Episode 326: Iran Under Pressure: Economic Strain, Political Stability, and Regional Risk with Professor Djavad Salehi-Isfahani
This episode with Professor Djavad Salehi-Isfahani examines how prolonged sanctions, inflation, and structural economic stagnation have reshaped Iran’s political economy. We explore how comprehensive sanctions since 2011 constrained oil revenues and fiscal capacity, why inflation and currency depreciation have reinforced one another over time, and how these pressures have affected poverty, middle-class security, and youth prospects. The discussion considers why sustained economic hardship has not translated into political collapse, how ideology and fear of instability contribute to regime resilience, and what the Iranian case suggests about the limits of economic coercion as a tool of statecraft.
Professor Salehi-Isfahani is Professor of Economics at Virginia Tech. He received his PhD from Harvard University and has previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania. He is Managing Editor of the Middle East Development Journal and a Research Fellow at the Economic Research Forum in Cairo. His research focuses on labour markets, inequality, youth unemployment, and the economic consequences of sanctions and policy reform in the Middle East.
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Transcript:
[00:00:00] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: A lot of Iranians complain that they don’t participate in the decisions that result in sanctions, that the government has its own foreign policy, and that foreign policy may cause or bring about sanctions, but then the people have to pay for it.
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[00:01:26] Dominic: Today we turn to a country that is facing sustained economic pressure marked by high inflation, sharp currency depreciation, and the cumulative effects of long-term sanctions. Now, these economic pressures are not isolated to just financial statistics, but they’re shaping political behaviour, social cohesion, and state-society relations.
[00:01:46] Dominic: The costs are significant — both rising living costs and declining purchasing power — but also public frustration and uncertainty. And it’s not just within the country, but it’s also causing concern across the region. Of course, we’re talking about Iran. I’m Dominic Bowen.
[00:02:00] Dominic: Welcome to the International Risk Podcast, where we explore the risks that are shaping our world and the forces that are driving global change.
[00:02:07] Dominic: And our guest today to discuss Iran is Professor Djavad Salehi-Isfahani. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University, and he’s taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Virginia Tech, where he’s currently a professor of economics. He’s also the managing editor of the Middle East Development Journal and a research fellow at the Economic Research Forum in Cairo.
[00:02:30] Dominic: I’m really excited to discuss this today with Professor Salehi-Isfahani. So let’s get into the conversation. Professor Djavad, welcome to the International Risk Podcast.
[00:02:39] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Thank you. It’s good to be here.
[00:02:41] Dominic: Djavad, now Iran has experienced more than a decade of significant sanctions, high inflation, and currency instability.
[00:02:49] Dominic: Now, recent data suggests that inflation is above 40%, and we’ve seen a significant depreciation of the rial. We’ve seen weak gross domestic product and rising poverty levels across the country. Can you help us set the scene and understand how we should understand the current economic situation in Iran?
[00:03:08] Dominic: Is this just a cyclical downturn, or has Iran really entered a prolonged phase of structural economic strain?
[00:03:14] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Well, it has been a prolonged period of stagnation. And it started around 2011. That’s when targeted sanctions that didn’t really constrain the economy too much were changed to comprehensive sanctions that kicked Iran out of the international global trade and financial system.
[00:03:34] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: And as a result, Iran’s economy first took a big tumble and then later was unable to recover. If you go back in the 2000s, Iran’s economy was growing at a healthy rate above 5%, mostly because it was able to export oil revenues and oil prices were very high. What sanctions did is they reduced Iran’s oil exports sometimes by half, sometimes by two-thirds.
[00:03:59] Dominic: The sanctions that have been imposed by countries around the world on Iran have really constrained Iran’s oil revenues. It’s affected currency stability, and it’s really limited the fiscal space that the Iranian regime has to manoeuvre within, even when exports have remained relatively high.
[00:04:15] Dominic: So I wonder if you can help us understand what it is like on the ground. How do these sanctions actually translate into lived economic pressure and lived economic experience? And I also wonder, does inflation, currency depreciation, and monetary expansion ultimately keep reinforcing each other over and over again?
