Mina Khanlarzadeh examines state-centered anti-imperialism, the right-wing opposition, lived experience, and why Iranian society should be understood as a producer of political thought.
Amid war, sanctions, and repression, how can Iranian society move beyond a binary in which its suffering is treated, on one side, as the unavoidable price of “resistance,” while, on the other, its diverse voices are absorbed into the unified project of the right-wing opposition? In this conversation, Mina Khanlarzadeh examines state-centered anti-imperialism, permanent crisis, the postponement of the struggle against domestic authoritarianism, and the meaning of normalizing relations with the United States.
The interview asks why part of the Iranian Left continues to subordinate the struggle against domestic authoritarianism to confrontation with imperialism, and whether foreign pressure, sanctions, and war can be opposed without overlooking the Islamic Republic’s own role in reproducing crisis, corruption, and repression. It also asks whether opposing this order necessarily means joining a right-wing opposition that subsumes labor, gender, and ethnic demands into a unified project of regime change.
Khanlarzadeh understands imperialism not simply as another name for American power, but as a system of economic, military, and technological domination shaped by competition among powers. At the same time, she argues that state-centered anti-imperialism in Iran has become a language for legitimizing permanent crisis, while the right-wing opposition often recognizes society’s experience only insofar as it can translate that experience into its own political framework.
From this perspective, lived experience is neither an unmediated and inherently emancipatory truth nor a form of “false consciousness” that can simply be dismissed. Drawing on the archive of the January protests, Khanlarzadeh shows how political language is reconstructed through slogans, mourning rituals, regional languages, music, dance, and bodily movement—and how mourning itself can create new forms of collective belonging without erasing differences of gender, language, ethnicity, and region.
The conversation also turns to organizing inside Iran and the responsibilities of political forces abroad. A “third way,” Khanlarzadeh argues, cannot be designed in advance outside the country but must emerge from existing struggles and a critical relationship between those inside and outside Iran. More broadly, Iran’s experience raises a methodological question: how can political thought begin from concepts and analyses produced through social experience and collective struggle rather than forcing those experiences back into inherited theoretical frameworks?
Mina Khanlarzadeh is a scholar of cultural and intellectual history who holds a PhD from Columbia University. Before joining the faculty of Deep Springs College, she held postdoctoral positions at Northwestern University and the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Her research develops along two main lines: one concerned with the intellectual history of modern Iran, translation, science, and technology; the other with political memory and collective affects.
Zamaneh: In a recent article, you show that, for part of the Iranian Left, anti-imperialism has been reduced from a critique of global relations of power to hostility toward a single entity: the United States. How, then, would you define imperialism—or imperialisms—in positive terms? In the specific case of Iran, what dimensions of the Islamic Republic’s place within the global capitalist order become invisible when imperialism is reduced to the United States alone?
Mina Khanlarzadeh: I think that to understand imperialism today, we need to approach it on two levels: first, as a system of global power, and second, as a way of politically representing that system. Let me begin with the first level. If we reduce imperialism to American power alone, we cannot explain how this system actually works. American power certainly plays a central role, but imperial domination also operates through the global financial system, military alliances and interventions, technological inequality, and competition among major powers. Once imperialism is reduced to the United States, we lose sight both of how global capitalism functions and of Iran’s own position within these geopolitical struggles—including its economic and political dependence on powers such as Russia and China. This narrow understanding of imperialism has, of course, already been extensively and carefully criticized in Persian-language intellectual debates.
The second level is closer to what interests me most. Reducing imperialism to a single enemy—the United States—performs an important function within political culture. Stuart Hall’s essay “The West and the Rest” is particularly useful here. Hall shows how societies and histories that are in reality deeply heterogeneous can be represented as coherent blocs, with this apparent unity produced through opposition to an external “other.” The Islamic Republic uses a similar logic. Its internal factions disagree over how relations with the United States should be managed, but opposition to America allows the political system to present itself as ideologically unified. Permanent confrontation with the United States also serves another function: it preserves a political and economic order from which powerful institutions and elites benefit. As sanctions intensified, economic networks connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps expanded, and certain groups acquired even greater power and protection. Those who benefit from this order are often also those who possess the power to preserve it. They therefore have a very real material interest in maintaining the confrontation.
