In 2010, the Iranian government reversed the neo-Malthusian policy it had introduced in December 1989, and opted for a new population policy that I will define as populationist. It consisted in deploying all possible means to reach a target population of 150 million, within an unspecified timeframe though. The supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, fully endorsed this policy, and in May 2014, for the sake of speeding up the process, he drew up a strategic program in a 14-article decree, called “Population General Policies”, which sanctioned the state’s new population policy, and instructed the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary powers to implement it.

Grounded in the alleged threat of population aging due to birth control and declining fertility, the new population policy aims to accelerate population growth by reversing the downward trend in fertility. There is no doubt that the process of population aging has started in Iran, but not to the extent that this demographic evolution may justify the implementation of incentive, coercive and particularly aggressive measures in order to entice Iranian people into having more children. While, by reappropriating their fertility, Iranian women succeeded in coming out of “the male sphere of domination” and thus reaching dignity and equality, they again find themselves subject to injunctions that violate their reproductive health rights and thereby their human rights.

I first shed light on the actual yet concealed objective of the new population policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  The examination of coercive as well as incentives measures shall then evidence the detrimental effect of this new policy on Iranian women's rights.

Guest speaker: Professor Marie Ladier-Fouladi (CNRS)/ CETOBaC)
Chair: Soraya Tremayne (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford)
Series: MEC

MEC Seminars (Women's Rights Research Seminars)

Women's Rights on The Altar of a Strategic Stake: The New Population Policy of the Islamic ROI

Speaker: Professor Robert Springborg (Italian Institute of International Affairs, Rome)
Recorded on: Friday, 3 November 2017
Edited by: Anne Kimunguyi
First published: 16 November 2017

About the speaker:
Robert Springborg is a non-resident Research Fellow of the Italian Institute of International Affairs, Rome. Until October 2013, he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, and Program Manager for the Middle East for the Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2002 until 2008, he held the MBI Al Jaber Chair in Middle East Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he also served as Director of the London Middle East Institute. Before taking up that Chair, he was Director of the American Research Center in Egypt, University Professor of Middle East Politics at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia; and assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also taught at King’s College, London; University of California, Berkeley; the College of Europe; the Paris School of International Affairs of Sciences Po; and the University of Sydney. In 2016, he was Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar, Middle East Initiative, Kennedy School, and Harvard University. 

His publications include Mubarak’s Egypt: Fragmentation of the Political Order; Family Power and Politics in Egypt; Legislative Politics in the Arab World (co-authored with Abdo Baaklini and Guilain Denoeux); Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East first and second editions, (co-authored with Clement M. Henry); Oil and Democracy in Iraq; Development Models in Muslim Contexts: Chinese, ‘Islamic’ and Neo-Liberal Alternatives and several editions of Politics in the Middle East (co-authored with James A. Bill). He co-edited a volume on popular culture and political identity in the Gulf that appeared in 2008. He has published in the leading Middle East journals and was the founder and regular editorialist for The Middle East in London, a monthly journal that commenced publication in 2003. His new book -‘Egypt’ has just been published in October 2017 by Polity Press.

MEC Seminar: Governing Divided Egypt

Speaker:Yael Zerubavel (Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and History, Rutgers University)
Chair: Professor Yaacov Yadgar (Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies, St Anne's)
Series: Middle East Centre Friday Seminar Series
Joint event with The Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA)

About the seminar:

At once an ecological phenomenon and a cultural construction, the desert has varied associations in Zionist and Israeli culture. Yael Zerubavel tells the story of the desert from the early twentieth century to the present, shedding light on romantic-mythical associations, settlement and security concerns, environmental sympathies, and the commodifying tourist gaze. Drawing on literary narratives, educational texts, newspaper articles, tourist materials, films, popular songs, posters, photographs, and cartoons, Zerubavel reveals the complexities and contradictions that mark Israeli society’s semiotics of space in relation to the Middle East, and the central role of the “besieged island” trope in Israeli culture and politics. The talk draws on the new book published by Stanford University Press (2019). 

About the speaker:

Dr. Zerubavel is Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and History and served as the Founding Director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Study at Rutgers University. She is a scholar of memory studies with an expertise in modern Israeli society and culture. Utilising an interdisciplinary approach that informs both her teaching and writing, her work explores collective memory and identity, national myths, the transformation of traditions, war and trauma, and cultural perceptions of space, drawing on historical sources, Hebrew literature, educational materials, popular and folkloric forms, as well as in-depth interviews. Her work addresses the impact of nationalism, secularisation, immigration and dislocation, the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the reshaping of Jewish memory in Israel and developments within Israeli culture.

Yael Zerubavel is the author of the award-winning book, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Desert in the Promised Land (Stanford University Press, 2019), and is currently working on another book manuscript entitled Biblical Reenactments: The Performance of Antiquity in Israeli Culture. She has served on the boards of the Association for Jewish Studies and the association for Israel Studies and on the editorial boards of key journals in the field of Israel Studies.

Recorded on: 10 May 2019
First Published: 3 June 2019
Edited by: Kaja Wawrzak(MEC)

Desert in the Promised Land: The Politics and Semiotics of Space in Israeli Culture

St Antony’s College, Oxford University, is a world-renowned centre for research and teaching in global and regional issues. The College provides an interdisciplinary environment to study a range of subjects from development to international relations. St Antony's houses seven research centres focused on Africa, Asia, Europe, Japan, Latin America, the Middle East, Russia and Eurasia as well as programmes on North America, Burma, Morocco, Sudan and Taiwan. In our regional centres and programmes we use insights and methods from both social sciences and the humanities to deepen our understanding of the key parts of the world. The work done here helps to inform public debate and public policy.

Our Fellows, students and visiting researchers include leading experts on the regions of the world and on issues of global and transnational importance. Each year we host visiting experts from the world’s leading universities and think tanks and from such fields as diplomacy, journalism, business, and politics. Our select group of more than 450 graduate students are among the best and the brightest, representing all the continents.

Women's Rights on The Altar of a Strategic Stake: The New Population Policy of the Islamic ROI

St Antony's College, Oxford

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