LUCAS VASQUEZ: Hello everybody, I’m your host Lucas Vasquez from the Minnesota Daily, and welcome back to another episode of In The Know, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota. 

Over the past few weeks, the world’s attention has turned once again to Iran. A country that has spent decades in the headlines but remains, for many, profoundly misunderstood.

We’re around the end of the third week of what some are calling the Fourth Gulf War. Air strikes. Civilian casualties. Political upheaval. And beneath all of it, a nation with centuries worth of history, carrying the weight of a century of foreign intervention, and a people caught between survival and the hope for something different.

Today, we’re going to try to understand what’s happening, not just through the lens of current events, but through the deep history that got us here. And we’re going to hear from an Iranian student about what it feels like to watch your homeland burn from thousands of miles away. 

To understand the complex political history of Iran, I spoke with an assistant professor of political theory, who specializes in politics and culture of Iran, Arash Davari. He helped me understand where to begin. 

ARASH DAVARI: In my estimation, a good starting point is 1901, when the D’Arcy Concession was written, which was an agreement between the Iranian government and oil financier by the name of William D’Arcy, who was from Britain. 

And the idea here was that the Iranian government at the time, which was a monarchy, the Qajar Dynasty, did not have enough control over Iranian land, did not have centralized power in a sufficient fashion to be able to generate revenue through taxation.

VASQUEZ: He explained to me that Iran is a unique case in the sense that it is one of only five to six non-Western countries that were never formally colonized. This dynamic has led to a development in the country’s international and domestic politics that is unlike other non-Western countries. 

DAVARI: What that meant was that in order to survive in the 19th century when European empires and imperialism were expanding was that they had to inaugurate a series of procedures that were effectively the same as colonization onto themselves. One of those procedures is called defensive development.

But others were less voluntary, by virtue of not having, as I mentioned, enough revenue. So the state not having enough revenue meant that the state started to engage in the granting of concessions to foreign powers. At that point people were starting to get a sense of oil being and becoming a valuable resource, but before you could extract it or access it, you needed to develop the infrastructure. 

And states that didn’t have a ton of revenue coming in, didn’t have the capacity to develop that infrastructure.

So what they would do is they would grant permission to a foreigner, a foreign company, to be able to access the oil when it was drawn out of the land, if the company developed infrastructure. And so Iran basically would enter into, and these, there was precedence for these kinds of concessions.

VASQUEZ: So to clarify, what the D’Arcy Concession did was it granted permission for a span of 60 years for a British company, and by extension, the British government to have access to Iranian national resources. And so this sets the stage for both the history of 20th-century Iran, but also in the context of more contemporary conflicts to become a dispute about oil resources and the global political economy.

DAVARI: So the D’Arcy Concession occurs in 1901. But as much as we think about Iran in terms of the global political economy, geopolitics, we also have to think about domestic movements in Iran that are oriented towards democracy and I’ll use this word deliberately, constitutional rights. 

So another event that occurred, which reflects Iran’s peculiar encounter with Western imperial powers or Western traditions, Western politics, was the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 to 1911. And that was an event where you had a movement within Iran that was trying to adopt and develop a political system that existed, or that was modeled for them in Western states primarily. 

In order to secure and ensure equal rights and provisions, and also to break from prior forms of traditional authority. Constitutional revolution fails in the immediate short term, but it establishes a framework for constitutional monarchy. So we have these two events in the first decade of the 20th century: oil concession, constitutional revolution. And this really sets the stage for what comes to follow.

VASQUEZ: And what followed, as Davari explained to me, was the emergence of a figure known as…

DAVARI: Mohammad Mosaddegh. And Mosaddegh was a trained constitutional lawyer from an aristocratic background that was affiliated with the Qajar monarchy. So he had a kind of stature. He becomes a parliamentarian within the Iranian constitutional system.

VASQUEZ: What’s significant about this is that because of a weakened monarch between 1941 and 1953, there was a twelve-year window where the principles of constitutionalism that were established with the constitutional revolution were given a chance to flourish. This led to the eventual appointment of Mohammad Mosaddegh as the prime minister of Iran. His first priority as prime minister was to nationalize Iran’s oil.

The D’Arcy Concession was annulled in 1933 with the formation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, later British Petroleum, at which point another 60 year deal was established. This led to a number of disputes and complaints at the international level because Mohammad’s aims involved breaking this deal. 