[00:04:34] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: That’s an excellent question. This interdependence of the exchange rate and inflation — when the currency depreciates as it did in 2012 by 200 to 300%, that’s when Obama sanctions came. When later in 2018, President Trump exited the nuclear deal, called the JCPOA, again the currency collapsed by 200%.
[00:04:56] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: These devaluations very quickly translate into price increases. Why? Because first of all, Iran imports a lot of food. It imports a lot of goods, but it also imports a lot of intermediate goods — things that go into the production of agricultural goods or industrial goods. So the price shock comes from the exchange rate immediately to businesses.
[00:05:18] Dominic: And what does that look like for people on the ground? Because I understand, and I’ve seen growing evidence, that these years of sanctions and economic instability have really affected the poorer classes.
[00:05:28] Dominic: There’s been an increase in the numbers and the percentage of the population considered living under the poverty line, and a decline in living standards for the middle class. Can you tell us what it is like for the average Iranian right now?
[00:05:40] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Well, the average Iranian is a middle-class person. That’s a good thing about Iran’s economy. It has moved a lot of people out of poverty. In the first two decades of the revolution, there were a lot of reforms made — lots of subsidies, lots of investment in disadvantaged rural areas. So as a result, you see a lot of improvements in education, health, and incomes in rural areas.
[00:06:03] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Poverty dropped to about 10% of the population by around 2010. Of course, oil income helped over that period. After the shock of sanctions, poverty began to rise. The government tries hard to give cash transfers to the poor. I should add that Iran is one of the few countries in the developing world that has a very well-functioning cash transfer system with ATMs all over the country where money is deposited electronically and instantly.
[00:06:26] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Money is deposited electronically, instantly, and they can go use their cards and buy stuff, but that doesn’t necessarily help with real incomes because when you have a big shock, like you lose half of your oil exports or more, there is no way to prevent real incomes from falling.
[00:06:42] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: You can help manage the shock, but you cannot keep incomes the same as when oil exports were flowing. So that has to be understood — that the population is put at risk. A lot of Iranians complain that they don’t participate in the decisions that result in sanctions, that the government has its own foreign policy, and that foreign policy may cause or bring about sanctions, but then the people have to pay for it.
[00:07:08] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Because the whole national income has gone down and it gets distributed. Now, the poor don’t have a whole lot of leeway to manage, although most Iranians now spend less than 50% of their expenditures on food. That’s a kind of poverty line of sorts. If you spend 20% of your expenditures on food, you’re kind of middle class.
[00:07:31] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: If you spend 30%, you are about the poverty line. But most Iranians are below 50%, which means that they are protected from hunger. And that’s another characteristic of Iran’s stagnation. We don’t see a whole lot of hunger. We may see malnutrition. They may consume more bread because bread is subsidised.
[00:07:50] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Red meat has become basically absent from the food basket of the poor. So that’s about the poor. And the middle class suffers in two ways. One, it is always in danger of sliding down. One of the characteristics of the middle class globally is they want to maintain their living standards.
[00:08:08] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: They want to maintain the outward signals of their living standards. Iranians are famous for giving parties, having plenty of food, red meat on the table, even though they may have to be cutting back on other necessities to provide that. That struggle is very painful. Another struggle the middle class is involved in is to keep their savings.
[00:08:27] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Iranians maintain their savings in bank accounts. Often bank accounts offer positive interest rates, but with inflation running at 50%, it’s very hard for banks to give interest on top of that so people can put their money in the bank and not lose it. Most people have anxiety that the savings that have been accumulating, maybe in the 2000s when the economy was good, are dwindling or disappearing.
[00:08:52] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: You can imagine you have a year’s worth of savings in the bank. If you wait six months, a third of it is gone. If you wait a year, half of it is gone. That creates a lot of anxiety. I think these two things make for a very unhappy population — the poor struggling to keep food on the table, the middle class struggling to maintain their living standards.
