Empire in Action: US Operations and the Making of Narratives Around the 1953 Iranian Coup d'État
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- How did US diplomatic and intelligence officers construct narratives of the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, one of the most famous and foundational instances of Anglo-American foreign intervention of the Cold War? The US role in the 1953 coup has been examined through myriad lenses, including post-World War II historical analysis, early Cold War foreign policy, consequences of covert intervention, and intelligence successes and failures. Historians, social scientists, and other scholars of political, intelligence, and military history have also long debated the significance of the 1953 coup. However, the coup has yet to be studied through an anthropological lens and examined as a site for the perpetuation and expansion of US empire as well as the imagination of narratives characterized by a new form of imperial mythos. As such, this thesis takes an ethnographically and historiographically inspired approach by investigating volumes of foreign policy writings, intelligence histories, personal memoirs produced by American planners, administrators, and governmental historians of the 1953 coup. This thesis argues that US operatives from the Central Intelligence Agency and the US Department of State embodied and reproduced empire via a set of practices that constituted a collective US imperial habitus. These practices involved exerting textual control over Tehran and Iranian individuals, construing themselves as committed to a sublime struggle against terror, and constantly repositioning covert operations as a form of valiant resistance in their written accounts. This thesis also contends that the narratives initially created by US operatives in archival and personal writings have imbued the history of the coup with a form of their ideological character and become the accepted US history of events.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 28, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Popp, Olivia |
|---|---|
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Program in Science, Technology, and Society |
| Primary advisor | Kohrman, Matthew |
Subjects
| Subject | STS |
|---|---|
| Subject | science technology and society |
| Subject | ethnography |
| Subject | Iran |
| Subject | coup |
| Subject | coup d'état |
| Subject | archives |
| Subject | empire |
| Subject | imperialism |
| Subject | United States |
| Subject | covert operations |
| Subject | Cold War |
| Subject | intelligence |
| Subject | diplomacy |
| Subject | narratives |
| Subject | sublime |
| Subject | prestige |
| Subject | Tehran |
| Subject | memoirs |
| Subject | foreign policy |
| Subject | history |
| Subject | habitus |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- Use and reproduction
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Popp, Olivia. (2021). Empire in Action: US Operations and the Making of Narratives Around the 1953 Iranian Coup d'État. Unpublished Honors Thesis. Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
Collection
Stanford University, Program in Science, Technology and Society, Honors Theses
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- Contact
- itsoliviapopp@gmail.com
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