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Abstract
Selectivity is often understood as global powers using military intervention in certain humanitarian crises but not in others based on perceived strategic interests at stake. Though the scholarship has acknowledged selectivity's practice, more disputed has been its 'problematic' ascription. Critics have correctly identified selectivity as a problem of hypocrisy, while advocates have construed it as necessary and even pragmatic. Importantly, however, both camps have premised selectivity as a problem of 'inaction' towards 'non-intervened' crises. In contrast to this existing 'bystander complicity' paradigm of selectivity, this article argues that selectivity must be reinterpreted as a problem of global power 'active complicity' to better understand and appreciate its problematic ascription. The proposed active complicity paradigm reveals the neglected colonial and imperial underpinnings within selectivity. It destabilises and challenges the idea that global powers simply 'stand by' as onlookers to disassociated, faraway crises, and instead highlights their key role in enabling and perpetuating them.

This paper maps how American popular culture came to terms with the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran through a study of Hussein Khosrow Vaziri. Vaziri, better known by his moniker, "The Iron Sheik," was active in professional wrestling in the 1980s and remains to this day one of the most well-known Iranians in American cultural memory. Through an analysis of his character and how he has been represented in the popular media, I argue that he was chiefly utilized as a figure through whom Americans could cope with the devastating blow that the Revolution caused to American power. I argue that this reaction continues to this day, albeit focusing not on Iran but on the current political tensions involving the attacks of September 11, 2001.