Introduction

Royalist nostalgia within the Iranian diaspora and hawkish U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic operate as mutually reinforcing formations. The affective attachment to a lost Pahlavi Iran supplies a moral warrant for punitive measures against Tehran, and the political infrastructure of those measures lends durability and institutional traction to an otherwise dispersed sentiment. This essay examines the emergence and operation of this assemblage through a genealogical method drawn from Michel Foucault and elaborated by David Garland. [1] The goal is to render visible the contingent historical paths by which a particular configuration of longing has come to function as political capital.

Genealogy, for Garland, charts the irregular routes through which the past arrives in the present. [2] Memory travels along paths shaped by power relations and by the shifting pressures of geopolitics. For diasporic communities, the framework exposes the instability of stories about the homeland. Such narratives evolve through reaction and repetition, and their renewed salience tracks cycles of tension between Iran and the United States.

Kathleen Stewart theorizes nostalgia as both cultural practice and representational form. [3] Within the Iranian diaspora, remembering operates as an act of social positioning. Among neo-monarchist circles composed largely of families whose prosperity peaked under Pahlavi rule, nostalgia functions as a claim to refinement and cosmopolitan modernity. The same affect registers differently for those who lived through the regime’s censorship apparatus or who bore the weight of SAVAK’s repression. Its meaning shifts with the storyteller.

Hamid Naficy observes that exile produces longing for a homeland that no longer exists in its remembered form. [4] The impossible return operates as a structural feature of exilic consciousness. Among those who left Iran after 1979, this structural impossibility fuels attachment to an image of a lost Iran whose perfection grows with distance. The remembered country becomes a horizon that recedes as one approaches it. The surplus of longing generated by this condition becomes available for political capture, and restoration movements compete to convert it into a program.

Historicizing the Royalist Diaspora

The royalist diasporic formation emerged through specific historical conjunctures that a genealogical account must trace. The 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh cast a long shadow over what followed. In the decades after, the Pahlavi state’s legitimacy came to rest on two interdependent pillars. U.S. military patronage supplied external underwriting, and oil rents financed a domestic security apparatus anchored by SAVAK. [5] The families who prospered under this arrangement cultivated ties to Western capital and Western institutions, a pattern that conditioned their flight after the Revolution.

The 1979 Revolution produced a heterogeneous diasporic formation composed of several overlapping waves. The first wave, departing between 1978 and 1981, included senior officials of the Pahlavi regime, military officers, and members of the economic elite whose resources enabled rapid relocation to Los Angeles and Paris. Subsequent waves included political dissidents from across the ideological spectrum and religious minorities facing persecution. Further migrants left during the Iran-Iraq War as wartime privation compounded political pressure. [6] The ideological heterogeneity of these waves is substantial. The public voice of the diaspora, however, has been disproportionately shaped by the first wave and by its capacity to capitalize on existing Cold War networks.

The Reagan administration’s early approach to Iran included a covert regime-change track that cultivated Iranian royalist exiles as instruments. In spring 1981, a CIA program authorized by presidential finding distributed aid to a royalist group headed by Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, the Shah’s twin sister, along with paramilitary organizations led by former Iranian military commanders. The program collapsed quickly, and by 1982 the Senior Interagency Group had concluded that exile groups were too divided and too compromised in Iranian eyes to serve as a credible vehicle for regime change. The logic of exile cultivation recurred across the first Reagan term, with senior National Security Council staff continuing to explore contacts with Iranian exiles who sought to install a pro-Western government. [7]

The later arms-for-hostages initiative that became the Iran-Contra scandal ran on a different track. Its intermediaries claimed access to factions inside the Islamic Republic, and the initiative aimed at a covert opening toward Tehran, distinct in both means and objective from the earlier regime-change program. The episode normalized covert dealings with Iranian interlocutors within Reagan-era foreign policy culture.

The contemporary royalist diaspora is therefore the sedimented product of specific alignments. Cold War ties between the Pahlavi elite and the U.S. security establishment provided the initial infrastructure. The economic and social capital that enabled elite flight after 1979 translated that infrastructure into a durable diasporic formation, which later diasporic political organizing would take up in varying forms. Reading these alignments through a genealogical lens renders their contingency visible. What operates today as a (seemingly) unified royalist position is a sedimented achievement produced through decades of institutional work.

