Abstract

The primary reason for Iran’s prominent role in the news and world politics in the last decade has been its nuclear programme. This does not mean that there are no other salient reasons for taking Iran into account when analysing Middle East affairs, but in terms of public perception and eventually actual politics, the nuclear issue became the one and only issue from the early 2000s onwards. In this chapter, I want to embed this current discussion in an account that is sensitive to the historical path dependencies (Amanat 1997; Atabaki and Zürcher 2003). I will look at Iran’s political history (first section), the economy (second section), and then the foreign policy/security discussions (third section).