Iran
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Reclaiming the Flag Without the People: Iran’s Technocratic Counteroffensive
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This article examines the political significance of Sazandegi newspaper’s decision to publish the Lion and Sun symbol on its front page in the aftermath of mass protests and state violence in Iran. Rather than treating the image as a cultural or historical gesture, the article situates it within the broader…
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Killing Without Guilt: The Political Engineering of Fascist Violence
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What we are witnessing in Iran is not an isolated case of religious extremism, but a fully developed political logic of fascist violence. Protest is redefined as war, citizens are recast as enemies, and killing is stripped of moral responsibility. Violence is no longer treated as an emergency measure; it…
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Iran’s Uprisings: Social Roots, Not Security Fantasies
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The claim that Iran’s protests are primarily the result of foreign interference has become a convenient shortcut—one that avoids engaging with the social reality of the country itself. Iran is a society of nearly ninety million people, spread across hundreds of cities, with deep class divisions, long histories of labour…
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The Bureaucracy of Killing in Iran, and Orientalism
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The news is horrifying for all of us. Not only because of the people who have been killed, but because of the shape of death itself. Seeing the bodies of hundreds of people in black bags. Seeing death being “processed” like an administrative file. Like a queue. Like an invoice.…
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Iran: When Politics Becomes a Black Market
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In a non-democratic society like Iran, the rise of a war-hungry far right is not a cultural accident. It’s the direct outcome of a system of governance designed to block ordinary, collective routes to change. When there are no independent unions, no real political parties, no free media, and no…
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The West’s Favorite Fantasy: A “Responsible” Islamic Republic
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It looks like Trump’s view of Iran’s fascist state and a big chunk of the Western Left’s view have basically converged, because they’ve landed in the same ugly place: treating the Islamic Republic as a legitimate adult in the room, and Iranians as background noise. Trump is out here thanking…
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Beyond the Headlines: Why Iran’s Protest Wave Can’t Be Reduced to One Name
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As Iran’s new wave of nationwide protests enters its twelfth day, and reports of a sweeping internet blackout continue to emerge, an old question has returned to the center of political debate with renewed urgency: are political figures leading the streets, or are they trying to catch up with a…
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Council of the Left: An Iranian Experiment
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On 10 January 2026, a cluster of Iranian Marxist parties and organizations will gather in Stockholm under the banner of the “Council for Cooperation of Left and Communist Forces.” On paper it’s just another exile conference. In reality, it’s a rare attempt to weld together fragments of a socialist left…
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The War on Minds: Inside Regime’s Coordinated Arrests of Left Scholars
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In the past 24 hours, security forces carried out coordinated raids on the homes of several left-wing researchers and translators in Tehran, arresting Parviz Sedaghat, Mahsa Asadollahnejad, and Shirin Karimi. They confiscated the belongings of Mohammad Maljoo and summoned him for questioning; the home of Heiman Rahimi was also searched,…
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Political Maturity in an Age of Binaries
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Ignorance is not harmless once it walks into the street. I learned that in 2004, watching Iranian football fans do a Nazi salute to German players, not out of ideology but out of emptiness — no history, no memory, no sense of what that gesture meant. Today I see a…
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Panahi’s Cinema and the Art of Smuggling Truth
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At an event held in honor of courageous, resilient cinema, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi and legendary director Martin Scorsese sat down for a deep conversation about obstacles, inspirations, and the power of film under extreme restrictions. The talk, in New York, gave Panahi space to speak about the roots of…
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Iran’s New ‘Hijab Situation Room’ and the Failure of Control
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On Friday, October 17, 2025, the secretary of Tehran province’s “Enjoining Good & Forbidding Wrong” headquarters, announced a new “Situation Room for Chastity & Hijab,” alongside the organization and activation of “more than 80,000 trained volunteers” plus 4,575 trainers and judicial auxiliaries (“zabet-e qazaei”). Officials framed it as a cultural-social…
