In this Global Thought Podcast episode, host Vishakha N. Desai, Vice Chair of the Committee on Global Thought interviews Kian Tajbakhsh ,a professor of Urban Planning and Urban Studies at Columbia University, Senior Program Manager at Columbia Global Centers and Development, and Fellow of Committee on Global Thought. Tajbakhsh describes his experience of returning to Iran and dissects competing paradigms of understanding world order.

Tajbakhsh discusses his features published this summer in the New York Review of Books telling the story of how his work on the Open Society Institute in Iran led to his interrogation and imprisonment in Iran, his subsequent trial and place in the negotiations with the US-Iranian Nuclear Deal, and this intersection of his personal and professional life as they relate to geopolitics and world order. He contemplates whether there could be a convergence internationally of universal norms or values, or if there are other ways to frame the world such as multipolarity, binary, or parallel universes.