BASIC Co-Executive Director, Paul Ingram, is to present two papers seeking to change the frame of the international debate over Iran’s nuclear program to an international conference on the subject in Tehran on 9th March, hosted by the Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS), a think-tank closely associated with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic. One is entitled Iran’s Role in Moving Towards a Nuclear Weapon Free World, the other Other solutions to Iran’s Energy Insecurity. These papers will be available on the BASIC website in the next few days, and Paul will be posting a report on the conference here on the blog.
BASIC believes fundamentally in dialogue and the importance of exploring with others mutually-beneficial solutions to apparently intractable problems. The international dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme is exactly the sort of problem that demands an understanding from all sides of the perspectives of others, an effort to speak in a ‘language’ that it understood, whether or not there is agreement between these perspectives; this paper and BASIC’s involvement in this conference is in this spirit.