Author: Siyavash Shahabi
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Bread, Speech, and Prison: Remembering Sattar Beheshti on Workers’ Day
On International Workers’ Day, Goahar Eshghi, the mother of Sattar Beheshti, published a message addressed to workers in Iran. It is a short text, but it carries the weight of a whole political history: the history of a worker killed in custody, a mother turned into a public voice of justice, and a society where…
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Bread, Freedom and Organisation: Esmail Bakhshi on Iran Today
Esmail Bakhshi is a well-known Iranian worker and labour activist. His name is mostly associated with the struggles of the Haft Tappeh sugarcane workers, the fight for independent workers’ organisation, and his own experience of prison, torture, dismissal from work, and resistance to repression. Over the past years, he has not been known as the…
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National Wealth, Private Misery
When we talk about oil, the main issue is not always what we see at first glance. The usual question is this: under war, blockade, and disruption in maritime routes, how much oil can Iran still sell? But perhaps the more urgent question is this: how much of the oil it still produces can Iran…
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Beyond the Mountain Myth: Kurdistan as Society
Kurdistan is often reduced to a militarized myth, erasing society, class, and everyday life. This essay argues for restoring social reality at the center, showing how both internal politics and external narratives flatten complexity across Kurdistan and Iran.
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Iran’s Geopolitical Weight, and Its Political Trap
Iran’s place in the world cannot be understood only through the language of its ruling regime. It has to be read as a geopolitical unit positioned at one of the most sensitive crossroads of energy, trade, and security in West Asia. This matters because not all states occupy the same place in the global order.…
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A Diaspora Misrepresented: Yasmine Mather on War and Media
The war against Iran has made it even harder to sustain the neat, one-dimensional image that many Persian-language and Western media outlets try to present of Iranians living abroad. In this dominant narrative, the “Iranian diaspora” is treated as if it naturally supports foreign intervention, the escalation of war, and even the destruction of Iran’s…
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Inside Tehran, Under Bombs, Arguing About War and Power
One month after the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, a long conversation was recorded in Tehran between Sobhan Yahyaei, a media researcher and host of the Panorama podcast, and Mohammad Mehdi Ardabili, a philosopher and public intellectual. This was not just an abstract discussion. In the middle of the conversation, they say they…
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Iran Beyond the Myth of a Unified People
One of the laziest clichés about Iran is the idea that a single, unified “people” are standing against a single, unified “regime.” This formula works well for headlines, for rushed journalism, and for simple moral commentary. But when it comes to understanding real politics, it is almost useless. Iranian society is not a homogeneous block.…
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The Islamic Republic and the Seizure of a Popular Revolution
In the official calendar of the Islamic Republic, April 1 marks the day the “system” was consolidated. But in Iran’s critical memory, this date is not simply the anniversary of a referendum. It is the anniversary of the moment when a mass, diverse, anti-despotic revolution was compressed into a single, pre-directed answer: “Islamic Republic, yes…
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The Strait of Hormuz: Where War on Iran Becomes Everyone Else’s Crisis
In Iran, talking about a “global energy crisis” can sometimes feel like talking about something distant, something that belongs to other people’s lives. In a society that has spent years dealing with inflation, a collapsing currency, sanctions, structural corruption, and political repression, all alongside the organized looting of resources and the cheapening of labor, a…
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How a School In The Middle of War Became a Battleground Over The Truth
The Minab school case is not only about a deadly strike. It is about what happens to truth, language, and human judgment once war begins. On the morning of February 27, 2026, as the first wave of US and Israeli attacks on Iran was still unfolding, Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab collapsed. In the…
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Under Fire, Still Speaking of the Neighborhood
The article published by Shargh first has to be read in relation to the conditions in which it was produced. This text was not written in a free and normal setting. It was written in the middle of war, communication breakdown, public fear, population displacement, and within one of the most restricted media environments in…