A Walk Through “Tehrangeles”: Spatializing Nostalgia

Photograph of Pars Books & Publishing storefront in Westwood, Los Angeles.

The Tehrangeles neighborhood illustrates how nostalgia takes spatial form. Along Westwood Boulevard, traces of a once-vivid cultural corridor persist in faded storefronts and weathered signage. In 2017, Ketab Corporation, the largest Persian bookstore in the area, closed after thirty-six years of operation. Its replacement by a marijuana dispensary registered more than commercial succession. The transition indexed a shifting terrain of diasporic life. Public infrastructure for Persian-language cultural reproduction has contracted, and other commercial logics have expanded into the spaces it once occupied.

Across the street, Pars Books and Publishing persists. The window displays the pre-Revolution Lion and Sun flag. Shelves inside offer glowing accounts of the Shah’s rule alongside volumes lamenting 1979 as national catastrophe. The shop functions as archive and shrine at once, preserving a royalist vision of Iran through its curated stock and symbolic apparatus.

Spaces of this kind act as repositories of collective memory. Their books and memorabilia promise continuity to readers who fear cultural disappearance. Titles such as Andrew Scott Cooper’s The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran circulate among patrons as confirmation that an authentic Iran survives in exile. [8] The display of the Lion and Sun flag signals allegiance to an imagined political order in which monarchy stands for civilization itself.

Digital Circulation and the Fractures Within Royalist Memory

Donya Alinejad’s The Internet and Formations of Iranian American-ness provides a framework for analyzing how neo-monarchist rhetoric proliferates across social media. [9] Facebook groups like “Supporters of Prince Reza Pahlavi” in Farsi, with membership exceeding 60,000, circulate images and superimposed text valorizing the Shah’s rule. The platform amplifies nostalgia’s reach and produces a digital archive of curated history whose repetition across posts yields the effect of a unified narrative. The resulting discourse converges on two recurring themes. The monarchy appears as the engine of modernization, and the Shah appears as the benevolent architect of an Iran that commanded global respect.

The appearance of unity bears closer scrutiny. The royalist milieu harbors substantial internal fractures that the standardized affect of Facebook imagery works to smooth over. One axis of division runs between constitutionalists who envision a restored monarchy under parliamentary constraint and those who hold out for a more absolutist conception of royal authority. Another axis distinguishes secular royalists who emphasize Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage from those who combine royalism with Shia religious nationalism. A further axis of disagreement concerns the person of Reza Pahlavi himself. Some factions treat him as the legitimate heir and rallying point. Others view him with skepticism or indifference, and still others contest the dynastic framing altogether. [10] The digital archive flattens these differences into a composite image of royalist purity. Social media’s tendency to reward affective intensity and symbolic economy privileges the most easily circulable images at the expense of internal debate. The unity that the Facebook feed performs is therefore itself an effect of the medium, one that conceals the contested terrain on which royalist memory actually unfolds.

Exemplary Neo-Monarchist Imagery

1. Map of Iran with Poetic Plea

A graphic pairs Iran’s map with the verse “Dearer to me than life and religion / You are my dearest, O’ land of Iran.” The text reworks an older slogan, “God, the Shah, and the Country,” into a new formulation that places Iranian nationalism above religious or other affiliations. In this reimagined hierarchy, national identity supersedes everything else and distances the image from the Islamic Republic’s theocratic framework.

2. Comparative Meme of Bows

A meme juxtaposes a photograph of President Obama bowing to Emperor Akihito in 2009 with an earlier photograph of Emperor Hirohito bowing to the Shah in 1969. Through the juxtaposition, a single decontextualized pairing generates a sense of aggrieved nostalgia for “lost greatness.” The meme reinforces the narrative that Iran under the Shah once occupied a more prestigious position in global affairs.

3. Skiing Shah and Queen Farah

A photograph of the Shah and Queen Farah on holiday in the Swiss Alps appears superimposed with text describing the monarchy as poised for “rapid progress” and imminent democratic reform. The glamorous scene omits the experiences of ordinary Iranians under authoritarian rule. It thereby betrays the selective character of neo-monarchist memory.

