The American Peace Corps operated in Iran from 1962 to 1976. By the end of the program, 1,748 Americans had served in Iran on educational, agricultural, environmental, and urban planning projects. Despite the significance of the Peace Corps in US-Iran relations, no scholarly studies have addressed this topic at length. Prominent works, such as Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman’s All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (1998) and Fritz Fischer’s Making Them Like Us: Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s (1998), mention the Iran case only in passing. Relying on US government and Peace Corps documents, oral histories and memoirs of Peace Corps volunteers and the Iranians with whom they worked, this paper will examine the motives, experiences, contributions and legacy of the Peace Corps in Iran. It will begin with a discussion of the projects that Peace Corps volunteers and their Iranian host communities tackled together during the 1960s and 1970s. The second section examines the testimonies and memoirs of Iran Peace Corps volunteers, as well as interviews with Iranians who developed personal and professional relationships with them. The conclusion explores the overall meaning of the Peace Corps experience to both Iranians and Americans, as well as what that legacy might mean today in terms of broader social, cultural, and diplomatic relations between Iran and the U.S.
This paper argues that the experiences of American Peace Corps volunteers and the Iranians they served promoted a new spirit of dialogue and understanding between the two groups. Although not devoid of misunderstandings and resentments, this interaction between Americans and Iranians was free from military, financial, and political complications and emphasized person-to-person contacts. In looking at the Peace Corps experience in Iran, we can gain valuable insights into both Iranian and American culture and their interaction in the late twentieth century. American volunteers joined the organization out of a sincere desire to serve abroad and alleviate poverty and underdevelopment. However, their living conditions, work, and relationships with Iranians forced them to reevaluate previously held assumptions about so-called backward nations, creating a new understanding of the world and helping point American culture in new directions in its understanding of other societies. For some Peace Corps volunteers, service in Iran sparked a lifetime of study and travel to the Middle East and facilitated their careers as scholars and diplomats engaged with Iran and the broader region.