[00:09:12] Dominic: I think that’s a really important point that you’ve just raised about how this prolonged economic strain is shaping expectations and maybe even aspirations. And of course, trust in institutions — both banks and government institutions. And I think some of the recent protests have reflected many things, but one of them has been economic grievances.
[00:09:31] Dominic: There have of course been ideological demands, but I think economic grievances have certainly been part of it. What’s your opinion? To what extent have the current dynamics, the current protests, been based in economic hardship rather than just political dissent?
[00:09:45] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Well, you may be surprised by my answer. As an economist, I like to say, yes, the economic issues are at the forefront, but Iran is a very special country.
[00:09:53] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: It has been engaged in social engineering — transforming a middle class, a population that was fairly happily absorbing Western lifestyles into Islamic codes. And at the forefront of this engineering has been women’s hijab, women’s hair covering in particular, over which there was a big set of demonstrations and uprisings in 2022.
[00:10:18] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: I don’t know if it’s possible for analysts to have a good idea of what share of the unhappiness you see on display in the streets during protests is because of social restrictions or because of economics. We talked about a particular aspect of the economy, which is living standards — having food on the table.
[00:10:43] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: There’s more to economics than consumption. Employment is a very big part of people’s wellbeing. If you have a job, even if your income is low, you’re a different person than someone who’s getting cash transferred from the government but has no place to go in the morning. I don’t know how large it is — sometimes the data isn’t very good — maybe 2 million people who are addicted to drugs, to opium, to fentanyl and other drugs.
[00:11:21] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: But I would put lack of hope, which is kind of a forward-looking thing, as equal to the current economic status in terms of disappointment.
[00:11:30] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: When people pack up and leave, sometimes with hardship to reach European cities or maybe reach Japan or Korea, that tells you life is very, very hard and it doesn’t really measure easily in how much food they have or what the inflation rate is. It is a worldview and outlook that used to be completely absent when I was a kid, when I went to high school in a fairly small town.
[00:11:47] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: I knew that if I studied hard, I could get into university. I knew that if I got into university, I would get a job. The job would probably pay for me having a car — a lot of things I imagined. And that actually came true, and it was true for a lot of people. I am not that young anymore.
[00:12:04] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: And I don’t pretend to know what it is like to be going to high school these days, knowing that you are the average kid in the class and knowing that only the top one to five percent get into good schools that can then guarantee a job and a career — maybe renting a place, maybe getting married, and so on.
[00:12:28] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: So all the dreams that I had that seemed to be coming true — which made life tough, we studied very hard to prepare for national exams — it’s one thing to know that if you put in the effort you would be rewarded, and then see that rewarded for a lot of people, and it happened to me.
[00:12:58] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: And it’s quite another thing to struggle hard to go from a B average, which is basically a lost cause, to a B+, and then knowing that’s not good enough — that you have to do maybe an A+ to get a job.
[00:13:00] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: I think if I wanted to summarise the frustration of Iranians with sanctions and the current economic conditions, I would focus on the youth.
[00:13:15] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: They all have parents. Their pain translates into parents’ pain, so you get the whole society upset with something that is actually a little bit invisible. People talk about inflation and the currency because they are very visible, but the pain is deeper and the solutions are deeper. So people who think that if you just eliminate the budget deficit and inflation comes down, things will go back to normal are very mistaken.
[00:13:40] Dominic: And I’ll take this opportunity, Djavad, to remind our listeners that the International Risk Podcast is also available on YouTube. So if you prefer to watch your podcasts, you can find the International Risk Podcast on YouTube now. Please do go to YouTube and subscribe and like our content — it really is important for our success.
[00:14:00] Dominic: Iran remains regionally very active, especially in Yemen, in Lebanon, in Iraq, and potentially also to some extent in Syria as well, despite economic hardship within its own country. Can you talk about how the economic pressures within Iran are influencing its regional behaviour and its risk tolerance as it engages in regional geopolitics?
[00:14:22] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: One of the things about Iran’s regional politics is that it is highly ideological. And it is also run on the cheap. It is not like some other countries where foreign policy costs a lot of money. They work with ideological kin like Hezbollah or the Assad regime, who was also a kind of Shia minority in Syria.