The same logic is then turned against Iranian society itself. The state presents people as a unified nation confronting an external enemy, while conflicts around class, gender, ethnicity, place of residence, religion, and political freedom are pushed aside or represented as security threats. Demands for justice can then be portrayed as attempts to weaken the nation—which, according to the state’s logic, amounts to serving the enemy. That is why state-centered anti-imperialism is no longer merely a position on foreign policy. It has become a mechanism that binds together the state’s ideological claims, the interests of a privileged minority that benefits from permanent crisis, and the repression used to contain dissent. This is also why many protesting sectors of society are skeptical of both groups: those who fully embrace the state’s language of “resistance,” and those who support its foreign policy while opposing its domestic repression.
Zamaneh: In the years before the 1979 Revolution, much of the opposition—and particularly left-wing currents—described the Shah as the “chained dog of imperialism,” understanding domestic authoritarianism as an expression of structural dependence on imperial powers. Today, a part of the Left, though smaller, regards the Islamic Republic’s authoritarianism as a defensive reaction to imperialist pressure and intervention, and therefore as a secondary and subordinate consequence of it. In both cases, the practical result of these premises can be to prioritize the struggle against foreign domination over the struggle against domestic repression. What similarities and differences are there between these two historical formulations? Through what theoretical and political mechanism is the struggle against domestic authoritarianism suspended in favor of the “principal contradiction” with imperialism? And how can the real relationship between foreign war and domestic authoritarianism be analyzed without postponing social demands at moments of crisis?
These two formulations emerged from very different historical contexts and have had different political functions. But despite those differences, both ultimately treat domestic repression as secondary to the struggle against imperialism. Under the Shah, much of the Left understood authoritarianism as a consequence of Iran’s dependence on the United States. But the history of the Islamic Republic itself shows that ending dependence on the United States does not necessarily produce political freedom. Today, part of the Left reverses the same argument: the Islamic Republic’s authoritarianism is presented as a defensive response to foreign intervention and military threats. Neither argument, however, really explains the form of political rule. Sanctions and military threats can certainly deepen economic crisis, further securitize political life, and intensify repression, but removing them does not automatically produce democracy. The political effects of the two formulations are also different. Under the Shah, the dependency argument helped produce a coalition against the government, bringing nationalists, leftists, and Islamists together. Today, the defensive argument often directs political energy toward resisting foreign pressure rather than challenging a state that governs through precisely this permanent condition of crisis.
For this reason, supporting the state’s confrontation with foreign powers in the name of anti-imperialism can produce the opposite result in practice. It shields from criticism precisely those policies that expose Iranian society to further sanctions, war, and foreign pressure—in other words, exactly the conditions an anti-imperialist politics should oppose. Iranian workers themselves have repeatedly drawn this connection, linking the state’s regional policies and nuclear adventurism directly to their own poverty and to the danger of war. Once preserving the existing political and economic order becomes synonymous with resisting imperialism, society’s suffering gradually begins to appear as an acceptable price. For more than two decades, protesters have consistently rejected this bargain. Rather than accepting permanent crisis in the name of some larger regional cause, they have demanded changes to an interconnected system of crisis, repression, corruption, and economic deprivation. They have chanted, “Forget the nuclear program and do something about us,” and, instead of uranium enrichment, demanded the “enrichment of life.” More recently, retirees have expressed the same refusal. In Ahvaz: “Enough warmongering—our table is empty.” In Kermanshah: “Inflation and high prices—no to war and destruction.” These slogans reject both the promise of sacrifice today for liberation tomorrow and the idea that society must postpone its struggle until some supposedly more appropriate moment. By then, war may have devastated the country even further and made those already fighting for their rights still poorer.
