On the Foreign Sources of Political Legitimacy in Late-Pahlavi Iran (1968-1978) with Hussein Banai

A talk by the fourth recipient of the Zahedi Family Fellowship, Dr. Hussein Banai. In this talk, Dr. Hussein Banai focuses on the procurement of late-Pahlavi Iran’s credibility, and Mohammadreza Shah’s legitimacy, in its diplomatic outreach toward the great powers, especially in the United States. It does so by drawing on official documents, personal notes and correspondence between top-level officials, and other archival materials from the Zahedi collection at the Hoover Archives. Hussein Banai is an Associate Professor of International Studies in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he is also faculty affiliate in the departments of Political Science, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and Central Eurasian Studies. He is also a Research Affiliate at the Center for International Studies at MIT. Banai's research interests lie at the intersection of political thought and international relations, with a special focus on topics in democratic theory, non-Western liberal thought, diplomatic history and theory, US-Iran relations, and Iran’s political development. He has published on these topics in academic, policy, and popular periodicals.He is the author of Hidden Liberalism: Burdened Visions of Progress in Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2020); co-author of two volumes on US-Iran relations: Republics of Myth: National Narratives and the US-Iran Conflict (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) and Becoming Enemies: U.S.-Iran Relations and the Iran-Iraq War, 1979–1988 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012); and co-editor of Human Rights at the Intersections: Transformation through Local, Global, and Cosmopolitan Challenges (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023). Additionally, he is the Co-Editor of International Studies Review, the flagship review journal of the International Studies Association. From 2018 to 2020, he served as an Associate Editor (for Social Sciences) of Iranian Studies, the journal of the Association for Iranian Studies.