[00:14:48] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: And they work also with the Houthis, who are a similar minority in Yemen. So that means they recruit these allies not so much by paying them, but by identifying with them, representing their marginal social status in their own countries, I think.
[00:15:06] Dominic: But do you think these economic challenges that Iran is facing encourage caution and constraint within Iran, or does it actually incentivise external engagement as perhaps a strategic diversion away from its domestic troubles?
[00:15:22] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Well, it hasn’t happened in the last few years. I think the military factor has been much more important than the financial one. If you look back over the last few years, when Iran has lost its regional allies, it has pretty much become weaker internally. It has a lot more to do with the June war, with US military operations and Israeli military operations that have weakened Hezbollah.
[00:15:47] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: And although Hamas was never part of Iran’s deterrence, if you like, because they were completely engaged with their own problems in the West Bank and Gaza, I think in terms of support for Assad and support for Hezbollah, those supports have diminished or completely disappeared, as is the case with Syria.
[00:16:09] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: And Iran, in a way, is now free from that part of its engagement. And I don’t see that translating into budget relief inside Iran. And I don’t see how that has helped the region become more peaceful. Your specific question — whether Iran is likely to engage more outside if its internal politics are difficult —
[00:16:35] Dominic: And I wonder, when we look at the possible futures that Iran has, I think many of us oscillate between predictions of reform and predictions of collapse.
[00:16:48] Dominic: I wonder, when you look at the economics, what does that tell you about the likely future? Because where I sit today, when I look at the facts, when we look at the security elites from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, when we look at the intelligence, when we look at the political elite, they still remain quite cohesive.
[00:17:03] Dominic: They remain well resourced, and we know that they’re willing to use brutal force against their civilian population. We know that the repeated protests back in 2017, 2019, 2022, and the most recent protests have definitely exposed regime weakness and have eroded legitimacy, but they haven’t yet produced a unified opposition.
[00:17:22] Dominic: They haven’t produced an organised group that is likely to take down the current regime. And even external pressures from sanctions, war with Israel, and US military posturing at the moment have certainly increased the costs for the Iranian regime, but we still haven’t seen actual loosening or a likely collapse of the regime.
[00:17:41] Dominic: So from an economic point of view, do you see continued resilience in Iran, or do you see that it is at the verge of collapsing?
[00:17:48] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Economies don’t collapse. I often remind people that economies have to do with people getting up in the morning, going to the farm, going to the store, and so on. And they don’t stop doing that because the exchange rate has devalued.
[00:18:02] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: The prices are rising. And I also remind people that rising prices mean the economy is still working very well. People are making money because higher prices are higher income for people who sell things. So Iran’s economy is still quite vibrant. If you go to Iran, you see very few items that are lacking.
[00:18:20] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: You see maybe items you cannot purchase because the price is very high, but the shelves are stocked well. This is in contrast to some other countries like Venezuela, where they practise harsh price controls, so goods disappear from stores. In Iran, it’s been mostly a question of income distribution.
[00:18:39] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: That’s one side of the issue. The economy has shrunk. It has stopped growing.
[00:18:44] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: And those are hard enough. People expect sanctions to do a lot more, but that was unrealistic. Sanctions have done quite well for themselves. If the purpose was to increase misery in Iran, they have done that. That misery hasn’t been translated into political divisions and political collapse.
[00:19:04] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: And I must admit that political systems do collapse. Unlike economies, there are things that are very fragile — alliances and so on — and all of a sudden they can collapse. And it hasn’t happened in Iran, partly because the regime has a very, if you like, native ideology.
[00:19:21] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: It’s not an ideology that’s imported from abroad like Marxism. Shia Islam is very particular to Iran. It does feel isolated in the region because the region is mostly composed of Sunni Muslims. Iranians speak a different language than their neighbours. So this government, on top of that, not only represents a nation that is fairly cohesive,
[00:19:45] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: it is also organised by a strong ideological commitment to the Islamic Revolution of nearly five decades ago. So at the top, I can imagine that some of the older figures are battle-hardened. Iran fought a bloody war with Iraq, which was supported heavily by Europeans and by the United States.
