Forum on Akbar Ganji's Road to Democracy in Iran

The FSI Program on Global Justice and the Iranian Studies Program present A Forum on Akbar Ganji's Road to Democracy in Iran.

Ganji is an Iranian journalist and dissident who was imprisoned in Tehran from 2000 to 2006 and whose writings are currently banned in Iran. He has won numerous prestigious awards in Europe and North America. His 56-day hunger strike turned him into a figure of international fame, with many heads of states and hundreds of the world's most renowned public intellectuals demanding his safety and freedom. Ganji first gained prominence in Iran as an investigative journalist when he helped uncover a government conspiracy to murder Iranian intellectuals. In response, the regime put him in prison for six years. Behind bars, Ganji continued to write and produced his famous Republican Manifesto where he argued in favor of a secular liberal democracy for Iran. In April 2008, Ganji's first English language  book appeared from Boston Review Books/MIT Press: The Road to Democracy in Iran, with an introduction by Joshua Cohen and Abbas Milani. 

Ganji will speak in Farsi with consecutive translation in English, and will be joined on the panel by Abbas Milani, director of the Hamid & Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies at Stanford University, and Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freud Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. Program on Global Justice Director Joshua Cohen will moderate the discussion.