Research Library

A report from center experts on the evolution of Islamist politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, security in the Persian Gulf and displacement in the Middle East.

"As the U.S. and Iran prepare for talks to revive the nuclear agreement that Washington abandoned in 2018, the leadership in Tehran is laying the groundwork for a newly assertive foreign policy," writes fellow Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar in Foreign Affairs. Read the full article here.

This brief explores pressing issues the Biden administration should address in developing a strategy for the Middle East. It provides analysis and policy recommendations related to the GCC states, U.S.-Iran relations, Islamist groups, and refugees and migration. Further CME publications will address issues such as the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace and the crisis in Lebanon.

Using religious political parties in Iran and Turkey as case studies, the authors argue that the parties are not passively constrained by religious doctrine. Rather, they actively and continually construct religious narratives that respond to their immediate threat perceptions and political environment. Read more at Political Science Quarterly.

"After the starkly low turnout and the conservative victory, we might be inching toward a more turbulent phase between [Iran and the U.S.]," Middle East fellow Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar writes in a New York Times op-ed on the parliamentary elections in Iran.

Fellow Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar offers a possible way to stop the escalation between Iran and United States. Washington Post (Monkey Cage Blog): https://wapo.st/2IA8s6r

As President Trump's policies make life increasingly difficult for the Iranian people, citizens who once supported the U.S. are now shifting their allegiance to Iran's hardliners, writes Baker Institute Middle East fellow Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar. New York Times: https://nyti.ms/2I9TLHG

Fellow for the Middle East Mohammad Tabaar proposes an alternative framework for understanding the ongoing Iranian-Saudi rivalry, focusing on factional politics and competition among elites in each country instead of the sectarian differences and cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

On September 22, 1980, Saddam Hussein initiated what became one of the longest wars of the twentieth century — a war of attrition between Iran and Iraq that finally ended in August 1988. Fellow Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar examines the domestic causes of the Iran–Iraq War, delving into secret discussions among Iranian political and military elites during the conflict, their analyses of their own performance on the battlefield, and their revealing public disputes and blame game decades later.

Drawing upon primary documents from various Iranian communists and Islamists, this research paper questions the conventional wisdom that the Islamists' takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 was a grassroots reaction to American policies. The author argues that competition between the Islamists and leftists instead may have been a key driver of the hostage crisis.