All of this eventually culminated in a CIA-orchestrated coup to overthrow the prime minister to protect foreign oil interests. But it wasn’t all just foreign influence. This event, a key inflection point in Iranian history, was also influenced by some internal Iranian elements and parts of a coalition that felt alienated by Mossadegh.

DAVARI: From 1953 until 1968 you get another inflection point. 53 to 1960, those are those dark years of repression. 1960 is when John F. Kennedy becomes president in the United States, and 1959 is when a revolution happens in Cuba. You also have a revolution happening in China. 

So all of a sudden there’s this concern with peasant-based revolts that people who are peasant classes are going to engage in uprisings and that dominoes are going to fall in the context of the Cold War that work against American interests. And the Americans are already quite invested in maintaining Iran on their side as exemplified by the 1953 coup.

VASQUEZ: This resulted in a tactical shift by the Kennedy administration on how to treat foreign interests.  

DAVARI: In the 1960s, you have the policy championed by Kennedy, of winning over hearts and minds. That if the United States provides welfare to people who might otherwise be inclined in engaging in revolts or revolutions, then they won’t engage in an uprising and the U.S. can maintain its friends and its allies in that context. 

Keep Iran on its side of the ledger in its competition with the Soviet Union. In the Iranian context that results in a set of policies that are known as the Shah and the People’s Revolution or more commonly it’s known as the White Revolution. 

Those policies are announced in 1963, and they involve land reform, which is yet another example of the Iranian state engaging in reforms that in other context, in other colonial or or non-Western context, would’ve been implemented by a colonizing power, which means that people would direct their anger at the colonizing power. In this case, they’re directing it at the state.

VASQUEZ: Alongside all of this in the mid-1970s, the Shah of Iran sought greater autonomy while working to remain aligned with U.S. military interests, working as a key figure in the Nixon Doctrine. The Nixon Doctrine was a policy that delegated the U.S.’s role as a policeman to regional powers. The U.S. benefitted by delegating the task to crushing left-leaning rebellions in the Middle East to a regional power. Iran under the Shah took on this role in exchange for being able to buy U.S. military hardware. 

Resistance against the Shah was anti-imperialist in nature, led by Marxist and Islamist groups who expressed solidarity with Palestinians, Vietnamese, Chinese and Cuban revolutionaries. These opposition forces condemned the Shah for violating human rights. 

They argued that Iranian oil wealth was not benefiting the Iranian people and contended that his policies served American imperial interests across the region. All while any space for dissent or democratic expression was at an all-time low. This eventually culminated in a revolution.

DAVARI: 1978-79 revolution occurs, and it is truly one of the rarest occurrences in human history in the sense that it was a decidedly popular revolution. The estimates are that about 10% of the Iranian population, which numbered around 38 million at the time, about 10% of the population engaged in street protests, we’re talking three to four million people.

The state collapsed rather quickly in the face of these masses of people demonstrating. You also have this peculiar phenomenon of the establishment of this thing called an Islamic Republic, which nobody knew what that phrase quite meant when it was first articulated. And that that bears some mention and some understanding in order to understand the circumstances that we’re in now. 

The Islamic Republic was voted in by a referendum in March of 1979 without much debate. It was voted in by about 98% in favor and 2% opposed. Which means that a whole generation of Iranians, many of whom are still present today, many of whose children are some of the dissidents against the state, they voted for this system. Admittedly, they didn’t know what the system was. 

The more interesting question, I think rather than pointing blame or ascribing responsibility for things, is to think about a revolution as a kind of, uh, experiment with something new at, at least from an analytic perspective. And what an Islamic Republic did was it established a system where you had both republican features, but also you had the maintenance of Islamic authority and rule.

VASQUEZ: Davari then recounted the infamous 1979 hostage crisis and its role in the development of political dynamics in Iran.

DAVARI: You then have the hostage taking, so the taking of the U.S. Embassy, which is a significant moment in terms of U.S. Iranian relations. And with the hostage taking, you have the marginalization of the people who were in the provisional government who had a more moderate or liberal stance with regard to political affairs. 

And so you have a radicalization of the process of the revolutionary process in favor of the Islamic Republican party’s interest, which is organized around the authority of Khomeini. You then have about a year after that, the start of the Iran-Iraq war. So neighboring Iraq decides that Iran is weak and that this is an opportunity for them to invade and take over Iranian oil fields that are on the border with Iraq.

