Nassrine Azimi

Nassrine Azimi co-founded and currently coordinates the Green Legacy Hiroshima Initiative (a global campaign to disseminate and plant worldwide seeds and saplings of trees that survived the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima). At the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) Azimi established the Hiroshima Office for Asia and the Pacific in 2003, and was its first director until 2009. Prior to her work in Hiroshima she had been UNITAR’s coordinator of environmental training programs, deputy to the executive director, and chief of the Institute’s New York Office, which she reopened in 1996 and directed for five years. She is currently a senior advisor at the Institute. Azimi has published extensively on UN peacekeeping and peace-building, post-conflict reconstruction, environmental and cultural governance, and Asia. She is the author of ‘Last Boat to Yokohama’ and ‘The United States and Cultural Heritage Protection in Japan, 1945-1952’ and teaches international peace and security at Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts.

Iran

Muslims and Jews: Remembering Jewish School Days in Pre-Revolutionary Tehran

Nassrine Azimi

( The Chukogu Shimbun ) – HIROSHIMA —The elegant art deco building of Ettefagh, Iran’s famous Jewish school, still stands on a leafy avenue adjacent to Tehran University. Originally established by prominent Iraqis who had settled in Iran following Jewish pogroms and expulsions of the 1940s and early 50s in Iraq, Ettefagh started as a […]

Authoritarianism

Hope for a New Day in Iran?

Nassrine Azimi

Hiroshima (Special to Informed Comment) — In 1975, when I was 16, my father’s work took our family to Turkey. It was hard parting. I was then in my junior year at Tehran’s famed Jewish high-school where, despite being a Muslim, I had thrived and made lasting friendships. Turkey in those days was struggling through […]

nuclear weapons

With Nukes Back as a Global Danger, Time to Remember Hiroshima

Nassrine Azimi

(Informed Comment) – Hiroshima—Saikoji, a small temple of the Jodo Shinshu school of Buddhism to which a majority of Hiroshima’s citizens belong, stands just across the street from the Atomic Bomb Dome. It often displays selected words of wisdom at the entrance—this month, to mark the 74th anniversary of the atomic bombing of August 6, […]