Breaking History
Breaking History
The Free Press
Why Iran’s Reform Movement Failed
54 minutes Posted Apr 9, 2026 at 9:00 am.
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Arash Azizi lived through the democracy movement in Iran before he wrote about it. Now a historian at Yale, he joins Eli Lake to trace the arc from former president Mohammad Khatami’s unlikely rise to the crushed hopes of the Green Movement—and what it tells us about whether reform from within the Islamic Republic was ever really possible.

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