This is done with the support of the Europeans. It’s also done with the support of the Americans. So the narrative from the Iranian perspective is that it was the Iranian nation against the entire world. This war rages for two years. Where at, at which point the Iranians fight back the Iraqi incursion in 1982 and they could stop the war there. And this is another key inflection point in terms of history. 

The Iranians decide to keep going, and so the war goes on for another six years until 1988. So that’s the first Gulf War, if you will. In many ways right now we’re in the fourth Gulf War. So with this first Gulf War, there was a policy by the Americans known as dual containment: supply arms to both sides so they can weaken each other.

VASQUEZ: During this conflict, war mobilization helped those in charge of the government to gain the upper hand in state consolidation. This tactic is speculated to be foreshadowing as to what the objectives for the current war in Iran are, which is to weaken the infrastructure and state apparatus in Iran so that whoever is in power doesn’t pose as much of a threat to American or Israeli interests in the region. 

But regardless, fast forward to the 1990’s and after the rewriting of the Iranian constitution and several other factors, there is a vibrant middle class that is starting to establish itself, which in turn was starting to lead to the organization of political freedom. 

Which led to 1997, when a reformist named Mohammad Khatami won the presidency in a landslide.

DAVARI: Those are the heights of the reform movement. He wins a second term. So there’s, same as the U.S. you have two four-year terms. At every step of the way he makes some advances. There’s a robust civil society that emerges with all kinds of newspapers that open. 

In 2005, the reformists make a mistake, I think, and they put forth three candidates for the presidency who siphon votes away from each other. And you end up in a runoff between Rafsanjani, the guy who was the technocrat in the 1990s, who’s associated with corruption and all kinds of profiteering off of the, the opening up towards capitalist investment.

And another figure, by the name of Ahmadinejad. And Ahmadinejad becomes quite popular. He becomes the president, he wins the election. And this was a surprise moment in Iranian politics because Ahmadinejad came out of nowhere and appealed to populist sentiment. So he’s arguing against the kind of oligarchic rule of Rafsanjani that was his primary opponent. 

But he’s also not making an argument for institutional welfare. Instead, he’s making an argument for removing and breaking down subsidies and putting cash in people’s hands. And this is popular in the moment of, but what does that mean for the state? What does that mean for the economy? 

VASQUEZ: The 2009 election in Iran brought forth The Green Movement, which was hugely significant, and the peaceful protests that followed were repressed, creating a turning point where people no longer believed that reform would fix things. Iranians began to become more revolutionary and people started to call for the fall of the regime. 

DAVARI: 2009 you have Ahmadinejad’s second election and he’s very socially conservative, advancing politically repressive policies more than his predecessor Khatami. So there’s a popular movement amongst the middle classes behind a presidential candidate by the name of Mir Hossein Moussavi, who was the prime minister in the 1980s, who was known for having steered the welfare program.

Interestingly, in those presidential debates, Moussavi does not make an economic argument. All of his arguments are actually about political liberalization and democratization. Perhaps we could say that behind that is creating the political foundations for an economic opening to the west. The numbers come in and the results come in at least two to three days before when they’re expected to arrive, which fuels rumors that they were doctored. 

Ahmadinejad wins 64% of the vote, Moussavi wins 32% of the vote. People had been out in the streets for about a month showing a significant amount of support for Moussavi. So, the understanding is that people’s votes had been stolen, and that becomes the primary chant at first of what is known as The Green Movement.

VASQUEZ: Now, we will fast-forward to the first Trump presidency and its more tense approach to Iran and its politics.

DAVARI: 2015, you have this brief moment in U.S. foreign policy where there seems to be an inclination towards shifting U.S. policy in the region away from primarily supporting Israel and Saudi Arabia and towards a kind of realignment around what’s known as the Shia Crescent, if you will, that Iran has considerable influence in Iraq and in Syria, and that it would be beneficial to the U.S. if it were actually allied with Iran. There’s pushback on this from the Saudis and from Israel. 

The Democrats lose the election in 2016. Trump comes into power in 2017, and one of the first things he does is he tears up the JCPOA, the nuclear deal, and he imposes what is known as maximum pressure sanctions. So going as far as possible in terms of placing economic pressure on Iran with, it’s now come out, the intention of inciting street protests that would destabilize the state.

The period from 2017 onward sees disaffection among greater and greater portions of the Iranian populace with the reformist project, the sense that they had promised that they would be able to deliver things from within the parameters of the state, and they were unable to do so. This is combined with the economic immiseration of the Iranian populace at an increasing rate partly due to the oligarchic class that was established in the 1990s. 

Which had been profiting off of black market economic exchanges that were actually fueled by the sanctions regime. So when sanctions happen, that means that people can’t engage in business ventures that are transparent. So what they do is they engage in under the table kinds of transactions that the members of the Iranian state who are embedded around the Supreme Leader benefited from.

VASQUEZ: This tense political dynamic led to a defining event in the build up of the current conflict, which was the Bazaar protest on December 28, 2025. Merchants in the electronics section of Tehran’s bazaar protested due to the economic frustrations that they had. 

This is a significant event because the bazaar is an ancient economic institution that predates capitalism in Iran and has historically been intertwined with the higher clerical class, providing them with economic support and legitimacy. The bazaar played a key role in the 1979 revolution and has functioned as a shadow-state institution ever since. 

When the bazaar protested on purely economic conditions, the state acknowledged their grievances as legitimate, but ordinary Iranians saw this as a signal: if even the traditionally government-aligned bazaar was willing to protest, perhaps this was the moment for broader action.

DAVARI: So then people start to come out and you have messages broadcast from abroad calling on people to come out en-mass on January 9 to overthrow the state. And one of those messages is broadcast by the son of the formerly deposed King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who has named his son after his own father. And that person is Reza Pahlavi who spent most of his life abroad in California and Washington D.C.. 

And he had issued a similar kind of call during the June, 2025 war when Israel had attacked Iran in the midst of nuclear negotiations. He issues another call on January 8, in this case, people come out. And from the reports that I have read, the people who came out, many of them, we still are gathering information, but many of them did not know what kinds of forces they were competing with. They were not trained political activists. 

And so they took the foreign news media that was being broadcast into Iran via satellite at its word. And a lot of those reports said to people that if you go out, we’re going to protect you. And so people took their kids, small children, they took their elderly aunts and parents because they thought that it was going to be safe. 

And they confronted a state that was willing to do anything that it needed to do in order to ensure its own survival, which involved snipers shooting on people from rooftops.

VASQUEZ: During these protests, there are many reports of agent provocateurs. U.S. officials like Former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted about Mossad agents in the crowd. 

There is also leaked audio of a reformist politician by the name of Ali Shakouri Rad who suggests that the security forces aligned with the hardliners sent agent provocateurs into the crowd, causing vandalism and burning mosques, so as to create an excuse to then attack the crowd. Shakouri Rad and other Reformist politicians were arrested days after this. 

The truth is murky. But what’s clear is this, there is frustration among a significant part of the populace that a number of them came out to protest and many were killed indiscriminately. These things we know.

And this is where I want to pause. Because we’ve been talking a lot about history, about geopolitics, about coups and revolutions and policies. But underneath all of it are actual people. People with families.

I spoke with a University of Minnesota student. They are Iranian, and have deep roots in the country. They have been watching this unfold from thousands of miles away.

ANONYMOUS STUDENT: To be honest. It’s the first time in my life that my country’s been at war directly. I still feel desensitized because I’ve seen what’s going on, what’s been happening the last, you know, two decades obviously, but even more, uh, in the neighboring countries. 

Whether it’s Lebanon, whether it’s Palestine, whether it’s, uh, you know, Syria, any of these countries. Iraq, literally a neighbor. I’ve seen it so much that, you know, there is a form of desensitization.

VASQUEZ: But being desensitized is not the same as not caring. He spoke about how, despite the desensitization that the media in America works to perpetuate, he is working on processing the events that are currently happening.

ANONYMOUS STUDENT: But you know, there is also still that, you know, a sense of like personal connection. I’ve been there so much. I know people there. I know places that like, like I can see a place I got bombed and I’ll be like, “Hey, I know that place.”

You know, that’s, that’s a whole new different feeling. So processing that all is kind of new. And it, it, it, it’s like now for the first time I can really feel what it’s like. Uh, it’s not just like a, “Oh, I feel for you.” But now I can actually, now I really do, like I can actually say I do.

