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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AREA STUDIES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

Author(s): Hossein Khosrowjah

Source: Arab Studies Quarterly , Summer/Fall 2011, Vol. 33, No. 3/4 (Summer/Fall 2011), pp. 131-142

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AREA STUDIES

AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

Hossein Khosrowjah

On the television screen in front of me, in exquisite high definition details, a

distinguished older gentleman speaking softly with a charming foreign accent

discusses the war in Afghanistan, Revolution in Iran, the Palestine-Israel conflict,

and Islamic extremism. While the friendly banter with the host, the professorial/

grandfatherly white beard and the receding hairline lend the speaker an aura of

authenticity and gravitas, it is his institutional affiliations, academic position(s)

and book titles that give him discursive authority. The host, framed by the Stanford

University's Hoover Institution's logo on the screen, having introduced himself as

that institution's fellow and the guest as a colleague, has already rattled off a list of

credentials including "former Princeton professor," "Hoover Research fellow," and

"professor and the Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the Paul H. Nitze

School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University." The

proceedings have the appearance of a rational and reasonable conversation about

the region (the so-called Middle East) between two well-informed, knowledgeable

scholars, even if one disagrees with every single statement they make. There is,

however, something unsettling in the tenor of the conversation, in the phrasing

of sentences, and in the attitude, one that I personally find troubling. Discussing

history and current events of the region, the guest and the host use pronouns "we," "us" and "our" as in "our interests" or "we should do this or that." Whom do these

ambiguous pronouns we and us refer to and what are our interests? Do they refer to

those scholars who study the Middle Eastern culture, history and affairs? American

society at large? Or perhaps, the host and the guest are acting as surrogates of the

US government, evidenced by slippage from abstract theory to concrete political

analysis to policy recommendation. The above scene is neither exceptional nor a recent development. For decades,

area studies scholars have had a robust public presence in the mainstream mass

media. During the Iranian Revolution, before and after the invasions of Iraq and

Afghanistan, and following the recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East,

Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, and Abbas Milani and some of the other better-known

Dr. Hossein Khosrowjah received his PhD from the University of Rochester, New York and will be teaching at the SUNY Fredonia in fall.

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132 ARAB STUDIES QUARTERLY

contemporary area studies' public faces appeared on cable news programs, public

television, webcasts, and radio to analyze these events and prescribe policy positions.

Even though this high degree of public visibility is a new phenomenon, perhaps a

sign of the times, the general public and even many people in academia might not

be aware of the long history of area studies departments' involvement in foreign

policy, intelligence and security matters, and inversely, the US military-intelligence

role in founding and shaping area studies programs in the most elite higher education

institution in this country in the beginning and everywhere else later. As I will argue

in this article, this reciprocity is built in the structure of the field of area studies.

The genesis, the historical development and the formation of various area studies

programs during and after World War II have led to a blurring of the university borders and state interests.

While there is no denying that area studies programs have also produced valuable

knowledge and espoused radical critical thought in the past 65 years, this article is an

overview of the historical events that characterize the dominant discourses governing

these programs. Of course, the interdisciplinary nature of the area studies enterprise

makes it almost impossible to fix it with any set of characteristics consistently. At

the same time, the uneasy and tenuous conjoining of two dissimilar fields to create

area studies has produced a vast body of knowledge that is academically diverse

and heterogeneous, but ideologically coherent and unified. The coming together

of philologists, archeologists, historians and classics scholars, on one hand, and

economists and political scientists, on the other hand, was not accidental: It was

carefully and strategically planned to create academic programs that would both

guide and legitimize US foreign policy.

This double function of area studies programs, that of producing academic

"knowledge" (situated, contingent, and shot through an ideological prism) for

specific areas and recommending and shaping governmental policies, has been the primary raison d'être for these programs. In fact as some1 have argued, these

are not separate functions, but different stages of the same process. Whatever our understanding of the link between the functions, there has been remarkable

continuity in certain aspects such as articulating a neocolonial political topography

by dividing the world into friendly/unfriendly regions, identifying and characterizing

friends and enemies populating those regions (governments and social forces),

training experts on political and cultural aspects of each constructed region, and

making policy recommendations for various Republican and Democratic admin-

istrations. Enemies have changed, regions have been re-configured, but the basic

functions of the programs remain the same. From 1942 to 1991, communism,

the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence were the determining factors in how

areas were partitioned and studied, while since the fall of the Soviet Union, there

has been a paradigm shift and drawing coherent boundary lines between areas

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AREA STUDIES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES 133

has become more complicated. Categories of "Islam" and "Islamic World" have been more instrumental than anything else in defining areas, enemies, friends, and

strategies for hegemony and control in the newly re-drawn regions. Another aspect

of the contemporary paradigm shift has been a change of emphasis on the term

"democracy" as being an inextricable dimension of free enterprise and as antithetical

to Islam and Islamic civilization. More on this paradigm shift later.

In the course of seven decades since the inception of the first area studies programs,

the same kind of academic work that the classical Oriental programs used to produce

such as the study of ancient civilizations in the "Middle East" and the "Far East" and

dead languages have continued to be produced. However, this knowledge is now

routinely, if not always, deployed by political scientists and international studies

experts to draw conclusions about contemporary cultures of the countries in a region. The common link here between what I called above two dissimilar fields, housed

originally in social sciences and humanities, was the act of cross-cultural translation.

As philologists translated ancient texts and the classical scholars did the same to

classical poetry and religious texts, political scientists and other social scientists translated contemporary cultures of these societies, which ranged from literary and

visual culture to political discourse. Since the translation of contemporary culture

demands literacy in modern literature and visual culture of societies under study,

area studies programs either brought in people from comparative literature and

film and media departments or had their existing classics and social science faculty

teach and research contemporary cultural aspects of these societies. In either case, area studies were academic institutions dedicated to cross-cultural translation and

as Robert J. C. Young (2003: 139-149) observes:

. . . [T]o translate a text from one language to another is to transform its material identity.

With colonialism, the transformation of an indigenous culture into the subordinated

culture of a colonial regime, or the superimposition of the colonial apparatus into

which all aspects of the original culture have to be reconstructed, operate as processes

of translational dematerialization. At the same time, though, certain aspects of the

indigenous culture may remain untranslatable. As a practice, translation begins as a matter

of intercultural communication, but it also always involves questions of power relations,

and of forms of domination. It cannot therefore avoid political issues, or questions about

its own links to current forms of power. No act of translation takes place in an entirely

neutral space of absolute equality.

Area studies programs have been far from neutral spaces of research, as a close look at their history reveals. The cross-cultural translation that has taken place in

area studies programs has been directly informed by the heritage of colonialism

and readjusting former colonial interests of the Western powers for a series of

succeeding world orders.

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134 ARAB STUDIES QUARTERLY

The origins of area studies, dating back to World War II and the period immediately

after, are well-documented. It is no secret that the first beginnings of area studies are

deeply entrenched in intelligence and military imperatives of the US government.

Now, this history was openly and sometimes proudly acknowledged by those men

who were present at the creation of area studies. Looking back at that moment (in

the mid- 1940s), McGeorge Bundy, the famous hawkish National Security Advisor to JFK and Johnson, and one-time Dean of Arts and Sciences and also Dean of

Faculty at Harvard (1953-61), wrote in 1964:

It is a curious fact of academic history that the first great center of area studies... [was]

in the Office of Strategic Services... It is still true today, and I hope it always will be, that

there is high measure of interpretation between universities with area programs and

the information gathering agencies of the government, (quoted in Cumings, 1999: 173)

As Bruce Cumings points out, Bundy was perfectly positioned to comment on this link: as a Harvard Dean, he made "life difficult for young scholars with

political backgrounds that he or the FBI found suspect. He was also working with

various Central Intelligence Agency projects" (173). According to Cumings, the

declassification of American Archival Materials on the service to the state by

many prominent academics is just becoming public, but from what we know, it

appears that Bundy's involvement was the rule and not the exception {ibid.).2 In addition to universities and state military and intelligence agencies, foundations

such as Ford (through the mediation of the so-called independent non-governmental

organization Social Science Research Council, SSRC) constitute the third side of

the area studies triangle. Bundy at various points in his life served on each side

of that triangle in key positions: despite holding only a Bachelor's degree, he was

a Professor of Government at Harvard in the 1950s, and later, after retiring from

his National Security Administration (NSA) position at state, he was appointed Professor of History at New York University from 1979 to 1989 and Scholar-in- Residence at the Carnegie Corporation from 1990 to 1996. 1 have already mentioned

his tenure as a dean at Harvard and his NSA position; he was also instrumental

in the implementation of the Marshall Plan and its more covert aspects such as CIA-backed illegal funding of anti-communist activities in Europe. He played a decisive role in the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, and the expansion of the

Vietnam War; however, what I feel is relevant to our considerations is his position

as the president of the Ford Foundation from 1966 to 1979, the third side of the

aforementioned triangle.

