Iran: A New Chapter?
In June 2013, Hassan Rouhani was elected president of Iran, running with a mandate of “moderation and wisdom”. He promised to free political prisoners and guarantee civil rights, to return “dignity to the nation”.
He has also made promises of reform, of saving the economy and working to lift international sanctions by ending the nuclear standoff. But in a country where the elected leader is overshadowed by the unelected Supreme Leader and the Council of Guardians, will Rouhani be able to bring about effective change?
As dialogue with the US and other world powers continues to improve, we will be exploring the changes this new leader is enacting both on the international stage and within Iran.
Chaired by Elizabeth Palmer, CBS News correspondent.
The panel:
Ramita Navai is a British-Iranian Emmy award winning foreign affairs journalist. She has reported from over 30 countries and has made 20 documentaries for Channel 4’s critically acclaimed current affairs series Unreported World. She was the Tehran correspondent for The Times from 2003-2006 and she has reported for the United Nations in Iran, Pakistan and Iraq. Her first book, City of Lies, about Tehran, will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2014.
Sir Richard Dalton was British ambassador to Iran 2002-2006 and is associate fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House.
Kelly Golnoush Niknejad is founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning Tehran Bureau, which is hosted by The Guardian. She is also the inaugural recipient of the Innovator Award from Columbia Journalism School for “inspiring, creating, developing, or implementing new ideas that further the cause of journalism”.
Arron Reza Merat was formally The Economist‘s Tehran correspondent and is currently working on Iran at the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Shashank Joshi is a Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and a doctoral student of international relations at Harvard University’s Department of Government. He specialises in international security in South Asia and the Middle East.
