The Successful “Failure” of the Iranian Green Uprising | (dot)history
(dot)history | A space by SARA ZANOTTA
Pouya Alimagham is a historian of the modern Middle East. His main areas of research are revolutionary and guerrilla movements, imperialism, representation, Orientalism, “Political Islam”, post-Islamism and their interactions, especially in Iran, Iraq and the Levant. Currently, he is Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
His book Contesting the Iranian Revolution: The Green Uprising, published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press, is the result of Dr. Alimagham’s doctoral research on the Iranian 2009 Green Movement. The most interesting aspect of the book is the focus on how Green Movement’s activists appropriated state-sanctioned history and symbolism and subverted them for their own purposes. The author claims that «although the Green Movement failed to cancel Ahmadinejad’s election “victory” or to overthrow the state, both of which at certain junctures were expressly the aims of activists in the movement, it nonetheless succeeded in that “failure”» as it challenged the government on an ideological and discursive level (p. 256).
