Narges Bajoghli. Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic. California: Stanford University Press, 2019, 176 pages

What does it mean to be pro-regime in the Islamic Republic of Iran? Narges Bajoghli’s Iran Reframed, the 2020 recipient of the Margaret Mead Award, offers a rare, in-depth look at Iran’s pro-regime media producers at a time when they face a crisis of credibility: Iran’s youth, who comprise the majority of the population in the country, do not remember (and therefore do not understand) the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary stories. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in Iran among various groups of regime supporters and eighteen months of ethnographic research with their media producers specifically, Bajoghli highlights these men’s struggles to “transmit the commitment to their revolutionary project” to younger generations and illustrates what is at stake for them in keeping the revolution alive (5). Bajoghli’s ethnographically-rich analysis challenges entrenched stereotypes about Iran’s regime supporters, demonstrating that they are far from homogenous, cohesive, unchanging, and all-powerful. Bajoghli’s main argument is that “the various ‘pro-regime’ categories are in fact fluid” (14). As the Islamic Republic’s media producers face a broad range of international pressure and local criticism, they fiercely debate with one another about “how to define the regime and what it stands for today” and dispute the boundaries of who is part of the regime and what the “right” revolutionary narrative is (116). By putting these men’s opinions, debates, and strategies at the centre of her analysis, Bajoghli reframes the study of Iran from one traditionally viewed through the lens of Islam to one focused on the worldviews of those who support the Islamic Republic in line with the goals of the 1979 revolution. Such a reframing of analysis allows Bajoghli to illustrate that “contestation in the Islamic Republic is not just between the regime and the people or between the older and the young” but that it is, in fact, more “multi-layered” and complex than previously discussed (119). The book’s five chapters guide the reader through discovering this fluidity and the complexity of pro-regime categories. Chapter 1 looks at generational changes and divides. Bajoghli deftly demonstrates the differences between earlier pro-regime generations and today’s, providing insights foundational for the following chapters. For instance, Bajoghli illustrates that the earlier generations of Basij—the Revolutionary Guard’s primary apparatus composed of volunteers who work to enforce state control over Iranian society—discourage their children from joining the Basij as they see it as “a step down the social ladder they have scaled” (46). Bajoghli’s extensive ethnographic research reveals that the older generations prefer sending their children to Europe once they are older because they believe a European experience will grant them “the right cultural capital to be in the social class to which they aspire” (46). At the same time, they feel disdain towards the younger generation who join the Basij to climb the social ladder, a move the older generations see as “opportunistic” (Ibid). Thus, Bajoghli’s detailed analysis illustrates that Iran’s regime producers do not form a monolithic, unified group. By bringing to light these men’s concerns over social status and cultural capital, it also reveals that, contrary to their depictions in Western media, these men are not solely motivated by Islam. Chapter 2 expands on these insights by exploring the contrasting stories of the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war, which, according to Bajoghli, “provides the master narrative of the Islamic Republic” (28). This chapter highlights the differences between the official war stories projected on state television and the “real” ones that veterans usually recount off-camera in private settings. Bajoghli finds that state-produced films in service of the war leave out scenes that do not conform to the official version of the war, such …