Please join us join in person in room P1-547 or online as Reza Mehraeen presents "Beyond Deterrence: Nuclear Politics and Authoritarian Survival in Iran, 1979-."
About the Seminar
Nuclear programs can serve important domestic political functions, including bolstering a state’s domestic popularity, reinforcing internal cohesion, consolidating elite power, developing a secrecy state, justifying executive overreach, enabling corruption and sanctions profiteering, and providing a pretext for violently suppressing civil society dissent. Yet, much of the existing scholarship on nuclear politics and proliferation, especially that related to Middle Eastern countries like Iran, has largely overlooked the reciprocal relationship between domestic politics and nuclear technology, namely how domestic institutions and bureaucratic actors shape nuclear programs and postures, and, conversely, how nuclear programs themselves reshape domestic politics and reinforce authoritarian rule.
About the speaker
Reza Mehraeen is an Iranian Ph.D. Candidate in International Studies and Comparative Politics at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, University of Denver, and a Fellow at the Center for Middle East Studies. He is the recipient of the 2025-2026 Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship and currently serves as a Visiting Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP) at the Geneva Graduate Institute.
His doctoral research, titled "Beyond Deterrence: Nuclear Politics and Authoritarian Survival in Iran since 1979", examines how Iran's nuclear program has shaped the country's domestic political dynamics and the mechanisms through which nuclear technology has sustained authoritarian survival in Iran since 1979.
Reza's dissertation addresses this gap and explores how Iranian nuclear technology, typically viewed through the lens of international security and deterrence, can also serve as a mechanism of domestic authoritarian resilience. He shows how Iran’s nuclear program has enabled the Islamic Republic regime and its ideologically loyal base of supporters to monopolize key sectors of Iran’s economy, curtail outward-looking economic policies, limit competition and transparency, empower coercive political institutions, and violently suppress dissent. At the same time, the regime’s strategies of nuclear ambiguity and hedging have facilitated periodic sanctions relief and other material benefits, allowing the leadership to channel resources to its clientelist network and security institutions, thereby reinforcing the Islamic Republic’s durability at home.
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