From Reza Shah to 2026: Narrative Power and the Geopolitics of Iran

Pic Courtesy: IOR/L/PS/12/3518, British Library

The crisis in Iran is unfolding on two fronts simultaneously: a politico-military now, and an informational one. Both are fiercely contested, and neither can be understood without the other. On one front, mass protests have swept dozens of cities in Iran since late 2025, driven by economic hardship and political dissatisfaction. Reports of massacres in Rasht and Fardis, mass arrests and killings, and a nationwide internet shutdown have drawn intense international scrutiny. Western media has largely framed these events through the lens of regime fragility and imminent collapse, while critics note a heavy dependence on diaspora organisations and advocacy groups with alleged links to Israel as primary sources. This  raises pointed questions about whose version of events reaches global audiences.

 

On the other front, military strikes by the United States and Israel have generated a parallel and equally contested narrative. A significant section of the population within Iran—not reducible to state propaganda—have mobilised publicly against what they frame as foreign aggression and an assault on national sovereignty. That counter-narrative receives far less sustained attention in Western coverage, yet it speaks to a substantial domestic reality.

 

Two stories about Iran are therefore in circulation simultaneously: one of a population rising against its rulers, another of a nation under external attack. Each is real; each is also, in part, a product of who is doing the telling, for whom, and to what end. The information environment is not a neutral window onto events. It is a battleground.

This is not new to Iranian political history. A revealing precedent lies in the British management of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s forced abdication in 1941—an episode in which imperial authorities devoted considerable resources not merely to removing a ruler, but to constructing the story of his removal. Examining that episode through a media and communication studies lens illuminates how narrative management functions as an instrument of geopolitical power, and how strikingly replicable it is across more than eight decades.

 

Rise, rule, and strategic removal

 

Reza Shah’s rise to power unfolded in conditions of profound state fragility following the First World War. Reza Khan, then commander of the Persian Cossack Brigade, took power in a coup in 1921. By 1925, he had been crowned Shah, founding the Pahlavi dynasty. Though historians still debate the extent of British orchestration, there is a consensus that the British at least acquiesced to his rise: a strong central ruler was preferable to instability in a state bordering Soviet territory and sitting across vital imperial routes.

 

Reza Shah proceeded to modernise and centralise the Iranian state, yet his sharply authoritarian rule caused his domestic standing to deteriorate by the late 1930s. His foreign policy, particularly Iran’s extensive economic ties with Nazi Germany in the early years of the Second World War, also alarmed both London and Moscow. When Reza Shah refused to expel German nationals, they launched the Anglo-Soviet invasion in August 1941. The Shah abdicated and his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was installed who had the support of the British. The Shah died in exile in South Africa in 1944.

 

Controlling the narrative: the 1941 playbook

 

The military operation was swift, but British officials were acutely aware that the deposition of a head of state risked being read by audiences in Iran, India, Afghanistan and beyond as imperial interference. A substantial narrative-shaping effort was therefore mounted to shape how the abdication was understood.

 

Diplomatic telegrams from the British Minister (later Ambassador) in Tehran, Sir Reader Bullard, reveal how information flows were monitored. On 9 October 1941, Bullard relayed a query from the Iranian Finance Minister, asking whether “it is possible for the British Broadcasting Corporation to throw cold water on belief that the late Shah had large balances in English banks.” The rumour, which had originated with Reuters, had raised public expectations that enormous sums belonging to the former ruler might be recovered.

 

In response, British authorities in India suggested that Reuters’s messages about Persian affairs “can be controlled either at Tehran, the source, or in London,” implicitly acknowledging the extent to which wartime information flows could be influenced by government direction.

 

More revealing is a circular issued on 19 September 1941 by the British Secretary of State for India, which aimed to establish the thematic framework to guide publicity surrounding the abdication. The circular drew an explicit contrast between German conquest—imposed through “unpopular quislings”—and British intervention, which was to be presented as having removed a “local tyrant”. The abdication was therefore to be portrayed as part of a process restoring “complete Persian independence” and opening the path to constitutional reform. The operation was not to be narrated as a strategic intervention to secure supply routes, but as a moral act of liberation.

 

This framing was not uncontested within the British administration itself. Olaf Caroe, foreign secretary to Government of India, argued that the abrupt reversal—from portraying Reza Shah as a model moderniser to condemning him as a greedy despot—risked appearing obviously opportunistic. He recommended a more balanced tone that acknowledged the ruler’s achievements. Others, including Colonel G. E. Wheeler of the Ministry of Information (British India), disagreed: if hostile coverage of the former Shah ceased, he warned, audiences would correctly conclude that he had been removed purely for strategic convenience. The narrative of tyranny and liberation had to be sustained, because the alternative was transparency about geopolitical interest.

 

Managing the story: information control and the legitimation of intervention

 

Viewed through contemporary frameworks in media and communication studies, the 1941 episode demonstrates the systematic deployment of what might be termed “narrative legitimation”: the effort to provide geopolitical intervention with a moral and political vocabulary that displaces its strategic rationale.

 

The British authorities understood that military occupation was insufficient as a political instrument. Public meaning had to be actively produced and managed across multiple audience formations simultaneously: Persians, Indians, Afghans, and the broader imperial world. Different messages were calibrated for different contexts, with the BBC, Reuters and the All India Radio functioning as overlapping but distinct channels of influence.

 

According to Wheeler, the Persians were more interested in knowing the future plans following the abdication rather than being constantly fed about the “misdemeanours” of the ex-Shah. The Indians, on the other hand, assessed Wheeler, were to be impressed upon the necessity of the British action in Iran which essentially meant “personal condemnation” of the ex-Shah. The colonial government thus faced the dilemma of “placating Indian opinion at the cost of Persian listeners.”   

 

This is not an argument for crude equivalence between 1941 and 2026. The contemporary global media environment is vastly more plural, decentralised and contested than the wartime imperial information architecture managed from London. State actors no longer exercise the same degree of direct control over major news organisations, and counter-narratives circulate with a speed and reach that would have been unimaginable to Bullard and his colleagues. Social media platforms, diaspora networks, and independent journalists have all complicated the information landscape significantly.

 

And yet the underlying dynamic is structurally familiar. Geopolitical intervention continues to be accompanied by an intensive effort to supply the interpretive framework through which it is understood. In the current context, questions about which sources are authorised, which casualties counted, and whether Iran’ government is framed as illegitimate or as retaining genuine domestic support are not merely editorial decisions. They are exercises in communicative power during armed conflict, shaping the political conditions under which intervention becomes thinkable, justifiable and sustainable.

 

The British officials who debated in September 1941 whether to vilify Reza Shah aggressively or with more restraint were, in effect, working on precisely the same problem that media researchers and critical journalists grapple with today: how narrative shapes the conditions of possibility for political action.

Reza Shah’s career encapsulates a broader paradox that retains its relevance: a ruler who sought to strengthen Iranian sovereignty rose to power within a geopolitical architecture shaped by foreign interests and fell victim to those same interests when they shifted. The parallel management of his removal—military on one hand, communicative on the other—reveals the extent to which information control was not a wartime expedient but a constitutive element of imperial governance.

 

As external pressure on Iran intensifies in 2026 and the contest over the narrative of current events grows sharper, history deserves more than passing acknowledgement. Understanding how geopolitical storytelling works—who constructs it, through which institutional channels, for which audiences, and with what consequences for those living through the events being narrated—remains one of the central tasks of media and communication research.

This post was first published at LSE Media blog