Zamaneh: You emphasize that people’s lived experience should be the point of departure for rethinking the Left’s theoretical framework. You criticize a Left that waits for society to become worthy of its concepts rather than allowing society’s experience to transform those concepts. Assuming that people are ignorant or deceived clearly leads to a kind of vanguardism whose result is an even greater separation from society. But is everything that is real—including people’s concrete and lived experience—necessarily wise? Social experience is neither uniform nor unmediated. It can contain democratic and egalitarian demands alongside expectations of foreign intervention and authoritarian tendencies. By what method can the Left take social experience seriously without reducing it to “false consciousness,” while also avoiding the opposite error of automatically treating all the diverse and contradictory desires within society as political truth?
Lived experience does not, by itself, tell us what is politically right or emancipatory. But it gives us evidence through which we can ask how people’s accounts of their own experience are formed, what contradictions they contain, and what they reveal about the political conditions of their lives. If we dismiss this evidence as “false consciousness,” we lose puzzles that could help us understand society more clearly. Since the Green Movement—beginning when people chanted in the streets, “Not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life for Iran”—the distance between parts of society and the state’s regional policies has become increasingly visible. Parts of the Left interpreted this slogan and similar ones as expressions of nativism or hostility toward Palestine. That reaction itself showed how far they had moved from the material concerns and aspirations of protesting sectors of society. In the years that followed, criticism of nuclear policy and of the costs of the “Axis of Resistance” widened that distance. Protesting sectors of society became increasingly conscious of the costs and dangers of these policies and placed greater emphasis on national development and improving people’s lives. Parts of the Left and the reformist current were unable to move with this transformation in society, and the gap between them and protesting sectors widened. I think this gap was one of the factors that allowed the right-wing opposition and monarchist current to gain greater traction in Iran’s political space. And yet, for more than eight years, many analysts have explained the growth of monarchism simply as the result of its supporters being deceived by Manoto TV or Iran International. In other words, they defined their political Other as someone who had been manipulated. As a result, the collective emotions, narratives, and social divisions behind this tendency were never seriously examined. Later, when some of these same people faced the state’s weapons during the January protests, they were called “fascists” and “far right.” Those labels demonstrated greater loyalty to the earlier analysis than any genuine attempt to understand the transformations taking place within society. This way of thinking has done enormous damage to our political space.
This inability to understand social change takes a more specific form within the anti-imperialist Left. This current usually assumes that protesters are geopolitically naive and that they do not understand the violence of the American and Israeli states as well as commentators who often live in the United States or Europe, far removed from sanctions and the danger of war. It therefore assumes that protesters cannot even recognize their own interests. It is as though one side consists of “gullible natives,” while the other consists of anti-imperialists who imagine themselves to possess the correct understanding of international relations. That is why slogans invoking Pahlavi are either reduced to evidence of manipulation by foreign media or dismissed as naive nostalgia. During the January protests, when the internet shutdown had made independent verification almost impossible, some commentators within this current immediately attributed the uprising to Mossad or CIA infiltration. Some even reconstructed unverified reports in ways that made state violence appear to be an unavoidable response to foreign interference. Within this framework, Iranians count as political actors only when their words and actions conform to a pre-established theory of resistance to imperialism. The right-wing opposition appears, on the surface, to show greater solidarity with the street and the prison. But it generally treats whatever protesters say at a particular moment as a transparent and unmediated statement of political truth. Slogans invoking Reza Pahlavi, for example, are simply interpreted as direct support for the restoration of the monarchy. This current then treats monarchism as the only authentic voice of society and portrays its political opponents as people trapped in the past, referring to them through the derogatory term “fifty-seveners”—a reference to 1357 in the Iranian calendar, the year of the 1979 Revolution. Parts of this current recognize protesters as political actors only once demands for gender justice, ethnic rights, or labor rights have been stripped of their more radical content and absorbed into a unified opposition to the state. Kurdish demands for linguistic rights, for example, are treated as threats to national unity. At the same time, many in this current have placed their hopes in a U.S. president who threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age,” spoke of changing the country’s borders after a war, and promised attacks on infrastructure that would devastate everyday life and the environment. And this is the important point: although these two camps disagree fiercely on many questions, both ultimately place the United States at the center and push Iranian society’s own political voice to the margins.
