Journal
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The Performance of Stability: Tehran Under the Lens
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When a major international broadcaster describes Tehran as “a family festival” weeks after mass killings, the issue is not poetic tone. It is narrative power. In an authoritarian context, language does not merely describe reality; it rearranges it. After thousands were shot in the streets and communication blackouts were imposed…
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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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From Venezuela to Everywhere: The Logic of Rebuilding Empire
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They keep telling us the problem is “misconduct,” “overreach,” or a few illegal decisions made by the wrong people in Washington. It’s a comforting story because it turns history into a courtroom drama: find the violation, fix the procedure, move on. But what if the point isn’t the violation? What…
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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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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…
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How Taghvai’s Cinema Teaches Us to Replace Paranoia with Practice
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Nasser Taghvai, a renowned Iranian filmmaker and creator of enduring works, who for years resisted censorship and chose seclusion rather than making films under official policies, has passed away at 84. He was a pioneer of the Iranian New Wave and, at the same time, widely known to the public…
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After Jina Amini: Bodies, Labor, and the Regime’s Social Defeat
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After “Woman, Life, Freedom,” Iran’s hijab law has neither changed nor been repealed; yet in social reality the state has failed to enforce it effectively. The streets of Tehran and other cities now look less like scenes of discipline and more like a daily referendum: women without hijab or with…
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Iran: CFT, FATF, and the Politics of Credible Execution
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At its session on October 1, 2025, the Expediency Council approved Iran’s “conditional accession” to the Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism (CFT). According to the Council’s spokesperson, this approval will be interpreted “within the framework of the Constitution and domestic laws.” Domestic and international media described…
