Iran unveiled: How the Revolutionary Guards is turning theocracy into military dictatorship

Iran unveiled: How the Revolutionary Guards is turning theocracy into military dictatorship

Ali Alfoneh's seminal treatise on IRGC, its history, influence and possible future.

Watch video clip here




Speaker Biographies

Ali Alfoneh is a former resident fellow at AEI and a doctoral candidate at the department of political science at the University of Copenhagen. His research areas include civil-military relations in the Middle East, with a special focus on Iran and the role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the politics of the Islamic Republic. Previously, Alfoneh was a research fellow at the Institute for Strategy at the Royal Danish Defence College and taught political economy at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Southern Denmark.


Karim Sadjadpour is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He joined Carnegie after four years as the chief Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group based in Washington, DC, and Tehran, where he conducted dozens of interviews with senior Iranian officials and hundreds more with Iranian intellectuals, clerics, dissidents, paramilitaries, businessmen, students, activists, and youth, among others. He is a regular contributor to BBC TV and Radio, CNN, National Public Radio, PBS NewsHour, and Al-Jazeera. He has also appeared on the Today Show, Charlie Rose, Fox News Sunday, and the Colbert Report, among others. He contributes regularly to publications such as The Economist, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and Foreign Policy. Frequently called upon to brief US, EU, and Asian officials about Middle Eastern affairs, he regularly testifies before Congress; has lectured at Harvard University, Princeton University, and Stanford University; and has been the recipient of numerous academic awards, including a Fulbright scholarship.