This free, public webinar will cover the history of U.S. sanctions on Iran, whether they have had the intended effects (and what those are), what effects they have had, what the status is of the JCPOA nuclear agreement, and new ideas for activism to end the sanctions.

The timing will be December 8, 2021, at 21:00 UTC (very similar to GMT), 1 p.m. in Berkeley, 3 p.m. in Little Rock and Winnipeg, 4 p.m. in Toronto and New York, 5 p.m. in Halifax, 9 p.m. in London, 10 p.m. in Rome and Stockholm, and December 9, 2021, at 12:30 a.m. in Tehran, 8 a.m. in Sydney, 10 a.m. in Auckland.

The event will include presentations, followed by Q&A, from these presenters:

Gareth Porter is a member of World BEYOND War’s Advisory Board. He is an independent investigative journalist and historian who specializes in U.S. national security policy. Among his books is Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, published by Just World Books in 2014. He was a regular contributor to Inter Press Service on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan from 2005 to 2015.   His original investigative stories and analysis are published by Truthout, Middle East Eye, Consortium News, The Nation, and Truthdig, and reprinted on other news and opinion sites. Porter was Saigon bureau chief of Dispatch News Service International in 1971 and later reported on trips to Southeast Asia for The Guardian, Asian Wall Street Journal and Pacific News Service. He is also the author of four books on the Vietnam War and the political system of Vietnam. He has taught Southeast Asian politics and international studies at American University, City College of New York and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.


Dr. Assal Rad is a Senior Research Fellow at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). She graduated with a PhD in Middle Eastern History from the University of California, Irvine in 2018. Her PhD research focused on Modern Iran, with an emphasis on national identity formation and identity in post-revolutionary Iran. With this background, Assal works with the NIAC policy team on research and writing related to Iran policy issues and U.S.-Iran relations. Assal joined NIAC in January 2019. After working with NIAC in California as a volunteer on election and voting campaigns in 2018, Assal joined the team in order to further this work and embolden the voices of Iranian Americans. Her writing can be seen in Newsweek, Independent, the National Interest, and Responsible Statecraft, and she has appeared as a commentator on the BBC, Al Jazeera, BBC Persian and NPR.

Richard Broinowski was a diplomat in the Australian Embassy in Tehran in the early 1970s and has since written two books about nuclear weapons, as well as several articles about the JCPOA. His book Fact Or Fission: The Truth About Australia's Nuclear Ambitions is to be updated and republished next year.

Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, a native of Iran, is a public health advocate and a human rights activist. She is an award-winning environmental toxicologist who received the 2015 Rachel Carson Prize for her work on uranium contamination in Iraq and its public health catastrophic consequences. Her groundbreaking research in the toxicology of war contaminants has received international recognition. The BBC, the Guardian, the Independent, CNN, and NBC have extensively reported on her discoveries.