VASQUEZ: He also spoke about the feeling of guilt that he is dealing with when it comes to watching this unfold from afar.

ANONYMOUS STUDENT: It also sucks to experience it from abroad in the sense that like, you feel kind of guilty. You feel like, why am I relaxing at home? In the safety of my, my home when my own people, you know, the roofs above them are collapsing, right? So.

VASQUEZ: We’re around the end of the third week of the war now, and there are thus far no signs of a ceasefire negotiation in place. Davari pointed out a dynamic that is unfolding with the continuation of this war. Davari noted how the ideal of the self-determined right of natural resources is falling apart before our eyes. 

DAVARI: And we are now seeing the right of the people being evoked by some of the people in order to justify foreign intervention. The terms of the debate are such that many Iranians felt that there was no other way to change the state. That the state had effectively lost legitimacy. And they felt that the only way the change could occur would be through foreign intervention.

There are many other civil society activists who are increasingly gaining a louder voice as this war progresses who are saying that war can never bring about any kind of desirable change, certainly not democracy, that something like democracy has to be authored by the people themselves, no matter how difficult the circumstances.

VASQUEZ: We’re now in the Fourth Gulf War, by Davari’s count. The first: Iran-Iraq, 1980 through 1988. The second: U.S. vs. Iraq, 1991. The third: the 2003 invasion, and now this. And in the beginning of this conflict, a moment that seems almost scripted for maximum symbolism, the attack and killing of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, on February 28. 

DAVARI: On the first day there was an attack on the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who by all indications deliberately decided not to hide in a bunker. By all indications already had cancer and decided to go out in this manner such that it would increase the legitimacy of his cause. 

And we cannot forget that much of the revolutionary ideology in Iran is predicated around a principle in Shiism that is known as shahadat, which is variably translated as testimony, as witnessing but also as martyrdom. So if you sacrifice yourself, you’re bearing witness to the divine and you’re offering yourself as testimony of the divine.

VASQUEZ: He then commented on some of the contradictions and the polarization of the region coming to the forefront after that assassination.

DAVARI: This was a very powerful principle that was combined with revolutionary ideology in 1979. It was even more powerful in the context of the eight year Iran-Iraq war when a million people died on both sides. In many ways, Khamenei dying in the way that he did plays into this principle. And we see this in the support demonstrated by some of the crowds that gathered outside of Iran among the world’s Shia population.

In any case other Iranians were celebrating and were even engaging in TikTok dances around this event, dancing to the Village People song “YMCA” because it was Trump’s campaign song. So you can imagine how polarized the community is.

That same day there was an attack on a school in southern Iran that was close to IRGC facilities in a town called Minab, 175 people died. There are now reports one by a reporter who was recently laid off by the Washington Post when they contracted, Nilo Tabrizy, who had done what is called visual forensics around the January massacre. In order to demonstrate that, in fact it was a massacre by snipers. 

She used the same methodology to demonstrate that the attack was by the U.S. and the Israelis. You have a New York Times report that substantiates it now and the most recent thing that I’ve seen is that it was not only a double tap, but a triple tap. So one bomb was dropped, people came to help, another bomb was dropped, people came to help, a third bomb was dropped. 

VASQUEZ: Since the initial strike from the U.S. and Israel, President Trump has stated that he is looking to destroy their missile capability, their navy and prevent them from developing nuclear weaponry. Trump expects this to take four to five weeks, but it could be longer. Many more attacks have been made, and many innocent people have died. 

I started this episode wanting to understand the history behind the headlines. And what I found was a story that defies easy narratives. But it’s also a story about what happens when a people’s desire for self-determination gets caught between an unyielding state and foreign power with their own agenda. About what happens when the legitimate grievances of a population becomes a justification for intervention that has nothing to do with their liberation.

The complex history of this conflict cannot be fully understood in the time frame of a single podcast episode. Therefore, I think it’s important for all of us to do our due diligence when it comes to educating ourselves on global affairs and to draw from all perspectives. 

Thank you for listening and I hope you learned something new. This episode was written by Lucas Vasquez and produced by Ceci Heinen. If you have any questions, comments or concerns do not hesitate to reach out at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you. 

Thank you again for listening. My name is Lucas Vasquez and this has been In The Know.