On today’s episode we have an installment of our MERIP Roundtable series, where members of our editorial committee, recent contributors and close comrades discuss current events. In this episode, we centered our discussion on the social dynamics and impacts of the current war on Iran and consider how the regional political order may be shifting as a result. 

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel began a massive air war against Iran, which has now impacted up to 12 countries in the region. Many of Iran’s political leaders, including the 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, have been killed and replaced, oil infrastructure in Iran and across the Gulf has been severely damaged or production halted and retaliatory Iranian missile and drone strikes have hit both military and civilian targets in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the Emirates and Oman. The closing and apparent mining of the Strait of Hormuz has sent oil prices over $100 a barrel, pushing the global economy to the brink of a recession. All of this is happening under the direction of a US administration whose war aims appear opaque and in cooperation with an Israeli government bent on sowing regional chaos, inflicting misery on ordinary Iranians, accelerating devastating attacks on Lebanon, closing Gaza to all aid and severely restricting movement within the West Bank.

Joining Executive Director James Ryan for the roundtable are Ida Nikou, a sociologist and author of a recent MERIP article “Governing Crisis–Sanctions, Austerity and Social Unrest in Iran”; Arang Keshavarzian, professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies at NYU, a long time MERIP contributor and editor and author of Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East, published by Stanford University Press in 2024; and Sean Yom, a member of our editorial committee, associate professor of political science at Temple University and author of Jordan: Politics in an Accidental Crucible, published in 2025 by Oxford University Press. 

This episode was recorded on March 11, 2026.

Further reading: 

Ida Nikou and Manijeh Moradian eds., “Iran in Crisis: Seven Essays on the Obstacles to Freedom,” Jadaliyya, February 24, 2026. 

Ida Nikou, “Governing Crisis–Sanctions, Austerity and Social Unrest in Iran,” MERIP, January 29, 2026.

Adam Hanieh, Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power and the Making of the World Market, (Verso Books, 2024). 

Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, “The Iran War is Jeopardizing the Entire Global Economy”Foreign Policy, March 4, 2026. 

Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History(Penguin, 2017). 

Marc Lynch, America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region(Hurst Publishers, 2025). 

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, “The Dry and the Wet Burn Together,”London Review of Books, March 3, 2026. 

Ervand Abrahamian, “Iran Under Fire,”New Left Review 157, January/February 2026. 

Naghmeh Sohrabi, “These are the True Things” (Substack)

Reza Akbari, “The Guarded Domains” (Substack) 

Toby Craig Jones, “Iran and America’s Long War in the Middle East,”New Global Politics, March 4, 2026. 

Arang Keshavarzian, “Iran Transformed,”New York Review of Books, March 8, 2026. 

Mira Al Hussein, “The Iran War Has Exposed the Gulf’s Bet on US Protections,” Hidden Cities, March 9, 2026.

The MERIP Podcast features exclusive interviews with contributors to the Middle East Research and Information Project from the present and past about their work for MERIP, as well as audio from events we’ve conducted online and in-person that examine contemporary issues in the politics, economy, society and culture of the Middle East. Hosted by James Ryan, MERIP’s Executive Director. Visit our website, www.merip.org, to read all of our work without paywalls.

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