I use Bundy as an exemplary case here; while most academics were not necessarily

as prolific as Bundy was, his close ties with CIA and state department were not

uncommon in the postwar period (a period that might extend to our present) among

many prominent academics. The fact that he so easily circulated from one node

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AREA STUDIES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES 135

of this matrix to another should also alarm us to the very close and inextricable

interconnectedness of this configuration. Again, Cumings (1999: 186) comments:

...[The] incomplete but important evidence from the Mosely papers [that is Philip E.

Mosely (1905-1972), President of the East European Fund and professor of international

relations at Cornell and Columbia] suggest that the Ford Foundation, in close consultation

with the CIA, helped to shape postwar area studies and important collaborative research

in modernization studies and comparative politics that were later mediated through

well-known Ford-funded SSRC projects... According to Christopher Simpson's study of

declassified materials, however, this interweaving of foundations, universities, and state

agencies (mainly the intelligence and military agencies) extended to the social sciences

as a whole: "For years, government money... not always acknowledged as such- made

up more than 75 percent of the annual budgets of institutions such as Paul Lazarfeld's

Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, Hadley Cantril's Institute

for International Social Programs at Princeton, Ithiel deSola Poole's CENTS program at

MIT, and others." Official sources in 1952 reported that "fully 96 percent of all reported

[government] funding for social sciences at that time was drawn from the U.S. military."

I think that this brief history will suffice as a broad outline of the conditions

and the rationale behind the creation of area studies in the US and their support

structures, but I have not commented on any pedagogical aspects of area studies. As

Rey Chow (2006) points out, Edward Said describes area studies as a continuation

of the old European Orientalism with a different pedagogical emphasis:

No longer does an Orientalist try first to master the esoteric language of the Orient; he

begins instead as a social scientist and "applies" his science to the Orient, or anywhere

else. This is the especially American contribution to the history of Orientalism, and it can

be dated roughly from the period immediately following World War II, when the United

States found itself in the position recently vacated by Britain and France, (quoted 39-40)

Said uses the career of Sir Hamilton Gibb to illustrate the pedagogical shift in

Orientalism in response to modern realities of the Orient. He uses two lectures delivered by Gibb eighteen years apart to trace the postwar shifts as embodied in

the career of one scholar. In 1945, delivering the Haskell Lectures at the University

of Chicago, Gibb talks about "the Arab mind" in the most Orientalist manner by

characterizing the Arab Oriental mind as "lacking a sense of law" and the "Muslim

[mind having an aversion to] the thought process of rationalism..." (quoted in Said, 1979: 106).

As Gibb was appointed the director of Harvard's Center for Middle East Studies

in 1957, a position he held until 1966, his shifting attitudes reflect shifting paradigms

in Orientalism trying to adjust its priorities with the realities of area studies. In a lecture delivered in 1963 entitled "Area Studies Reconsidered," he declared that

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136 ARAB STUDIES QUARTERLY

"The Orient is much too important to be left to the Orientalists" (quoted in Said,

1979: 106). Said summarizes the new attitude in Gibb's formulation as one in which

the job of "the Western experts on the Orient... is to prepare students for careers

'in public life and business.' What we need, said Gibb, is the traditional Orientalist

plus a good social scientist working together: between them the two will do 'inter-

disciplinary' work" (107).

Lest we think that this really means that Orientalism is ready to concede some of

its age-old dogmas on the Orient in its encounter with the Western Social Sciences,

Gibb was quick to remind his audience that the Orientalist's expertise "will serve

to remind his uninitiated colleagues in area studies that 'to apply the psychology

and mechanics of Western political institutions to Asian or Arab situations is pure

Walt Disney'" (quoted in Said, 1979: 107). The result is that social sciences were

mobilized to point out that Orientals fail to have democratic institutions or come

to terms with women's equality with men because they have failed to understand

law, social rights and other contributions of the European Enlightenment. They are

after all Orientals adhering to the seventh-century principles of Islam and, as Said

articulates, or rather ventriloquizes Bernard Lewis and other modern Orientalists,

"[HJistory, politics, and economics do not matter. Islam is Islam, the Orient is the

Orient, and please take all your ideas about a left and a right wing, revolutions, and

change back to Disneyland" (107).