[00:20:07] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: And if I may add one other thing that explains — again, I want to emphasise that I’m not a political scientist — but the Iranian regime is, in a way, blessed by its opposition.
[00:20:18] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Iranians don’t care much for what Netanyahu has done in Gaza to Palestinians. They don’t consider the United States, which pulled a coup in 1953, put the Shah in place, imposed sanctions, and supported Iraq in the war — they don’t hold these governments in much esteem or sympathy that they might come and help them.
[00:20:41] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: I think the most sophisticated Iranians — and this is not the Iranians you see in Berlin or in Toronto demonstrating, that’s a completely different story — I think Iranians who live in Iran are quite aware that if the government collapses, chaos is more likely to ensue. That creates cohesion that makes resistance to pressure a lot more effective.
[00:21:02] Dominic: We’ve talked a little bit about youth unemployment, about labour markets and the allocation of time amongst young unemployed men and women, and of course development and inequality within Iran and within some of the neighbouring states.
[00:21:17] Dominic: And of course, the economics of sanctions and their impact on growth and welfare and inequality within Iran, and how households are adjusting. I wonder if you were briefing senior policymakers within the European Union or within the United States, what would you be advising them to do now?
[00:21:34] Dominic: How do we encourage positive reform and positive development in Iran today? What can the international community do to support?
[00:21:42] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: That’s an excellent question, although it’s now kind of a depressing question to try to answer, because we were there 20 years ago. I and many others wrote about basically two paths of dealing with Iran.
[00:21:57] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: One was to continue to limit Iran’s economy, damage its infrastructure so it would maybe bring the regime down or make the regime subservient. The other was to help Iran’s economy flourish, let the middle class flourish, and let the middle class put pressure on the leaders. I belong to the latter group.
[00:22:20] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: And I still feel like that. But again, we’ve gone so far, especially with these horrendous killings that took place in Tehran on January 8th or 9th, I think. We’ve gone a distance away from that. But the idea is still there.
[00:22:44] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: And maybe if it’s not relevant for Iran anymore, it is relevant for other countries — that there are two ways of pressuring a government to do the right things, to treat people well, to allow business enterprise to grow, and so on. And I’m thinking of Afghanistan at the moment, for example.
[00:23:03] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: If you wanted to help Afghan women, you still have two choices. One, to let the economy do better. Return maybe the $7 billion that the US is holding. Remove sanctions. Allow business enterprise. Allow women to fight their way into the system. When the economy is expanding, women have a lot better chance because they’re educated and motivated to enter the system and ask for their own rights.
[00:23:25] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: And I think once you try to punish the Taliban, you are making it harder for women, because if you are unable to deliver, they certainly can’t do anything on their own in a very difficult economy. And that applies to Iran as well.
[00:23:48] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: I go back to the uprisings of 2022. I draw a very positive lesson from there. It was bloody. A lot of women lost their eyesight because they were shot with pellets. Maybe 500 people were killed, which now, by current numbers, seems small. But it was a very tough rebellion, initially led by women, but then it became a national uprising.
[00:24:10] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: But it ended in a very good place, which is that the government recognised there is a middle class of women and families that had a genuine demand for women not to be pulled into minivans because a conscript soldier or security force officer recognised the hijab to be inadequate — a very subjective thing.
[00:24:36] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: And in the middle of those uprisings, the government slowly started stepping back. And at some point, they actually declared that they were going to stop harassing women in the streets, pulling them into minivans, taking them to re-education camps — which, by the way, is how Mahsa Amini, over whose death those uprisings formed, was caught and brought to a re-education centre.
[00:25:00] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: And then she collapsed and died, and nobody still knows what the real cause of that was. But the flexibility on the side of the government over something that I might have said is the defining characteristic, the defining symbol of the Islamic Republic — the hijab.
