The Lumumba Playbook

The University

The rector was defensive. When Iran’s state budget became public in 2019 and the numbers attracted considerable consternation, the head of Jama’at al-Mostafa University — the crown jewel of the Islamic Republic’s ideological apparatus — offered a justification that inadvertently revealed the scale of the operation. The university, he explained, was “a cultural arm of the Islamic regime” that had “recruited more foreign students than any other university in Iran.” Beyond the students at headquarters, he added, the institution had twenty thousand more in satellite campuses around the world, and ten thousand engaged in distance learning. Who these students were, where they lived, and how they functioned as instruments of the regime’s global strategy — in the words of Hoover Institution scholar Abbas Milani — “remains to be studied.”

Jama’at al-Mostafa al-Alamiye is headquartered in Qom — Iran’s seminary city, the intellectual center of Shiite clerical authority. It operates branches in Iran and sixty other countries. It runs four thousand weblogs and fifty magazines in forty different languages. It claims to have published “a book a day” in one of twenty languages since its inception.

A university operating branches across sixty nations, publishing daily in twenty languages, maintaining four thousand blogs, and training thirty thousand students worldwide — with a curriculum designed to recruit ideological cadres for a theocratic state. That is Jama’at al-Mostafa. And it is one of at least twenty-nine known institutions in the Islamic Republic’s cultural warfare apparatus.

The Cold War Parallel

The structural comparison is Milani’s own, and it is precise.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union operated Patrice Lumumba University — officially the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia — as its primary instrument of ideological soft power. Students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America were recruited, educated in Soviet ideology, and returned to their countries as cadres — some as ideologues, some as outright agents. The university was one pillar of a broader strategy to expand Soviet influence by training a global network of sympathizers.

Milani’s parallel between Jama’at al-Mostafa and Patrice Lumumba is drawn from the regimes themselves: “Not only do the Iranian and Soviet regimes bear striking resemblances in their moribund last stages — ruled by septuagenarian men, moored to sclerotic ideas, deluded by self-serving fantasies about the power and appeal of their ideas, and maintaining total control through terror — the structure and functions of the two institutions also bear fascinating similarities.”¹

The mission is the same: train cadres to promote the ruling ideology in their home countries. The scale is comparable. The difference is the era — where the Soviet Union operated in a world of limited media channels and controlled borders, the Islamic Republic operates in a world of unlimited digital reach and open societies. The same playbook, adapted for the information age.

The Doctrine

The machine runs on a theory. Ali Khamenei’s worldview is not the product of reactive governance but of a coherent — if paranoid — strategic vision.

At its center is the “Historic Turn” — Khamenei’s belief that the West is in terminal decline, Israel is dying, China is ascending, and Islam, under his leadership, stands at the threshold of a civilizational victory that will end Judeo-Christian hegemony. Every American president from Bush to Biden has pursued the same goal of regime destruction — “either with an iron fist, or the same fist clad in a velvet glove.” All have failed. Negotiations with the United States are, in Khamenei’s framework, “only a ploy to expose America’s true hypocrisy and buy time for that Historic Turn.”

The military threat has been contained — but America has pivoted. Khamenei believes the West now fights primarily through cultural warfare, deploying soft power to erode Islamic identity from within. He has quoted Joseph Nye — the American political scientist who coined the concept of soft power — multiple times, positioning Nye as “the grand theorist of American global hegemony.” If America has built a Cultural NATO, Khamenei will build an Islamic counter-offensive.

He introduced the term “Cultural NATO” on November 9, 2006, in a speech describing a Western conspiracy of “nihilism, materialism, individualism, and a rationalism devoid of Allah and faith.”² He alluded to George Soros — “that Jew whose name I don’t want to mention” — in a tone that, as Milani observes, “betrays his anti-Semitism.” The conspiracy was spearheaded by the United States and “Zionists.”

