Iran Democracy Project

The Iran Democracy Project "at the Hoover Institution was created to understand the process and prospects for democracy in Iran and the rest of the Middle East. The central goal is to help the West understand the complexities of the Muslim world, and to map out possible trajectories for transitions to democracy and free markets in the Middle East, beginning with Iran. The project also seeks to identify, analyze, and offer policy options on the existing obstacles to democratic transition and ways to remove them and to ensure that policy makers in Washington receive advice that is non-partisan and reliable. The history of the Middle East in the last one hundred years has shown Iran to be a bellwether for the rest of the region in the areas of political, social, and economic reform.

"Hoover Fellow, Abbas Milani, is coordinator of the Iran Democracy Project along with Hoover Fellows, Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul who are recognized scholars in their fields and bring widely different but complementary areas of expertise to their joint effort. Dr. Milani is also the director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford."