July 2026 | BIPS Student Travel Grant
Revolutionaries without Borders: A transnational history of the Iranian guerrilla movement (1963-1979)
Summary of topic:
This project examines how Iranian guerrilla groups built and sustained connections with revolutionary movements and governments across the world between 1963 and 1979. Iranian activists travelled abroad for military training, collaborated with organisations such as the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman, and even received support from states including Libya, Egypt, and South Yemen.
By tracing the experiences of individual militants, the project explores how these cross-border relationships shaped their political ideas, strategies, and personal trajectories. It then shows how these experiences influenced the organisations they joined, the broader Iranian guerrilla movement, and ultimately the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
The project contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to internationalise the history of the Iranian Revolution. Rather than explaining the revolution primarily through developments within Iran, it places Iranian activists within wider regional currents of anti-colonial and revolutionary struggle. In doing so, it highlights the movement of people, ideas, tactics, and forms of solidarity across borders, while also showing that Iranian revolutionaries were not simply passive recipients of outside influence but active participants in shaping this transnational revolutionary world.
Report:
The project reveals the practical forms of support that connected Iranian guerrilla organisations to revolutionary movements outside of Iran, primarily in the Arab world. Groups such as the Mujahidin-e Khalq (MEK) and the Organisation of Iranian People’s Fada’i Guerrillas (OIPFG) used these relationships to secure military training, weapons, and logistical assistance. These ties, therefore, materially shaped the capacity of Iranian organisations to operate both inside and outside Iran.
The research also shows how these relationships were formed. Rather than emerging primarily through formal agreements between organisations, many began through contingent encounters that can only be uncovered by evaluating individual militants’ personal trajectories, which, through oral history interviews, this project has sought to do.
One of the project’s most significant and unexpected findings concerns relations among Iranian groups themselves. Throughout the 1970s, shared foreign interlocutors – particularly Palestinian organisations and the supportive regional governments of Libya and South Yemen – brought together Iranian activists from organisations that remained separate within Iran. Shared training camps, safe houses, publications, and political contacts created opportunities for cooperation abroad that were rarely possible inside the country, particularly among the OIPFG and MEK. The project therefore demonstrates that transnational relationships shaped not only Iranian groups’ tactics and political ideas, but also the relationships between them. Indeed, this shared activism across ideological boundaries earlier in the decade would foreshadow the 1978-9 revolution itself.
In sum, by tracing these cross-border connections, the project demonstrates why studying the international dimensions of the Iranian revolution is essential: it reveals dynamics and relationships that remain invisible when the revolutionary movement is examined solely within national boundaries. And as this project shows, the guerrilla movement provides a particularly valuable lens through which to uncover these transnational dimensions of the revolution as a whole.
Ashkan is a PhD student at the University of Oxford
