What’s in a Revolution? Method and Metrics in the Study of Iranian Welfare Policy
Speaker
Chair
Join the LSE Middle East Centre for a conversation with Kevan Harris, Associate Professor of Sociology and director of UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies, on social policy after the Islamic revolution in Iran.
Revolutions, like most concepts in social theory, are a category of practice as well as a category of analysis. For the study of social welfare policy in Iran, this dual character of the concept has funneled our vision and division of the country's modern history around 1979. Yet treating the revolution as a self-contained causal event risks turning it into a black box, attributing subsequent outcomes to “the revolution” without specifying the processes that produced them. Instead, one might ask what post-revolutionary welfare institutions inherited from the old regime, what they subsequently transformed, and what emerged through longer-term processes of state-building. Doing so raises a broader methodological question: how should we measure the effects of a revolution when the outcomes attributed to it unfold through institutions and processes that cross the revolutionary divide?
Meet our speaker
Dr Kevan Harris is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles and the director of UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies. His research focuses on welfare politics in low- and middle-income countries and the history of social policy in West Asia and North Africa. He has also studied social and occupational mobility in Iran before and after the 1979 Revolution.
Meet our chair
Dr Reza Omidi is a Visiting Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. His research focuses on social inequalities, welfare regime, political economy, and social policy developments. His master’s thesis examined how global development discourses and the international political environment influenced Iran’s development plans from the 1940s to the 2000s. His doctoral research focused on the institutional context and political–economic dynamics that shaped the emergence of the welfare system in Iran.
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