Moving fast-forward to the post- 1989 phase of area studies, after the demise

of the Soviet Union, as one explores the link between area studies and military- intelligence state agencies, the persistent question comes up: How do area studies

in this second phase search for new enemies, or as Rey Chow puts it much more

explicitly in The Age of the World Target : Self-Referentiality in War, Theory ; and

Comparative Work , search for new military targets in order to rationalize their

raison d'être? In response to the last two inquiries, I am interested in the "sudden"

appearance of various "Democracy Projects," mostly in the so-called Islamic/Middle

Eastern programs, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and

Freedom House. In a way, while these have not surpassed SSRC as a major player in meting out resources, they have at least changed some of the terms under which

area studies programs interconnect with foreign policy issues and intelligence/

military agencies. In contrast to the dominantly white, male, Eurocentric origins of

area studies (a veritable good old boys club), in this new configuration, the role of

immigrant/exilic/immigrant academics becomes increasingly more prominent as a

way of authenticating and legitimizing the new area studies discourse.

Consider the following contemporary self-definition of a project called "The Iran Democracy Project," which was initiated by Abbas Milani, the Hamid and

Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AREA STUDIES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES 137

The Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution was created to understand the

process and prospects for democracy in Iran and the rest of the Middle East. The central

goal is to help the West understand the complexities of the Muslim world, and to map

out possible trajectories for transitions to democracy and free markets in the Middle East,

beginning with Iran. The project also seeks to identify, analyze, and offer policy options on

the existing obstacles to democratic transition and ways to remove them and to ensure

that policy makers in Washington receive advice that is non-partisan and reliable. (Iran

Democracy Project)

Abbas Milani perfectly represents the merging of two functions by his participation

as a research fellow in the conservative political think-tank, Stanford's Hoover

Institution, which also houses the Iran Democracy Project (IDP). His "expertise"

is defined as "U.S./Iran relations, Iranian cultural, political, and security issues."3

The Iran Democracy Project is linked to a Hoover initiative called "Diminishing

Collectivism and Evolving Democratic Capitalism," which, again according to the

IDP's website, is "an area of study that includes analysis and documentation of how

totalitarian societies transition to freedom, representative government, and private

enterprise." Apparently, IDP was initiated

[t]o understand the process and prospects for democracy in Iran and the rest of the

Middle East. The central goal is to help the West understand the complexities of the

Muslim world, and to map out possible trajectories for transitions to democracy and

free markets in the Middle East, beginning with Iran. The project also seeks to identify,

analyze, and offer policy options on the existing obstacles to democratic transition and

ways to remove them and to ensure that policy makers in Washington receive advice

that is non-partisan and reliable. The history of the Middle East in the last one hundred

years has shown Iran to be a bellwether for the rest of the region in the areas of political,

social, and economic reform. (Iran Democracy Project)

In the above two statements, we can see a smooth and seamless transition from

the high moralism that saturates the Cold War language to a more pragmatic

managerial (middle-management) tone. Not that the rhetoric is completely devoid

of moralism - contrasting democracy with Islam after all is a moralistic gesture - but

there is a surprisingly candid attitude about the political intentions and state policy

implications of the initiative's academic research. One can attribute this new candor

and openness of the aims of area studies programs, which is hardly limited to my

IDP example, to a number of factors: the pervasiveness of the national security

state, a different set of dynamics between universities and mediating institutions that

collaborate with area studies programs such as NED and SSRC, and the Hoover's own conservative nature.

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138 ARAB STUDIES QUARTERLY

But what exactly does IDP's academic research consist of? Abbas Milani has been quite prolific in publishing books on contemporary Iranian history such as The

Shah (20 1 1 ), and The Myth of the Great Satan: A New Look at America s Relations

with Iran (2010), and The Persian Sphinx : Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle

of the Iranian Revolution (2009). All three books constitute part of a revisionist

history that psychologizes and personalizes major events in Iran's recent past: conflicts over economic decisions, political oppression, social uprisings, and foreign

policy decisions are attributed to personal quirks and leaders' disagreements. This

shift of emphasis conveniently eliminates questions of class interest and conflict,

imperialism, neocolonialism, and all structural factors that shape personalities and

not the other way around. It is Milani 's tireless effort to de-emphasize the popular

notion that the US government has played a significant role in Iran's recent history

which is absolutely fascinating. It is his contention that the US played a minor

role in the 1953 coup against the democratically elected Mossadeq government.