Between 2007 and 2009 alone, Khamenei discussed “culture wars” in forty-three of eighty-nine recorded talks — nearly half of all public addresses.³ The study documenting this frequency was published in an IRGC-affiliated journal with a name Milani calls “Orwellian”: the Scientific-Scholarly Journal for Culturally Guarding the Islamic Revolution, published by the Center for Islamic Human Sciences and Soft Power in Imam Hossein’s Officers College.

The 2019 Manifesto — issued on the fortieth anniversary of the revolution — was positioned by IRGC ideologues as a “seminal text and strategic gospel for the second phase of the revolution.” The first stage of the Historic Turn had begun.

The Budget

The institutional apparatus translates doctrine into action.

The Known Infrastructure

Metric Figure
Known institutions with budget line items 29+
Budget for 23 of these centers (2019) $280 million
Estimated total ideological spending (2019) ~$3 billion
Jama’at al-Mostafa: countries 60
Jama’at al-Mostafa: weblogs 4,000
Jama’at al-Mostafa: magazines 50 in 40 languages
Jama’at al-Mostafa: publishing rate ”A book a day” in 20 languages
Jama’at al-Mostafa: satellite students 20,000
Jama’at al-Mostafa: distance learning 10,000

Metric	Figure
Known institutions with budget line items	29+
Budget for 23 of these centers (2019)	$280 million
Estimated total ideological spending (2019)	~$3 billion
Jama’at al-Mostafa: countries	60
Jama’at al-Mostafa: weblogs	4,000
Jama’at al-Mostafa: magazines	50 in 40 languages
Jama’at al-Mostafa: publishing rate	”A book a day” in 20 languages
Jama’at al-Mostafa: satellite students	20,000
Jama’at al-Mostafa: distance learning	10,000

The twenty-nine known centers are “only known because they have a line item in Iran’s state budget.” The President’s political consultant, Hesamodin Ashna, has implied that other, unnamed institutions exist outside any official budget.⁴ Milani warns that trying to understand the regime’s financial tools for ideological warfare “simply through a forensic search of official regime budget lines” is “both facile and faulty.”

Another component of the mandate is symbolic politics — organizing mass demonstrations and Shiite rituals in cities worldwide. During Moharram — the month of mourning for the Battle of Karbala and the martyrdom of Hossein — rituals are staged from Sydney to Toronto, London to Los Angeles. Journalists and scholars sympathetic to the regime then use these “rented crowds” as evidence of sustained global support.

The Fellow Travelers

The most effective instrument of the regime’s soft power is not the paid agent. It is the unpaid sympathizer.

The technique that enables this is what political psychologists call source laundering — the process by which regime-aligned perspectives acquire legitimacy through the credentials of the people who voice them. A professor at a major university who “contextualizes” the regime’s gender apartheid is not writing as an agent of Tehran. She is writing as a scholar whose institutional affiliation lends authority to a perspective the regime could never sell under its own name. Once you recognize the mechanism, the pattern becomes unmistakable.

Milani is careful to distinguish: “It is both facile and faulty to think that every one of the regime’s ‘fellow travelers’ support or legitimize, or ‘contextualize’ the regime’s nefarious activities because of personal profit. Lingering belief in Islam, fond attachments to shibboleths of ‘progressive’ ideology are at least as powerful as the perks of power.”

The strongest version of the fellow travelers’ position is this: Western media coverage of Iran has been dominated by voices advocating confrontation, sanctions, or regime change. Scholarship that provides context — including context that complicates the hawkish narrative — serves a legitimate intellectual function. That argument deserves to be heard on its merits. The problem Milani identifies is not with contextualization itself but with scholars who contextualize selectively — offering nuance for the regime’s actions while providing none for its critics.

The fellow travelers are faculty at prominent universities who sit on review committees, pass judgment on articles and books submitted for publication, write op-eds “partially validated by the names of the institutions they are affiliated with,” and through it all “help promote or justify the regime’s ideology and actions, silence or sideline critics, and sometimes offer ‘explanations’ for the regime’s behavior by drenching it in the lexicon of ‘progressive discourse.’”

