The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was squarely rooted in the anti-colonial and anti-imperial Zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s. Instead of ushering in a new era of democracy and social justice, the Islamic Republic that replaced the monarchy instituted a more brutal dictatorship, paving the way for an oli-garchic theocracy. This talk will address this historical trajectory into the present day, delineating some of the Islamic Republic’s uses and abuses of anti-colonialism. Moreover, it will provide a critical discussion of the often-misleading progressive hopes associated with the group of states known as “BRICS-plus” and the formation of a just, new, non-Western world order, in which Tehran sees itself as a pivotal part alongside Moscow and Beijing. The talk closes by arguing against glorifying anti-Western authoritarian regimes, arguably practiced by a sizeable section of the intellectual milieus in both the Western and non-Western worlds, which merely misuse the noble hopes and aspirations linked to postcolonial thinking.

Ali Fathollah-Nejad is a German-Iranian political scientist and author focus-ing on Iran, the Middle East, and the post-unipolar world order. He is Founder and Director of the Center for Middle East and Global Order (CMEG). He currently teaches Middle East politics and international security at the Hertie School – The University of Governance in Berlin and is a Fellow with the University of Bonn’s Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies (CASSIS). Among his publications are, most recently, Iran — wie der Westen seine Werte und Interessen verrät (2025 [How the West is Betraying its Values and Interests]), The Islamic Republic in Existential Crisis: The Need for a Paradigm Shift in the EU’s Iran Policy (2023, European Union Institute for Security Studies, Chaillot Paper), the much-acclaimed book Iran in an Emerging New World Order (2021, Palgrave), and The Islamic Republic of Iran Four Decades On: The 2017/18 Protests Amid a Triple Crisis (2020, Brookings). Ali is also the former Iran expert of the Brookings Institution in Doha (2017–2020), the German Council on Foreign Relations (2015–2018), and the American University of Beirut’s Issam Fares Institute for Public Poli-cy and International Affairs (2022–2024) as well as a 2022 McCloy Fellow on Global Trends of the American Council on Germany. He holds a PhD in Inter-national Relations from the Department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and was the winner of the 2016/2017 postdoctoral fellowship of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Iran Project. He has taught at universities in London, Berlin, Doha, Tübingen, and Prague, and is a regular commentator for major media out-lets across the globe.