Institutional Operationalization and the Co-Production of Policy

Organizations like Iranian Americans for Liberty (IAL), founded in 2020, translate digital affective energy into institutional form. Through affiliated political committees, IAL organizes media campaigns calling for maximum pressure on Tehran. Its policy proposals mirror the priorities of U.S. neoconservative networks and envision the eventual reestablishment of a constitutional monarchy. Farashgard (“Iran Revival”) and the Constitutionalist Party of Iran, both based in Southern California, maintain close ties to IAL and to Republican politicians in Washington. Together these organizations sustain a transnational infrastructure that projects royalist nostalgia into mainstream U.S. policy debates.

The thesis developed in this essay’s opening finds its clearest expression in these institutional arrangements. Royalist nostalgia supplies an affective warrant for hawkish Iran policy by furnishing its advocates with moral testimony about the regime the Islamic Republic replaced. Hawkish Iran policy in turn lends political traction to royalist nostalgia by providing venues where diasporic affect translates into legislative influence and media visibility. The alliance functions as a transnational infrastructure of mutual legitimation that outlasts particular administrations and political cycles.

The dynamics became starkly visible on January 6, 2021.

Photograph of Iranian Americans during the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection.

Amid the chaos at the U.S. Capitol, a group of Iranian monarchists brandished the Lion and Sun flag, signaling alignment with far-right populist formations in the United States. Several prominent neo-monarchists had already declared support for Donald Trump, drawn by his posture toward the Islamic Republic and by the “America First” framing that resonated with their anti-regime commitments. The image of royalist flags on the Capitol grounds captured the convergence that the institutional architecture had been producing for years.

Conclusion: The Regressive Pull of Co-Produced Nostalgia

Naficy observes that nostalgic longing tends to produce division within diasporic communities. His warning resonates here. The dream of a benevolent monarchy obscures the authoritarianism that defined the Pahlavi state. It recasts inequality as a prelude to modernization. A genealogical approach exposes the silences that sustain the dream. The glorification of the Shah erases those who bore the costs of his rule. Agricultural workers displaced by land reform drop out of the royalist imagination. The dissidents imprisoned by SAVAK likewise appear nowhere in its image of progress. By substituting myth for history, neo-monarchist nostalgia risks reproducing the exclusions that contributed to the 1979 Revolution in the first place.

The diaspora contains many trajectories that the royalist public voice tends to obscure. Many Iranians abroad reject the Islamic Republic and the call for royal restoration alike. Others channel their energies into artistic production and humanitarian work and maintain a careful distance from restoration politics. Royalist activists frequently claim to speak for the diaspora as a whole, producing an illusion of unanimity that the actual heterogeneity of diasporic politics belies.

The persistence of nostalgia raises urgent questions about the relationship between diasporic politics and global power. When longing for an imperial past becomes a guide for political action, democratic possibilities recede. The entangling of royalist nostalgia and hawkish U.S. policy creates feedback loops that amplify the affective and the strategic dimensions of anti-regime politics simultaneously. Genealogy insists that history remains open. The path from memory to future takes shape through the stories people choose to tell and through the silences they accept. Understanding how neo-monarchist nostalgia operates clarifies the stakes of building political identity upon an imagined past.

Notes

[1]: Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–64.

[2]: David Garland, “What Is a ‘History of the Present’? On Foucault’s Genealogies and Their Critical Preconditions,” Punishment & Society 16, no. 4 (2014): 365–84.

[3]: Kathleen Stewart, “Nostalgia—A Polemic,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 3 (1988): 227–41.

[4]: Hamid Naficy, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

[5]: Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations (New York: New Press, 2013); Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne, eds., Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004).

[6]: On the waves and ideological heterogeneity of the post-1979 Iranian diaspora, see Mohsen M. Mobasher, ed., The Iranian Diaspora: Challenges, Negotiations, and Transformations (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018); and Naficy, Making of Exile Cultures.

[7]: Malcolm Byrne, Iran-Contra: Reagan's Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 29–30. On the distinction between the regime-change track and the arms-for-hostages initiative, see Byrne, Iran-Contra, 28–31.

[8]: Andrew Scott Cooper, The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran (New York: Henry Holt, 2016).

[9]: Donya Alinejad, The Internet and Formations of Iranian American-ness: Next Generation Diaspora (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

[10]: On internal heterogeneity within Iranian American political identifications, see Alinejad, Internet and Formations. On the longer history of constitutionalist currents in Iranian political thought, see Ali M. Ansari, The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Afshin Matin-Asgari, Both Eastern and Western: An Intellectual History of Iranian Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Iranian Neo-Monarchism and the Politics of Diasporic Longing