Our Mission

While democracy was in an upswing for most of the last century it has had a clear and visible set back in its spread around the world in the first two decades of this century. In the established democracies like US and EU the rise of populism has slowed down emphasis on education as the engine of spread of science, art, cultural progression, and economic productivity. The impact of education on democracy has been well established since the establishment of the first democratic governments in UK, US and France. A critical factor for democracies to thrive is educated and conscious citizens. Such citizens motivated by the knowledge of society, economy, and human psychology organize and bring about progressive changes through consensus. This has been the miracle of democracy since its inception: democracy providing education for citizens and informed citizen spreading and consolidating democracies.

A notable deficiency in the spread of democracy is in the Islamic world. From 57 countries with Muslim majority only a handful have semi-democratic governments and a vast majority of them are ruled by despotic monarchs and presidents. IDEA is established with the intention of using democracy to spread education to bring democracy to undemocratic regions of the world. IDEA will explore and search for factors that has impeded the spread of democracy in the world. In this endeavor we will pay special attention to the barriers against education assuming its critical role in establishment and nourishment of democracies. Obviously, on this undertaking the existing democracies play an important role in assisting the process of democratization of the countries ruled by undemocratic regimes. Institutions such as USAID, Peace Corp, Physicians without Boarder and many others have tried to facilitate development and progress in the third-world countries. But, no institution has dedicated itself to the goal of using democratic institutions in the Western countries to break the deadlock of democracy-education feedback that is the vital mechanism for establishment of democracy. IDEA is aiming to achieve exactly
that goal.

In our mission, we will pay especial attention to Iran. This is due to the fact that Islamic Revolution in Iran acted as a major impediment against Iran’s political system’s natural evolution towards democracy and helped spread of fundamentalist Islam in the Middle East and beyond. At the same time, the 8 million Iranians who have left Iran since 1979 have been highly successful in their professions in every country in which they have settled. IDEA will try and find the reasons for such easy assimilation of Iranians in diaspora in the democratic societies in which they live in contrast with many citizens of other Muslim countries who have built Islamic cocoons in their Western countries of residence and have adhered to the culture,
tradition and religion of the countries which they departed. IDEA will initiate research on the impermeability of the diaspora residents of the Western countries against democratic values.

Inversely, IDEA will explore the factors that makes integration in democratic societies easy for Iranians residing in the West. IDEA will specifically investigate the mutual relationship between  democratic values and education, culture and history of immigrants to the West. IDEA’s studies could be conducted on multiple fronts. On the one hand, our activities will shed light on the reasons for lack of assimilation of the immigrants from certain countries to the West and use educational tools to remedy such deficiencies. On the other hand, we can use powerful tools such as study of specifics of mechanisms of hindrance in undemocratic countries against social
changes that brought democracy to other countries of the world.