Kian Tajbakhsh

Kian Tajbakhsh is an Iranian-American scholar, writer, and political analyst whose work focuses on Iranian politics, Middle East geopolitics, democracy, urbanism, local government, and public administration. He is the author of books including Creating Local Democracy in Iran and The Promise of the City. He is currently a Visiting Professor of International Relations at NYU and, since 2016, a Fellow at Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought.

His scholarship and public writing are informed in part by his experience through democracy advocacy in Iran, by more than a year of imprisonment in Tehran's Evin Prison, and by six years of house arrest before his release in 2016 as part of the Iran nuclear agreement.

His essays and commentary have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and Project Syndicate, and he appears regularly across major broadcast outlets including CNN, NewsNation, MSNBC, BBC, CBC, and NPR.