Haleh Esfandiari

Why it matters: In a country where women have been punished for not observing "Islamic values" in public, this is a bold move. Haleh Esfandiari, Director Emerita and Fellow at the Middle East program of the Wilson Center, told Axios that the protests are "very interesting, very bold, very courageous," but "on the other hand, ...

After a week of political unrest in Iran, it is now possible to delineate the prominent features of the protests and demonstrations. The unrest broke out in the northeastern city of Mashad over economic grievances, and economic issues remained a prominent feature of the protests as they spread to other ...

Iran has often seemed to be on the brink of democracy. During the twentieth century, the country experienced three major political upheavals: the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11, the oil nationalization movement of 1951–53 and the Islamic Revolution of 1978–79. Each differed from the others in ...

Haleh Esfandiari; May 18, 2017; Global. Share; Tweet … LinkedIn; Email; Print. Text Size. Like The Atlantic? Subscribe to The Atlantic Daily, our free weekday email newsletter. On Friday, Iranians will vote for their next president. The race has essentially boiled down to a choice between a centrist and a hardline ...

WASHINGTON — Jason Rezaian , The Washington Post 's correspondent in Iran , was arrested in Tehran on July 22 almost certainly not because of anything he had written, but because the hard-liners among Iran's ruling elite seek to embarrass and weaken President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate.

Following the disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad in 2009, the world looked on as tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets in protest, only to be repressed by force, arrested, or worse. Though there is far less coverage of Iran now—few foreign correspondents are allowed into the ...

In 2007, Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American director of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Middle East Program, told Iranian intelligence everything she knew. She was interrogated for almost eight months, nearly four of them inside Tehran's notorious Evin prison. During that time, she explained the ...

Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American academic who heads the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, returned to Tehran in late 2006 to visit her then 93-year-old mother. As she was heading to the airport to leave Iran, her car was forced off the road by armed men ...

An Iranian-American scholar who had been jailed for months in Iran has been freed on bail. Haleh Esfandiari is director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In December, she was on the way to the Tehran airport after visiting her mother, when she was seized ...