Sanjida Bary Sanjida Bary is a doctoral fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago. She can be reached by sbary3@uic.edu. What comes next for Iran? 2 March 2026 If the current government survives in weakened form, reform is unlikely to follow automatically. Studies of regimes under siege show that external pressure often strengthens coercive institutions rather than weakening them. 2 March 2026