Milani argues that a popular uprising and the intervention of Iran's top clergy led

by Ayatollah Kashani toppled the popular prime minister's government; the US

had little to do with it. The other component of this revisionist history, explicitly

articulated in Milani 's book The Shah , is that various US governments and the Shah's

regime were at odds over the Shah's undemocratic and oppressive measures. If the

US ever interfered in Iranian affairs, it was to moderate the Shah's despotic and

erratic behavior. Milani 's account personalizes the political by transforming critical

historical events, such as the 1953 coup or the 1978 Revolution, into personality

clashes (the Shah vs. Khomeini). It also ignores/overlooks objective realities such as

US oil interests in the region and Iran's geopolitical significance, while highlighting

the personal ambitions of the Shah and his conflicts with various US presidents. One

key consequence of this type of historiography is that it erases traces of continuity

in US foreign policy by shifting the emphasis from objective interests to leaders'

intentions and moral criteria. Thus, any past, present and future interference by

the US in Iran's internal affairs is also rationalized and legitimized by the same

analytical grid.

Now, if I may return to the scene that opens this piece, Milani was a ubiquitous

presence on various news programs following Iran's contested 2009 elections. The

rhetoric of Milani, IDP, the Hoover Institute, and the slogans of the Green Movement

in Iran melded together, and it seemed that the democratic demands of the wronged

voters in Iran were somehow aligned with IDP's and the Hoover Institute's concern

for "free markets." There is the sudden realization that democracy is indeed an

empty signifier that is used to mean many things to many people, or nothing at all,

an undetermined quality that Milani and IDP define according to their own positions

and interests. In reality, in the post-Soviet era of area studies programs specializing

in the Middle East and/or Near East, there are many side projects and collaborations

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AREA STUDIES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES 139

with outside university institutions (governmentally-funded or private) that use

monikers "democracy," "democratic" and "freedom" in conjunction with "Islam,"

"Islamic," or "Muslim."

While I will not be able to give an exhaustive list of all such programs, I have

noticed a strong presence of organizations such as the Freedom House and National

Endowment for Democracy (NED) as (partial) funding institutions that undeniably

shape the philosophy, intellectual attitude and research interests of contemporary

area studies programs. I will conclude this article with a brief mention of another

well-known academic institution, Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced

International Studies (SAIS), which is home to the above-mentioned Fouad Ajami

and the well-known autobiographer, Azar Nafisi. It is also the former home of

Paul Wolfowitz and Francis Fukuyama. It is not guilt by association, but the exact

mechanisms at work at SAIS that produce very similar academic and political

projects. Francis Fukuyama's The End of the History and the Last Man (1992),

Fouad Ajami's writings and positions, and Paul Wolfowitz's are quite well-known,

so I will point out the involvement of English literature professor Azar Nafisi in a

program called "The Dialogue Project."

The Dialogue Project is a multi-year initiative designed to promote- in a primarily cultural

context- the development of democracy and human rights in the Muslim world. In doing

so, the Dialogue Project also hopes to educate those in non-Muslim communities-

whether they be policy makers, scholars, development professionals, members of the

media, or ordinary citizens- in the complexities and contradictions that govern both

Western relationships with and life in many predominantly Muslim societies around the

world. (Dialogue Project, 2004)

In response to criticisms by Dabashi and others of her 2008 book Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books , Nafisi4 has stated that she is "more interested in

arts and literature than politics," but the Dialogue Project, housed at SAIS, is a

decidedly political enterprise:

In pursuing democracy and human rights in the Muslim world, one must realize that the

battle is both ideological and cultural in nature and must be met on these grounds. Too

often, oppressive regimes and organizations have attempted to suppress any movement

towards pluralism and democracy under the banner of ideological Islam, protecting

tyranny in the name of religion. For this reason, the topics addressed by the Dialogue

Project will be those that have been the main targets of Islamists and, as a result, are

the most significant impediments to the creation of open and pluralistic societies in the

Muslim world, including culture and the myth of Western culture imperialism, women's

issues, and human rights, among others. (Dialogue Project, 2004; emphasis added)

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140 ARAB STUDIES QUARTERLY

After one gets past the platitudes about democracy and pluralism, the key statement

is the last sentence, which is very similar to IDP's attempts at a revisionist history

to discount the historical role of colonialism and imperialism in the colonized

and semi-colonized societies. It is the kind of conceptual framework that assigns

blame for economic underdevelopment and cultural backwardness to the failures of

non- Western countries having endured the colonial rule and imperialist interventions.