So how do we move beyond this impasse? I think it requires sustained collaboration among different communities of knowledge production. Critical scholarship in Persian remains marginalized, both because of state repression and because linguistic and institutional barriers prevent much of it from entering English-language debates. Persian-language journalists and human rights activists also do indispensable work, often at serious personal risk. Without their documentation, much of this information would be extremely difficult—or simply impossible—to gather. But documentation produced while a movement is still taking shape cannot, by itself, explain what political critiques and aspirations, what languages and imaginaries, and what forms of belonging are emerging. What we need is an ongoing encounter and conversation among all these different forms of knowledge, alongside the archive of political expression produced by society itself. And this encounter cannot remain confined to the university. It must transform the frameworks through which we understand, interpret, and judge political movements in Iran as they are taking shape.
Despite the internet shutdown after the January protests, and despite all the attempts to control what emerged from Iran, those protests left behind a rich archive of political expression, documented and circulated by journalists, protesters, activists, and human rights organizations. I began a preliminary examination of this archive in a three-part series titled “The Morgue Is Karbala” (Part I, Part II, and Part III). Some analysts describe these protests as nothing more than an eruption of anger or a riot. For me, too, this archive offered an important lesson: precisely where some saw nothing but anger, manipulation, false consciousness, or the far right, there was a great deal to see and to learn. What the archive shows is that inherited religious and political languages—the same languages the state has appropriated to justify its own violence—have lost much of their former authority. Many people no longer want to speak in a language the state uses to enact violence. But that does not mean these languages have simply been abandoned. The January archive shows the opposite. People are taking these languages out of the state’s possession, displacing them, and reconstructing them. One way this reconstruction occurs is through a kind of multiplication: the multiplication of the sacred time and geography of resistance. Karbala is no longer only the name of a single historical place. It moves to the morgue, the graveyard, the street, the prison—to every place where a protester has been killed. Ashura is no longer confined to one date on the religious calendar. Every date on which the state kills someone, every day of mourning, becomes another Ashura. Because inherited words can no longer carry the weight of grief and refusal on their own, the body takes on part of the work of political expression—through rhythm, clapping, dancing, ululation, ritual mourning, and other forms of grief. These movements cannot be reduced to a single narrative of “joyous mourning.” At the same funeral, a body may move directly from dancing into ritual self-striking, or from ululation into wailing, collapsing, and falling to the ground. These movements do not arise from an abundance of possibilities for political expression. They emerge from what one grieving father called “absolute poverty.” And yet political language and practices of mourning are becoming richer and more plural at the same time. Protesters and families seeking justice draw on songs in Mazandarani, Kurdish, and Luri, on popular music and protest rap, and on mourning traditions from different regions. Through these forms, mourning becomes a political act that crosses lines of difference and creates new forms of collective belonging without erasing differences of gender, language, ethnicity, and region.
Zamaneh: Many labor activists, political prisoners, and civil-society activists in Iran believe that the Left must be able to confront foreign domination and domestic authoritarianism simultaneously—a position sometimes described as a “third way.” What theoretical foundations, organizational conditions, and forms of social and political relations within Iran and beyond it are needed for this position—which receives little support from governments or mainstream media on either side of the confrontation between the Islamic Republic and the West—to consolidate itself and shape political developments?
For decades, the policy the state has pursued in the name of “resistance” has led not to liberation, but to war, sanctions, and economic crisis. That is why many protesters no longer see the state’s nuclear and regional policies as separate from corruption, repression, and the crisis of everyday life. What has emerged from these struggles is a demand for a different form of governance—one based on accountability and national development rather than geopolitical confrontation and permanent crisis. The theoretical starting point is that the struggle against foreign domination and the struggle against domestic authoritarianism should not be treated as two separate or competing projects. A slogan raised by labor activists after the twelve-day war expresses this very clearly: “Ballistic missiles and nuclear enrichment are not our choice; enriching our lives is our inalienable right.” This slogan does more than articulate a different set of priorities. It challenges the very distinction according to which one can support the state’s policy of “resistance” against foreign powers while simultaneously opposing its domestic corruption and repression.
