Hashim

Civil-Military Relations in the Islamic Republic of Iran

The role of the military in Iranian politics seems essentially unexplored when examined against the backdrop of the enormous output of literature on civil-military relations generated in the past four decades on societies as disparate as Argentina and Zimbabwe. Studies of Iran have consumed a great deal of scholarly energies. Historians, sociologists, and political scientists have applied their diverse skills to reach some sort of reasonable understanding concerning the origins and consequences of the Pahlavi dynasty for Iran; the 1979 Iranian revolution; and the evolution of the Islamic Republic since then. Over the past decade and a half, there has been a proliferation of works dealing with the performance of the Iranian military during the Iran-Iraq War, the post-war modernization programs of the Iranian armed forces, and Iran’s attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Iran's Strategic Intentions and Capabilities

Abstract : Iran appears to be pursuing an assertive foreign policy that confronts the United States on a variety of points: the Middle East Peace Process, the stability of moderate Muslim states, terrorism (such as the death threat to Rushdie), security in the Persian Gulf, and nuclear proliferation.

Adapting to win: how insurgents fight and defeat foreign states in war

capacity in Chapter 5, and the abovementioned comment on the ‘entire ethos of the global health security regime’, I would have expected a deeper exploration of why that ethos left so few traces in the IHR. The implicit answer can be found in Chapter 2, which addresses how the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic constituted the tipping point, leading to the extensive revision of the IHR. SARS hardly affected low-income countries at all. It spread from China, to Viet Nam and Hong Kong, and further into Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Germany, Canada and the USA. For SARS, the problem was not weak capacity, but weak political will to report and to cooperate. Weak capacity was somewhat overlooked. If the IHR are revised again, in the near future, will weak capacity – and the ways to overcome it, including international financial cooperation – be included? The answer to that question will not be found here, obviously. However, global health scholars who would like to see international financial cooperation included in the next iteration of the IHR can learn a lot from this book. What it takes is ‘a critical mass of states, persuading them to cease being apathetic (or even resistant) to a set of new collective behavioural expectations concerning infectious disease outbreak’ (p. 52), and then, of course, to persuade them that international public financing of health systems is part of the collective behavioural expectations...