Decoding Iran Scholar Sahar Razavi

Alliance Theory, developed by David Pinsof, shifts the key question away from what a scholar believes toward what coalitions her framing allows her to coordinate with, and what audiences reward her for saying it. Applied to Sahar Razavi, a political scientist at California State University, Sacramento who studies Iranian politics, nationalism, gender, and the Iranian diaspora, the framework reveals how her scholarship functions not only as analysis but as a coordination signal within a specific institutional ecosystem.
The Woman, Life, Freedom movement, which followed the death of Mahsa Amini, sits at the center of Razavi’s recent work. Centering gender and bodily autonomy identifies a victim group universally legible to Western liberal institutions. This creates a low-cost entry point for a wide range of allies, from Hollywood celebrities to European policymakers, to coordinate their signaling without needing deep expertise in Shia jurisprudence or the procurement logic of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The focus on Amini strips a messy geopolitical situation down to a clear moral binary, and that clarity is precisely what makes broad coalition formation possible.
Pinsof argues that coalitions are defined by loyalty rather than consistency. A diaspora-democracy coalition must navigate what might be called a state of exception regarding which human rights abuses it emphasizes. For a scholar inside this ecosystem, the structural incentive runs toward highlighting grassroots agency rather than the constraints of the state. If the narrative shifted too far toward the logic of regime stability or geopolitical realism, it would signal a lack of solidarity with the protesters. The truth produced is therefore partly a function of what keeps the alliance coherent. Highlighting the internal diversity of Iranian society signals that the country is ready for the values the coalition promotes.
Applying Stephen Turner’s concept of tacit knowledge sharpens this point. Razavi’s value to the coalition rests partly on her claim to an understanding of the Iranian experience that Western-born analysts cannot easily replicate. She does not only supply data. She supplies the feel of the movement. This creates an epistemic monopoly of sorts. The coalition rewards her because she provides the moral grounding that a traditional security analyst lacks. The scholar furnishes the legitimacy; the policy institutions furnish the platform.
Charles Taylor’s concept of the buffered self also helps explain why Razavi’s work resonates so strongly in the West. Her research tracks a transition in Iranian identity from a porous religious framework toward a modern individualist one. She maps the emergence of a self that Westerners recognize as structurally similar to themselves. The friend-enemy distinction shifts. It is no longer the West against Iran. It is the modern Iranian individual against the authoritarian state. That reframing lets Western audiences feel solidarity with the Iranian people while opposing the Iranian government, a much more comfortable posture than any stark civilizational opposition would allow.
Alliance Theory also looks at what is not said. To keep the diaspora-democracy coalition coherent, a scholar working within it might downplay the potential chaos of state collapse, the nationalist sentiments that might unite the public and the regime against foreign intervention, and the contradictions among diaspora factions, say between monarchists, MEK supporters, and secular liberals. By centering a unified moral aspiration in Woman, Life, Freedom, the scholarship sidesteps the internal friction that would fracture the coalition. It functions as a tool for harmony within the alliance as much as a tool for analysis of the subject.
The media ecosystem reflects this coalition structure directly. The information about Iran is not simply transmitted. It is curated to sustain specific institutional ecosystems. In the establishment internationalist cluster, outlets like the New York Times and NPR platform analysts such as Vali Nasr, Karim Sadjadpour, and Ali Vaez, whose framings reinforce the post-Cold War foreign policy worldview in which diplomacy remains possible and global institutions still matter. The hawkish national security cluster, anchored by Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, amplifies analysts like Ray Takeyh, who argues that Iranian revolutionary ideology drives policy and that engagement mainly strengthens the regime. The progressive anti-intervention cluster, found in publications like The Intercept, platforms Trita Parsi, whose work frames American policy mistakes as the primary driver of escalation. The financial and energy cluster at Bloomberg and the Financial Times cares less about ideology and more about oil flows, sanctions enforcement, and market stability.
Razavi operates in a fifth cluster, centered in academic and diaspora discourse rather than Washington policy institutions. Her audiences are students, academics, diaspora communities, and human rights activists. Her narrative stresses that Iranian society is internally varied, that social movements and identity struggles shape politics, and that diaspora networks influence international perception.
Within this division, the mechanism Stephen Turner calls closed loops of tacit knowledge operates at full force. Inside the hawkish cluster, the revolutionary nature of the Iranian regime is a shared assumption that requires no argument. It is the starting point for all coordination. Inside the establishment internationalist cluster, the necessity of diplomacy functions the same way. Data that suggests diplomacy is impossible tends to get filtered out because it would dissolve the coalition’s reason for existing. The analysts are not only narrators. They are gatekeepers of what counts as a relevant fact within their specific alliance.
