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Tagged: Iran

An abstract mural with multiple circular faces and geometric shapes in black, gray, and yellow on a textured wall.

An Anguished Debate Among Iranians

By Nahid Siamdoust. There is no precedent in the modern Middle East — or for that matter anywhere — for a war producing a quick and clean democratic outcome, as the architects of this one implied in their promises. The complete dismantling of a functioning state, however brutal and however widely despised, without any credible plan for what follows, will not produce democracy by miracle, but ruins by design. The division that has emerged — between those Iranians who will not support a war on their own country and those who have, through suffering and desperation, arrived at support for the war — is real and painful and will not be resolved easily.

An illustration of a power cable in the shape of Iran.

Epistemic Siege: Digital Blackout and the Fight for Meaning in Iran

By Fatemeh Shams. When the first U.S.-Israeli bombs started falling on Tehran on February 28, 2026, it wasn’t just the noise and destruction that shocked Iranian citizens. The nationwide digital blackout imposed by the government and the darkness that followed exacerbated the fear of millions of Iranians, who were cut off from any communication with the outside world. Almost overnight, Iran was thrown into a near-total digital silence. News of the outbreak of war arrived only in pieces, if at all. This was deliberate and tactical: the blackout cut off families and isolated communities, turning simple facts into rumors and confusion.

On ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ and the War on Palestine: Gender Violence, and the Struggle for Transnational Feminist Solidarity 

By Fatemeh Shams. In this article, the author reflects on seemingly disconnected events, such as “the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban” (2021), the rise of the “Women Life Freedom” Movement in Iran (2022) and the ongoing war in Gaza, under the lens of transnational feminist solidarity.

Cities in Custody: Urban Development as Spatial Proxy of Ideological Coloniality

In Iran, urbanization has played a central role in establishing infrastructures of social control, labor exploitation, and resource extraction – all under the auspices of religious authority. The appropriation of natural resources and public goods has caused lasting damage to ecological systems, making the region one of the world’s most extreme cases of heat and pollution, as Nassim Mehran and Niloufar Vadiati argue in their contribution to the “Kin City” text series.

‘Woman, Life, Freedom:’ Decoding the Political Poetics of a Woman-led Revolutionary Movement

By Fatemeh Shams. If people in Iran are finding a voice, what words are they choosing to say? All revolutions have slogans – the collective fight reduced to a handful of memorable, chantable, printable words. But what are the origins of these slogans? And how have they changed over time?

Unearthing the Substrata of Images – Interview with Sanaz Sohrabi

In this piece, Nurçin Ileri interviewed Sanaz Sohrabi, a doctoral candidate at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Montréal. Her doctoral project looks at how visual representations of oil have changed postcolonial sovereignty and resource nationalism in Iran over time. She is also an artist and filmmaker. In relation to her project, she prepares a trilogy of essay films

Against Remembering: The Fictional Truth of a Massacre

By Samad Alavi. Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness anthologizes poems that testify to some of the last century’s darkest political tragedies. In her introduction, Forché establishes her basic criteria for selection. First, she includes only poems, as she wishes to demonstrate that the old “arguments about poetry and politics ha[ve] been too narrowly defined” and that it is possible to understand poems as residing between the personal and the political.

Normalization of Violence Against Women in Iran

By Nassim Mehran. On 14 September 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, was detained by Iranian police forces because of an “improper hijab.” Two days later, she was pronounced dead, allegedly due to police brutality. For Iranians living under the fundamentalist state’s oppression of women during the last 43 years, this is not an exceptional incident.