Bates professor flexes expertise on rural Iran

Eric Hooglund, a visiting professor at Bates College in Maine, has been putting to good use his expertise on rural Iran to help inform the current debate over alleged electoral fraud in the Islamic Republic.

I wrote two articles in the Globe this week on New England's links to the turmoil in Iran, and both in turn have indirect links to Hooglund. Today I noted the fascinating ways in which a 23-year-old graduate student, Daniel Berman, has contributed to understanding the election landscape in Iran.

The report that Berman co-authored is available at the Chatham House research website.

Berman is a Bates alumnus -- and studied with Hooglund. It was Hooglund who suggested to Berman that he pursue graduate work at the Institute of Iranian Studies at St. Andrews University, with another noted Iranian scholar, Ali Ansari, who is the lead author of the Chatham House report.

Hooglund also was the author of an influential column a few days after the Iranian election that dispelled an oft-repeated myth -- that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might have won the June 12 election because of rural support, even if urban residents opposed him.

Hooglund's column, syndicated by Agence Global, appeared on Tehran Bureau, the website edited by Kelly Golnoush Niknejad from her parent's home in Newton, Mass.

Hooglund's column was in turn picked up by the New York Times op-ed page on June 18, titled, "Stealing the Village Vote." Since then, Hooglund's work has been cited frequently.

Hooglund wrote that his 30 years of research into rural Iran made clear to him that Iranians in the countryside would be every bit as likely to support a reformist candidate as city dwellers, and in some cases even more likely. Hooglund described in detail the situation in Bagh-e Iman, a village of 850 households in the Zagros Mountains near the southwestern city of Shiraz, where villagers had heavily campaigned for Mir Hussein Moussavi. But incumbent Ahmadinejad was reported to have won more than 60 percent of the nationwide vote.

Hooglund is also editor of Middle East Critique, a peer-reviewed Middle East studies journal published by Hamline University in Minnesota.