Did the Islamic Republic of Iran Plagiarize My Undergrad Thesis?
Years ago, in June 2017, I submitted my undergraduate thesis at Harvard on China's energy diplomacy in the Middle East. The core idea built on Cold War-era "strategic triangle" theory - the notion that in any three-way rivalry, the best position is to be the "pivot," the player courted by two rivals. During the Cold War, this described how China, the US, and USSR jockeyed for position - and it was Kissinger's main goal during detente and Chinese normalization to ensure the US occupied that favored pivot spot. My contribution was applying this framework to a new triangle: China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Beijing plays both sides, and that's ideal for Beijing.
Not exactly groundbreaking, but it wasn't discussed much in the literature at the time.
Two months later, in August 2017, two Iranian scholars submitted a paper to Iran Economic Review making the same argument.
One of the authors was from the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Their affiliations, as listed in the paper:
- School of International Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tehran, Iran
- Faculty of Law and Political Sciences, Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran, Iran
So either I influenced discourse at Iran's foreign policy institutions, or this is a remarkable coincidence.
Even stranger: as far as I can tell, this is Mahdi Salami Zavareh's only publication. He has no Google Scholar profile, no other papers. An Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs official with no publication history suddenly publishes a paper on the exact niche topic I wrote my thesis on, eight weeks after I submitted it.
Me presenting my thesis at Harvard's East Asian Studies colloquium, spring 2017
The Evidence
I submitted my thesis in June 2017. Their paper was received by the journal on August 8, 2017 - eight weeks later. The central arguments are strikingly similar:
My thesis:
China is continuing its careful, calculated, longstanding policy of balanced engagement with all members of the Gulf, which, in Beijing's view, best suits Chinese interests.
Their paper:
China's main strategy at the moment is to make a balance among all actors in the Middle East.
We cite the same sources (Garver, Daojiong, Zhao Hong), the same data points (China becoming a net oil importer in 1993, the $600 billion China-Iran trade target, Russia overtaking Saudi Arabia as China's top supplier in 2016), and reach the same structural conclusion about China's balancing act.
My thesis:
both countries agreed to increase trade to $600 billion USD by 2026
Their paper:
economic relation between these two countries will rise up to 600 billion Dollars in ten years
Did they plagiarize me? I suppose it's possible that it's a complete coincidence - that two people studying China-Iran-Saudi relations in 2017 independently drew the same conclusions on a niche subject and one of them just happened to publish two months after my thesis dropped. They didn't copy sentences verbatim. They didn't use my terminology.
But I have to admit - I'm flattered. I never dreamed anyone would read my undergraduate thesis, let alone that it might shape the discourse of the very phenomenon I was studying. If the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is reading Harvard undergrad theses on their own geopolitical positioning, I suppose I should be honored.
There's a concept in anthropology called the observer effect - the idea that the act of observing a phenomenon inevitably changes it. Ethnographers worry about this constantly: by studying a culture, you become part of it, and your presence alters the very thing you're trying to document.
I wrote a thesis observing how Iran navigates great power politics. And now, perhaps, Iran has observed me back. By writing about their strategy, I may have contributed to their strategic discourse. The observer has been observed.