[00:25:19] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: That if they remove that, you know, they have private enterprise, they have capitalism, they have inequality, they have a lot of things. So what’s left there? It’s not a communist system where they had a gospel plan. They have a lot of coordination of the economy. A lot of people thought that they would not step back from enforcing hijab because then they would lose complete legitimacy.
[00:25:40] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Now they did step back. I’ve been to Tehran since. It’s unrecognisable because you see women happily laughing in the streets and going about their lives. It doesn’t look very different from bustling cities in developing countries, maybe even European countries — beautiful coffee shops, very well decorated, people enjoying daily life — for a government that was preaching most of the time obedience to Islam.
[00:26:06] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: A kind of suffering philosophy as a way of paving the way to heaven and so on — to allow the middle class to come and say, okay, that might be a good thing to look forward to, heaven and so on, but I want to live right now and I want my daughter not to fear going outside and being insulted. I think that is a very important lesson in Iran’s history — that locals are better able
[00:26:33] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: to pressure their own government for reforms than a foreign power with very bad credibility, like the Netanyahu government or the Trump government, coming and saying, we are going to make your life better, just trust us. Let us bomb your country and you will like it. We are at that standstill right now.
[00:26:51] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: So maybe it sounds, again, after the major killings that took place a month ago, maybe it’s too far to ask people to look to reforms and expect results. But I still think the major lesson remains that in these countries — and these are not very poor, backward countries where you need a colonial authority to go on,
[00:27:14] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: set up traffic lights and teach them how to be civilised — these are countries that are fairly sophisticated. They have their own politics. Iran has a vibrant politics. Okay, it’s controlled. Presidential elections are managed. Parliamentary elections are managed, and so on.
[00:27:31] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: But it is learning. It’s come a long way from 40 years ago. And no one knows how far they can go. I wish the world had been such that it would have put trust in the Iranian middle class to bring about the reforms that European governments and Americans would like. There is no discrepancy here.
[00:27:53] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: There’s no difference between what Iranians want — which is to be able to read newspapers that write the right things, to be able to go to school, to purchase things, to dress the way they want. These are shared reforms from the point of view of the European middle class and the Iranian middle class. And this idea that we can make these things happen,
[00:28:14] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: as a German chancellor said, by letting Israel do our dirty work — which is basically through sanctions and through invasions — I think history will look very badly on that.
[00:28:24] Dominic: Djavad, one question that we ask all of our guests on the International Risk Podcast is, when you look around the world, when you’re seeing what’s happening globally, what are the international risks that concern you the most?
[00:28:36] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Well, the risks of war are right now very real. Iranians are kind of desperate. They’re threatening US bases.
[00:28:44] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Iranian missiles can reach those places, and I’m not sure any United States defensive structure is strong enough to prevent them — not to mention Israeli cities. So right now the real threat is war expanding beyond a managed invasion, reaching the Gulf, reaching cities in Israel, and becoming a regional war. Everybody loses in that.
[00:29:09] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: There’s no question Iran is going to be the biggest loser. I think nobody has illusions that Israel and the US are two nuclear powers. But this is history. When countries are very weak and are threatened, they don’t always fold. And I like to think that right now that threat is taken very seriously and they try to prevent it.
[00:29:33] Dominic: That’s very interesting. Thanks very much for explaining that, Djavad. And thank you very much for coming on the International Risk Podcast.
[00:29:40] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: Thank you for having me.
[00:29:41] Dominic: Well, that was a really insightful conversation with Professor Djavad Salehi-Isfahani. His work has really helped us understand how sustained economic pressure shapes political stability, legitimacy, and regional risk coming from Iran. Today’s episode was produced and coordinated by Katerina Mazzucchelli.
[00:29:59] Dominic: I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening to the International Risk Podcast. We’ll speak again in the next couple of days.
[00:30:05] Dominic: This episode of the International Risk Podcast is brought to you by Conducttr. They’re an ISO 27001-certified crisis simulation platform that lets you rehearse real crises in a safe virtual environment. It has realistic emails, social media, internal chats, company systems, and many other features. Conducttr really helps crisis teams practise how they actually work under pressure, not how they wish they worked. Go to conducttr.com to learn more about their software.