Current Affairs, Curated

Current Affairs. The phrase carries weight. In the email announcing the launch of the series, GU-Q described it as a “bold public series born for these destabilizing times. As power is asserted, contested, and reconfigured before our eyes, this series slows the churn of the news and turns to the intellectual force of this community to examine what has just occurred and what it sets in motion.” It is an ambitious promise, one that asks not just for expertise, but for care in how conversations are staged, who is centered, and how power operates inside the room itself.

To think about what unfolded in the auditorium during the inaugural Current Affairs session, bold feels almost insufficient. Associate Professor of Government Paul Musgrave and Professor of Government Mehran Kamrava sat in conversation with Al Jazeera English journalist Folly Bah Thibault, and from the very beginning, the atmosphere was heavy. This was not simply a discussion about Iran and Venezuela. It was a demonstration of how authority moves in academic spaces, and how quickly a conversation about power can replicate the very hierarchies it claims to analyze.

I do not want to focus on Musgrave’s comments on Venezuela. That is not a question of relevance, but of responsibility. I am not equipped to place his analysis in conversation with the facts on the ground in Venezuela, nor do I think that doing so from the audience, or from a single session, would add much beyond speculation. What I can speak to is the structure and ethics of the session itself, and more specifically, the role Professor Kamrava played within it. This is not a critique of his credentials or his scholarship. It is a critique of posture, framing, and the way certain forms of dissent were handled, or sidelined, in a space meant to “slow the churn” and reflect seriously on repression, protest, and sovereignty.

From early on, it became clear that Professor Kamrava was not simply offering one perspective among others. He functioned as the primary interpretive authority on Iran, setting the tone for how events were to be understood and, just as importantly, how they were not to be understood. His remarks were sweeping and definitive, leaving little room for ambiguity or for alternative readings that did not align with his framing. In a session dedicated to examining destabilizing times, that sense of closure felt premature.

The tension crystallized during the Q&A, when an Iranian diplomat asked a question. The moment passed without interruption, comment, or acknowledgment, but it should not have. Minutes earlier, the Iranian state had been described as a dictatorship sustained by fear, repression, and surveillance. Yet a representative of that same state now occupied the room as an ordinary participant, his presence unremarked, his authority unspoken. The issue was never his right to be there. It was the decision to treat his presence as politically neutral.

In a discussion explicitly concerned with repression and the cost of dissent, neutrality does not emerge by ignoring power; it is produced by naming it. For Iranian community members in the room, the diplomat’s presence was not symbolic; it was material. It carried histories of punishment, monitoring, and silence. To proceed as though all audience members arrived equally unburdened was not an act of balance, but a choice that reshaped the room. Some participants spoke without consequence; others were asked, implicitly, to calculate their words. A forum that seeks to examine how power operates cannot afford to overlook the moment when power quietly asserts itself, not in theory, but in who feels safe enough to speak, and who does not.

One of the clearest examples of this narrowing came in Kamrava’s treatment of the former Shah’s son, the exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi. Time and again, he refused to seriously engage with questions about the Crown Prince’s footing or influence inside Iran, confining his relevance almost exclusively to the Iranian diaspora. When I raised the issue of protest footage showing chants calling for his return, Professor Kamrava dismissed it as recycled material, old videos replayed by expatriate-run media that, in his view, distorted reality rather than reflected it. I am not going to debate the accuracy of that claim. What mattered, however, was the refusal to move beyond dismissal. The possibility that the Crown Prince’s name might circulate inside Iran as a symptom of desperation, fragmentation, or the absence of viable alternatives was never explored. Instead, we kept hearing “Iran for Iranians” as an empty slogan used to shut down other existing narratives. 

What the inaugural Current Affairs session ultimately revealed was not a shortage of expertise, but how easily authority can settle once a conversation begins. The series sets out to examine how power is asserted, contested, and reconfigured. Doing so requires more than informed analysis; it requires a willingness to let questions remain unresolved and to resist foreclosing debate too quickly. Throughout the evening, dissent surfaced only to be contained, agency was invoked without being made tangible, and certain narratives were dismissed before their implications could be explored. If Current Affairs is to live up to its ambition, it must remain attentive not only to power beyond the auditorium, but to how power operates within the conversations it convenes. Otherwise, the risk is not controversy, but closure.