Ghoncheh Tazmini is a visiting fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. Formerly an associate member at the Centre for Iranian Studies at SOAS, where she was Iran Heritage Foundation fellow, Tazmini conducts research on Iran-related themes as a British Academy grant-holder. She is currently researching Iranian-Russian alignment in the Middle East. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Kent at Canterbury, and she is the author of “Khatami’s Iran: the Islamic Republic and the Turbulent Path to Reform” (I. B. Tauris, 2009, 2013) and “Revolution and Reform in Russia and Iran: Politics and Modernisation in Post-Revolutionary States” (I. B. Tauris, 2012).