Narges Bajoghli

Narges Bajoghli is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She is a political anthropologist whose fieldwork inside Iran examined the cultural and media production of Basij and IRGC loyalists. Her book Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic (2019) documents how the regime's core supporters understand and project their own legitimacy, based on embedded access to IRGC and Basij cultural producers — an unusual level of institutional access that is itself a documented fact of her methodology.

She is co-author of How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare (2023, Stanford University Press) with Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj. One of the original co-authors listed in earlier versions of the project was Ali Vaez — subsequently identified by Semafor (September 2023) and Iran International as a participant in the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), a covert Iranian Foreign Ministry influence operation. The book's central argument — that maximum-pressure sanctions strengthen the regime and harm the civilian population — aligns with the Iranian government's preferred framing on sanctions. The co-authorship with an IEI-documented figure on this specific topic is editorially relevant context, even absent evidence of direct coordination on Bajoghli's part.