The research comes at a time when historical revisionism is on the rise. With the recognition of the ‘uses and abuses’ of history, especially (but not only) in authoritarian contexts, it offers a unique and nuanced understanding of such attempts through the case study of the Islamic Republic of Iran since its inception in 1979. The research focuses on school history textbooks, an integral element in the machinery of hegemonic production of official narratives of the past. Theorised as an ‘archive of the state’, it is the first longitudinal analysis of changes in official history, as codified in textbooks, situated in and through the socio-political transformations of Iran. Recent political developments globally have cast the subject of official history in a new light. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been framed in the context of historical revisionism, specifically, a view of Russia’s territorial remit and cultural reach, while the Islamic Republic of Iran’s brutal suppression of protests for Women, Life, Freedom has exposed the historical ruptures between Iranian women, and in particular students, and the State.

The governments of both nations are now part of a new ‘memory alliance’ a Russo-Iranian narrative bloc that contributes to renewed international rivalries between East and West, as evidenced by Russian media propagandists’ adoption of Ayatollah Khomeini’s branding of the US as the ‘Great Satan’. China’s educational reforms under Xi Jinping, including the othering of competing accounts as ‘historical nihilism’, further demonstrates the growing desires of authoritarian governments to modify and revise official history, as codified in textbooks, as part of their attempt to imprint on a new generation a state-sanctioned story of its past that is itself, unstable.