Papers by Stephanie Cronin
Social Histories of Iran: Modernism and Marginality in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press), 2021
The global analysis provided here draws on Hellema, Radicalism, Reform and Crisis. 3 'A long look... more The global analysis provided here draws on Hellema, Radicalism, Reform and Crisis. 3 'A long look at the Russian revolution'. Steve Smith talks to the British Academy Review about his new book, Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890-1928, in www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/long-look-russian-revolution.
Middle Eastern Studies, 2016
Middle Eastern Studies, 2016
Banditry, on land and sea, and allied trades such as smuggling have been widespread and endemic a... more Banditry, on land and sea, and allied trades such as smuggling have been widespread and endemic across the Middle East and North Africa. That this is so is attested to by a variety of sources, some hostile and emanating from elite origins, state archives, court records, chronicles, accounts of European travellers, and some more sympathetic, popular song, poetry and folklore. Yet the Middle Eastern experience of banditry has thus far failed to receive sustained academic attention and the figure of the bandit has found fuller representation in literature, most notably in the novels of the Turkish author Yashar Kemal. 1 In particular, the debates stimulated by Eric Hobsbawm's thesis of social banditry has elicited only a few responses from scholars of the Middle East and North Africa, and those largely negative, failing to spark the kind of comparative and theoretical interest that has proved so productive for Latin America, China and southern Europe. 2 The purpose of the survey which follows is twofold. It is, first, to encourage a discussion within Middle Eastern and North African Studies of the social significance of crime in general, and specific phenomena such as banditry and smuggling in particular. Second, it hopes to provide some historical context for the startling re-emergence in the ungoverned spaces created by state collapse of types of actors and activities associated with banditry and smuggling and often thought of as belonging to the past. These include mafia-type gangs, militias/warlords sometimes with quasi-political ambitions, smuggling, now of a wide variety of commodities, including people, weapons and drugs, on a massive scale across the Middle East and NorthWest Africa. Finally, and particularly, the survey offers an explanatory framework for the profoundly ambiguous popular attitudes often displayed towards such figures and their behaviour. The publication of Eric Hobsbawm's 'Bandits' in 1969 was a foundational event. 3 Although criticized as methodologically unsound, theoretically flawed, empirically limited and latterly, after its influence had spread among scholars working on the non-European world, as Eurocentric, the book itself and its central notion of social banditry are still, several decades after its first appearance, compulsory referential starting points for any discussion of banditry, of pre-modern rural crime, indeed for the social history of crime in general. Even though the search for the social bandit often failed, the quest itself has offered productive ways of thinking about contested definitions of crime, the nature and scope of peasant resistance and the subaltern psychological world.
Anglo-Iranian Relations since 1800, Edited by Vanessa Martin, 2005
Since the early nineteenth century, Britain had sporadically involved itself in Iranian attempts ... more Since the early nineteenth century, Britain had sporadically involved itself in Iranian attempts at military modernization. During the years of the constitutional period and the First World War, this involvement deepened and became more complex and of fundamental significance for the country's political future. The account that follows examines Britain's relationship with the various elements of Iran's military forces in the period 1910-21, focusing particularly on the political circumstances which produced the coup d'état of 1921 under a leader, Reza Khan, drawn from one of these forces, the Cossack Division. Central to this relationship was a paradox: although Britain had been instrumental in founding one 'reformed' military force, the Government Gendarmerie, this force evolved in a strongly nationalist direction and turned against its imperial masters, while it was the Russian-sponsored Cossack Division, of which the British had always been profoundly suspicious, that was ultimately to provide General Ironside with a corps suitable for nurturing as the incubator of a new national leadership.
Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslim World: Gender, Modernism and the Politics of Dress (Edited by Stephanie Cronin), 2014
Middle Eastern Studies, 2018
In 1971, E. P. Thompson published a seminal article on eighteenth century English bread riots whi... more In 1971, E. P. Thompson published a seminal article on eighteenth century English bread riots which was to become a foundational text for the study of such protests and which was, furthermore, to exercise a profound influence on the understanding of crowd politics in general across wide geographical areas and chronological periods. Challenging older elite notions of the irrationality, illegitimacy and even criminality of the 'mob', in this article, Thompson situated popular direct action in times of food crises within a very specific historical, economic and, most importantly, cultural context. 1 This context, he argued, produced a deeply held adhesion among the poor to the concept of a 'moral economy' and an equally profound rejection of the free market as enshrined in the new political economy of the late eighteenth century, theorized most famously by Adam Smith. 2 This article returns to Thompson's original text in order to assess whether and to what extent his paradigm may shed light on bread riots in Iran. 3 In particular, it examines the evidence which supports the notion that Iran experienced a 'golden age' of bread riots in the 1890s and early 1900s, just before and indeed contributing to the outbreak of the constitutional revolution. 4 It argues for the existence of a link between the destruction of market regulation in Iran, the resulting increasing anger and bitterness of those most affected, the urban poor, and their eventual readiness to participate in large numbers in the revolution. 5 It then suggests, in explanation of the intensity of the popular conflicts over bread raging in Iran's cities in the late nineteenth century, a parallel with eighteenth century England. Although a century of chronological time separates the two cases, each country experienced, at their different moments, a similar collapse of an older paternalist socioeconomic and political order, with market regulation at its core, and its supersession by modern capitalism, exemplified by the free market. In each country, this provoked a similar response from the urban poor. The Iranian and Middle Eastern bread riot had functioned reasonably effectively in pre-modern economic and political contexts, where the 'politics of negotiation' were still salient. As the free market replaced paternalism, however, so did unmediated class conflict replace older methods of bargaining, albeit occasionally by riot, between unequal partners within a social pact. 6 The constitutive components of Thompson's paradigm may be summarized as follows. 7 First, it strongly rejected 'crass economic reductionism' in its explanation of food riots. They were not instinctive reactions to hunger, not 'rebellions of the belly'. On the contrary,
Armies and State-building in the Modern Middle East 2013 I.B. Tauris
like his father, Riza Shah, controlled and dominated but also mortally feared his army and its of... more like his father, Riza Shah, controlled and dominated but also mortally feared his army and its officers, especially its senior officers. 1 Like both shahs, British and American diplomats in Iran also saw the army as a source of potential political opposition. Especially after the wave of coups d' état which swept through the Arab world from the 1950s, both Muhammad Riza Shah and his Western supporters were vigilant, ever on the alert for the emergence of an Iranian version of the Egyptian Colonel Nasser or the Iraqi Colonel Qasim. Yet this obsession with the danger of a coup, emanating from the higher ranks of the army, colonel and above, turned out to be entirely misplaced. Under both shahs, the majority of the high command remained loyal, their own positions inextricably linked to the fate of the regime, even the most ambitious of Iran's colonels, brigadiers and generals, exemplified by General Ali Razmara, offering only sporadic and contingent opposition. Yet the measures taken to avert any challenge from this quarter rendered the high command of the army impotent in the face of the real threat to the monarchy which emerged in 1977-8. A comment from a US embassy report, that the conscript was of no political importance, summed up this mistaken assessment. 2 In fact, when the crisis came, it was indeed to be the hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file soldiers who, by defecting or simply deserting, were key in determining the outcome of the struggle between the Shah and the revolutionaries, while it was the non-commissioned air force officers, the homafars, who dealt the coup de grâce to the imperial regime. The experience of the Iranian army in the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods conformed to the classical revolutionary model. Although
S ince invading Afghanistan in 2001 and overthrowing the Taliban, 1 the United States and its Nor... more S ince invading Afghanistan in 2001 and overthrowing the Taliban, 1 the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) partners have become drawn in to the project of rebuilding the Afghan state, and in particular to the creation of a modern army capable of supporting that state. The creation ★ 45 Abstract This article discusses the serial efforts made by Afghan rulers and governments, between the early nineteenth century and the present, to build modern regular armies, and analyzes the reasons for the repeated failure of these efforts. Its context is the urgency of the current army reform programme being undertaken by the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies in Afghanistan, which constitutes a key exit strategy for Western forces. The article situates the historical failure of military reform within the framework of a broader failure of state-building, and locates a central difficulty in successive Afghan governments' strategies towards tribal power.
Stephanie Cronin (1999) The politics of radicalism within the Iranian army: the Jahansuz group of... more Stephanie Cronin (1999) The politics of radicalism within the Iranian army: the Jahansuz group of 1939, Iranian Studies, 32:1, 5-25,
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Papers by Stephanie Cronin