One of the major contributors to the Dialogue Project is Freedom House, where Milani serves on the Board of Trustees.5

The problem is not so much deciding where the blame lies as it is oversim-

plifying, erasing and revising history when more clarification and precision are

called for.6 Finally, "human rights" and "women's issues" function in a similar

manner to democracy as floating signifiers. In the past decade, we have witnessed an

unprecedented number of articles and books that may be categorized as Orientalist-

Feminism, which has also a strong presence in area studies programs. The Dialogue

Project belongs to this tendency, but how gender and sexuality issues in the Middle

Eastern countries are mobilized in America and in the West in general for political

purposes and even military intervention requires a separate discussion.

IDP and the Dialogue Project are two exemplary cases of the direction that area

studies programs are taking in the post-Soviet era. I have tried to point out the

continuities and discontinuities in two succeeding phases of area studies programs.

In the new phase, the new emphasis on Islam, "democracy," "human rights," and

"women's issues" has replaced anti-communist rhetoric. This article is a discussion

of how boundaries between academic research and state security apparatus have

constantly been blurred since the inception of the area studies. This blurring of

the boundaries is particularly insidious since most policy decisions produced by

such collaborations are based on factual distortions and misrepresentations. As

mentioned, the programs have also been a haven for good scholarly work and

critical voices so this article is in no way a call for getting rid of such programs.

At the same time, since area studies continue to exert a strong influence on matters

of life and death, war and peace, academic knowledge and policy recommenda-

tions emanating from them need to be constantly scrutinized, especially since the

public may be less likely to be skeptical of the factual representations of prestigious

scholarly institutions than they are of the government.

Notes

1 . See Chow (2006) for a very detailed discussion of the link between military and epistemic dimensions

of area studies including the name itself which implies reconnaissance missions before a bombing campaign.

2. Bundy was also a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 by Lyndon Johnson.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AREA STUDIES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES 141

3. Another aspect of Milani 's history that makes his joint position as a Hoover fellow and the director

of Iranian Studies even more interesting is accounted in his autobiography, Tale of Two Cities: A

Persian Memoir ( 1 996), in which he recounts his life story in Iran under the Shah's regime including

his leftist activities (he belonged to a Maoist organization), his arrest, jail time and his eventual disillusionment with revolutionary politics. In a way, the autobiography is a classic conversion narrative that retrospectively rationalizes Milani 's famous collaboration with the authorities that had arrested him and his eventual embracing of neoconservative values. In an unpublished paper (under consideration), I include an expanded discussion of the book, but I need to mention briefly

that I consider the book and the way it frames Iranian culture and counter-poses it to Western liberal

values as closely following Samuel Huntington's theory of the "Clash of Civilizations." In a 1993 Foreign Policy article under that title, Huntington summarizes his theory:

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily

ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world

affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future. (22)

Even though Huntington sets up a dizzying array of civilizational spheres, he claims the main contemporary conflict is one between Islamic and Western civilizations. His theory has been rejected

as racist, static, inaccurate, and mere speculation by many, including Edward Said and Paul Berman.

4. Wikipedia , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azar Nafisi (accessed March 10, 201 1).

5. Freedom House is an international non-governmental organization based in Washington, DC that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom and human rights. Support for Freedom House is provided by individuals, but also by the United States government. It publishes an

annual report assessing the degree of perceived democratic freedoms in each country, which is used in

political science research. The organization was founded by Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt in 1941, and describes itself as "a clear voice for democracy and freedom around the world." The

group states "American leadership in international affairs is essential to the cause of human rights

and freedom" and that this can primarily be achieved through the group's "analysis, advocacy, and

action." Freedom House receives about 66 percent of its budget from the US government. Wikipedia ,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_House (accessed March 15, 201 1).

6. It is important to note that the Dialogue Project's website was not active at the time of writing this

article, but I had gathered my information in 2004. SAIS's website gives no information about the

cancellation of the program.

References

Chow, R. (2006). The Age of the World Target: SelfReferentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Cumings, B. (1999). Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Dialogue Project (2004). July 15, http://dialogueproject.sais-jhu.edu/ (accessed March 27, 201 1). Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of the History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books. Huntington, S. P. (1993). The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 22-49. Iran Democracy Project, http://www.hoover.org/research/projects-and-programs/iran-democracy-project

(accessed February 1, 201 1). Milani, A. (1996). Tale of Two Cities. Washington, DC: Mage Publishers.

Washington, DC: Mage Publishers.

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Hoover Institute Press Publication.

Nafisi, A. (2008). Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Random House Trade Paperback.

Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Young, R. J. C. (2003). Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.