Dr. Behrouz Alikhani
- University of Isfahan
- Master degree at the Teheran University in political sciences
- Research fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Westphalian Wilhelms-University
in Muenster in Germany - Website: http://ifs.wwu.de/alikhani
Short CV
Dr. Behrouz Alikhani completed his Bachelor degree at the University of Isfahan and his Master degree at the Teheran University in political sciences. The topic of his master thesis was “the impact of cultural fragmentation on political development in the contemporary Iran”. Alikhani moved to Germany in June 2004 and started studying sociology and social psychology at the Leibniz University of Hanover. Finally, he carried out his PhD thesis as a DAAD scholarship holder at the same university between September 2007 and Mai 2011. His PhD thesis dealt with a comparative study on processes of institutional de-democratisation in Iran (1906-1925), Germany (1918-1933), and France (1848-1852). From March 2012 to April 2013 Alikhani spend his time in the UK as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Iranian Studies of the St Andrews University. During this time, he did an investigation on the content of political songs and slogans in the Persian language developed during the Iran-Irak War. In September 2013, he received a position as a research fellow at the Institute of Sociology of the Westphalian Wilhelms-University in Muenster in Germany, where he still teaches and researches. His research interests include a wide range of topics such as democratisation and de-democratisation processes, social inequalities, process and figurational sociology, political sociology, social psychology and political development in contemporary Iran. His current project deals with the life of Bakhtiari nomads in the south-west of Iran. He studies the transformation of this nomadic society in the course of nationalisation and globalisation of the Iranian society in the past decades. Traumatic experiences of this rapid transition, anomie, disorientation and the loss of identity are some of the foci of this study.
Publications
Books
- Institutionelle Entdemokratisierungsprozesse: Zum Nachhinkeffekt des
sozialen Habitus in Frankreich, Iran und Deutschland, VS Verlag, Wiesbaden,
2012 (303 Seiten). - Die Bewertung der strategischen Lage Ägyptens (in Farsi), Abrar Moaser, Teheran, 2003, (532 Seiten, eine Zusammenarbeit mit Mokhtar Hossaini).
Articles
- „Zur Machtergreifung Reza Khans als Funktion des Nachhinkeffekts des
sozialen Habitus der Konstitutionalisten“, in Iranistik – Deutschsprachige
Zeitschrift für iranistische Studien, Göttingen, 2015 (im Erscheinen). - “The Socio- and Psychogenesis of Reza Khans Rise to Power and of the Failure
of the Constitutional Monarchy in Iran”, in the collected volume of the 7th
European Conference of Iranian Studies, Cracow, 2015. - Towards a Process-oriented Model of Democratisation or De-Democratisation,
in: Human Figurations, 3 (2), 2014. - Popular War Songs and Slogans in the Persian Language during the Iran-Iraq
War, in CAMBIO, University of Florence, Italy, Dezember 2013. - How Can Habitual Constraints Contribute to a Process of Institutional
De-democratization, in paper series: "National Culture and National Habitus",
the Centre for the Critical Study of Global Power and Politics, Trent
University, 2012. - Globalisierung und iranische Identität (in Farsi), Iran Nameh, Nr. 26:3-4,
S. 100-112, Bethesda (Maryland), 2011.
Research interests
- Democratisation and de-democratisation processes
- Established and outsider relations
- Process and figurational sociology
- Political sociology
- Social psychology
- Political and social developments in contemporary Iran