“Most ironic,” Milani writes, “is the existence of some feminists in this strange alliance. They are even wary of criticizing the regime’s gender apartheid and its blatantly misogynistic laws. The complicit silence of some parts of the feminist movement about the historic ‘Woman, Life and Freedom’ in Iran, the drivel of a few scholars about how the movement was a ‘Zionist’ or ‘colonial’ creation, are examples of the pernicious influence of this ‘soft power.’”

The Sharp Edge

Soft power has a companion. The regime calls it the same thing everyone else calls it: leverage.

Western journalists are led to believe that harsh criticism — or pointed questions in press conferences — will mean denial of access or an entry visa. “Obviously, many journalists are not intimidated into complicity,” Milani writes. “Some sadly are.” The calculation is rational: for a journalist specializing in Iran, access to the country is their professional livelihood. The regime makes the cost of criticism concrete and the reward for accommodation implicit.

For the diaspora, the mechanism is cruder. “The exercise of random acts of intimidation against returning members of the Diaspora and applying a shifting, ambiguous ‘red line’ of what kind of activity the regime will not tolerate has helped the regime’s effort to extend its reign of terror to Iranians abroad.” The randomness is the strategy — a predictable threat can be calculated around, but an unpredictable one creates a permanent state of anxiety. The cost of attending a protest, signing a petition, or writing under your real name is not knowable in advance. That uncertainty is the regime’s most effective export.

“In politics, perception is power,” Milani writes, “and hand in hand with its ‘soft power’ the regime has created a perception of possessing an omniscient and ruthless ‘sharp power.’”

Think about the last time you signed an online petition or shared a political post without a second thought. Now imagine that your elderly parents still live in the country you left — and that the price of your signature might be their interrogation at the airport when they try to visit their grandchildren. That is the arithmetic millions of Iranians in the diaspora perform every time they consider speaking up.

The Honest Ledger

The $3 billion apparatus exploits a structural asymmetry that Milani identifies with precision: “The singular power and appeal of democracy is its freedom. This lays it open to such malign uses. Ignoring the insidious influence of the regime’s network is courting danger. But suppressing the regime’s myrmidons is a cure worse than the disease.”

The dilemma is real. The fellow travelers operate within the protected speech of democratic societies. The Jama’at al-Mostafa students study at institutions that exist within the educational frameworks of their host countries. The Moharram rituals are religious observances protected by the same freedoms the regime denies at home. The regime uses the liberties of open societies to promote an illiberal vision — “yet no such possibilities exist for advocates of democracy in Iran.”

The defense is not suppression. It is transparency — naming the infrastructure, documenting the budget lines, tracing the networks, and making the playbook visible. The Lumumba Playbook worked in part because its target audiences — students from the Global South — did not know they were being recruited into an ideological pipeline. The same principle applies: the regime’s soft power is most effective when it is invisible. Visibility is the countermeasure.

Seventy to eighty percent of Iranians want secular governance.⁵ The regime knows this. Its $3 billion apparatus is not designed to change those numbers — it is designed to prevent the world from hearing them.

Abbas Milani, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, analysis of the Islamic Republic’s ideological warfare apparatus and its structural parallels to Soviet-era institutions ↩
Ali Khamenei, speech of November 9, 2006, as cited in Abbas Milani’s analysis of the “Cultural NATO” doctrine ↩
IRGC-affiliated publication, Scientific-Scholarly Journal for Culturally Guarding the Islamic Revolution, Center for Islamic Human Sciences and Soft Power, Imam Hossein’s Officers College, content analysis of Khamenei’s public addresses 2007-2009 ↩
Hesamodin Ashna, President’s political consultant, public statements on off-budget ideological programs, as cited in Milani’s research on the regime’s financial tools for ideological warfare ↩
GAMAAN, “Iranians’ Political Preferences in 2024: An Analytical Report on GAMAAN’s Survey Findings,” August 2025 ↩