https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/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.

Recent months have seen increased tension between Iran, its neighbours and the West.

Israel’s concerns over Iran’s nuclear programme, the storming of the UK embassy in Tehran and the closure of the Tehran embassy have all played a part in ratcheting up tensions across the region.

Sanctions on the trade of its oil provoked warnings from Iran that they will close vital access to the strait of Hormuz.

As President Barack Obama warned against the “loose talk of war” Iran’s political elite is also focused on internal power struggles between the spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Join us as we bring together a prominent panel to discuss the growing tensions between Iran, its neighbours and the West, the impact of the power struggles at the heart of government and what role the pro-democracy movement still might play in the country’s future.

Chaired by Martin Fletcher, associate editor and former foreign editor of The Times.

With:

Ran Gidor, the Minister-Counsellor for Political Affairs at the Embassy of Israel in London. Prior to this he worked as the Head of the UK & Ireland Desk at the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. From 2000 to 2003 he served as the Cultural & Academic Attaché at the Embassy of Israel in Beijing, China. From 1997 to 2000, he served as the deputy Ambassador at the Embassy of Israel in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Azadeh Moaveni, Iranian-American writer, journalist and former Middle East correspondent for Time magazine. She is author of Lipstick Jihad and co-author, with Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, of Iran Awakening.

Roberto Toscano, Italian Ambassador to Iran for five years (2003-2008). As a career diplomat, he has served in a number of other posts (India, Chile, USSR, Spain, United States, as well as at Italy’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations at Geneva). He is the author of books and articles on human rights, peacekeeping, conflict prevention, ethics and international relations.

Christopher de Bellaigue, a leading expert on modern Iran. Between 1996 and 2007, he lived and worked as a journalist in south Asia and the Middle East, writing for The Economist, the Financial Times, the Independent and the New York Review of Books. He is author of many books including most recently Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup.

Picture credit: Daniella Zalcman

Recent months have seen a rise in tension between Iran and the West; the storming of the UK embassy in Tehran in November led William Hague to order the expulsion of Iranian diplomats from the UK and the closure of the embassy in Tehran.

The latest flashpoint has been the strait of Hormuz, the narrowest point in the Gulf, through which a fifth of the world’s traded oil passes. Iran has warned that if sanctions on the trade in Iranian oil come into effect they could respond by closing the strait. Recent Iranian and Israeli military activity in the region has only increased these tensions.

Internally 2011 saw ncreased tensions in the country’s political elite focusing on a power struggle between the spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

There was a continued crackdown on dissidents, with a rise in arrests and executions and the suggestion that Iran might follow North Korea in creating a domestic intranet that could eventually close off the internet to millions of Iranians.

Join us at the Royal Institution of Great Britain where we will be discussing the growing tensions between Iran and the West, the impact of the power struggles at the heart of government and looking at the future of the pro-democracy Green Movement.

Picture credit: Daniella Zalcman