Karim Sadjadpour illustrates the special value of bridge figures, analysts whose framing is flexible enough to speak to multiple coalitions simultaneously. To the policy establishment he signals stability and realism. To diaspora and academic audiences he signals solidarity and transformation. This ambiguity is not confusion. It is a sophisticated coordination logic. It prevents the friend-enemy distinction from hardening too quickly, which keeps the broader liberal internationalist alliance coherent even when its subfactions disagree.
The reason the debates never converge is structural. A scholar at the Quincy Institute is rewarded for identifying the risks of war. An analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies is rewarded for identifying the risks of inaction. Agreement between them would jeopardize their standing inside their respective alliances. Each coalition also gains credibility through counter-signaling. Takeyh’s hawkish framing grows sharper by emphasizing the naivety of diplomatic realists. Parsi’s anti-war narrative gains force by framing the hawks as saboteurs of peace. The truth of a claim becomes secondary to its ability to mark the boundary between one alliance and its rival.
What Jeffrey Alexander calls purification rituals appears throughout. For the arms control coalition, this might mean downplaying Iranian proxy aggression to keep the focus on the rational nuclear negotiator. For the diaspora-democracy coalition, it means centering Woman, Life, Freedom to purify the image of the Iranian public from the more conservative or nationalist elements that might actually support the regime. Purification lets the coalition coordinate around a clear moral signal without being distracted by messier realities.
The Iran debate remains unresolved because no single coalition has achieved a monopoly on moral legitimacy or institutional power. The winning narrative will be the one that best aligns policy institutions, media reach, moral legitimacy, and elite prestige. Right now, multiple coalitions still hold enough institutional ground to keep the contest open. That is not a failure of reason. It is the predictable outcome of alliances competing to define reality.
Different coalitions need different narratives.
Security coalitions need threats.
Diplomatic coalitions need negotiability.
Activist coalitions need moral urgency.
Financial coalitions need risk analysis.
Diaspora coalitions need stories of internal change.
Coalitions are defined as much by what they oppose as what they support. In the current ecosystem, these analysts often gain credibility by counter-signaling the “enemy” coalition. For example, Ray Takeyh’s hawkish framing gains value by highlighting the “naivety” of the diplomatic realists. Conversely, Trita Parsi’s anti-war narrative gains strength by framing the hawks as “saboteurs” of peace. This creates a logic where the truth of a claim is secondary to its ability to differentiate one coalition from its rival. The analysts are not just providing information; they are providing the intellectual ammunition their respective coalitions need to maintain their boundaries.
The open conflict that began on February 28, 2026, with joint US-Israeli strikes on Iranian targets followed by Iranian retaliatory missile and drone attacks, has compressed the timelines and forced every coalition to adapt in real time. The effect has not been to settle the debate but to accelerate it, with each cluster doubling down on its core framing while the ground shifts beneath all of them.
Establishment internationalists like Vaez have warned that degrading Iran’s nuclear program by eight to fifteen years might simply produce a failed state of ninety-two million people, with refugee waves and radicalization as the more durable outcomes. The hawkish cluster has read the same strikes as validation. Takeyh has framed the degradation of Iran’s proxies and military leadership as a definition of success, while acknowledging that Iran claims survival as its own form of victory. Both narratives can coexist because they serve different coalitions, not because the facts are genuinely ambiguous.
Trita Parsi and the anti-intervention cluster have intensified their critique, arguing that American policy mistakes drove escalation and that a wider war now looms. They have some institutional wind at their backs: a poll of over nine hundred international relations scholars showed strong opposition to the strikes, with significant concern that the conflict increases the likelihood of Chinese action on Taiwan.
The financial and energy cluster has mostly watched oil prices surge and equity markets fall, which fits its prior framing of Iran as a major variable in global stability. The academic and diaspora cluster, where Razavi operates, has had to contend with a more uncomfortable development: external threat has paradoxically boosted regime support among some former dissidents, even as protests continue in urban centers. Betting markets dropped the odds of regime collapse before 2027 to around thirty-two percent. The coalition that depends on the diaspora-democracy narrative has not abandoned it, but the optimism is quieter.
What the war has also done is create small zones of convergence that Alliance Theory might not predict but can still explain. Both sides claim victory in their own terms, which creates just enough narrative overlap to make de-escalation possible without either coalition having to announce defeat. Some realists now echo anti-interventionists on the need for de-escalation. Even hawks acknowledge the risks of a failed Iranian state. These convergences do not resolve the underlying coalition competition. They suggest instead that a winning narrative might emerge if diplomatic coalitions can regain enough institutional sway to reframe survival as a mutual interest rather than a concession. Whether that happens depends less on the facts on the ground than on which alliance manages to define what those facts mean.