Under current conditions, it is not even clear how this distinction is supposed to function in practice. At least the part of the state that holds decision-making power is simultaneously executing protesters—that is, carrying out violence inside Iran—and insisting on continued confrontation with the United States—that is, continuing war and the policy of “resistance.” The same part of the state presents agreement or compromise with the United States as retreat and organizes demonstrations calling for revenge and escalation. Under these conditions, supporting the state in its confrontation with foreign powers does not necessarily mean opposing war. In practice, it may amount to supporting a policy that prolongs both crisis and war. Nor can opposition to domestic repression be postponed to some undefined future. In practice, this position calls state-organized demonstrations demanding revenge and escalation “resistance,” while marginalizing retirees protesting poverty and war and prisoners striking against executions. It is not clear why the former should be taken seriously while the latter are set aside for the time being. This position is therefore not only politically incoherent. It also destroys the trust of precisely those people whose rights and interests the Left claims to defend. For this reason, ending the war, reducing regional confrontation, and abandoning policies that contribute to the continuation of sanctions can themselves become anti-imperialist demands. Such demands can limit both the capacity of the United States and its allies to exert pressure on Iranian society and the state’s capacity to govern through permanent crisis. These changes would not necessarily make the state more democratic. But they could weaken part of the mechanism through which foreign pressure and domestic authoritarianism reinforce one another. That, in turn, could create more space for society to pursue its demands.
Different struggles in Iran are already producing a shared political language. Every Tuesday, political and non-political prisoners across the country stage strikes against executions, sustaining a form of collective resistance within one of the state’s most tightly controlled institutions. Retirees also gather every Sunday in several cities around pensions, healthcare, war, economic crisis, imprisonment, and execution. They chant: “Livelihood, dignity, and free healthcare are our inalienable rights.” This slogan rewrites the state slogan “Nuclear energy is our inalienable right.” Like the labor activists’ slogan, it redirects the language of national rights away from the state’s strategic projects and toward the actual conditions of people’s lives. Through repetition, these actions produce continuity, a shared language, and networks of collective activity. Those who claim that Iranian society lacks political or organizational capacity are often looking only for visible, centralized institutions and overlooking these less visible forms of organization.
Organizing in Iran is extremely costly and can provoke severe repression. It is therefore not enough simply to say that society needs to organize more, as though the only obstacle were a lack of political will. The question is how to support the networks and practices that already exist without exposing those working inside Iran to even greater danger. Political activity outside Iran can also be necessary and effective, but it does not automatically represent society inside the country. Parts of the opposition created expectations of safety and imminent victory that led protesters during the January 2026 protests to underestimate the danger of state violence. I should add that this is different from saying the protesters were simply deceived. Their reasons for protesting were their own. What was misleading were the expectations of safety and imminent victory created around them. The issue is the responsibility of those who produced these narratives, not a denial of the protesters’ capacity to act as political subjects. By contrast, parts of the anti-imperialist Left accepted the state’s narrative of “infiltration” and questioned the political legitimacy of protesters before attempting to understand the demands and contradictions of the protests. In both cases, people inside Iran paid the price for narratives produced largely outside the country. The relationship between inside and outside is therefore neither neutral nor naturally representative of society inside Iran.
A “third way” cannot be designed abstractly outside Iran and then exported to Iranian society. If this position is to acquire political meaning and force, it must emerge from existing struggles, from the political languages society itself produces, and from an ongoing relationship between activists inside and outside the country. Those living outside Iran have greater freedom to organize, but the concerns, priorities, questions, and political imaginaries inside and outside are not necessarily the same. Political activity abroad can contribute through reporting, analysis, translation, amplifying struggles inside Iran, and building solidarity. But it must remain in sustained and critical dialogue with those struggles. It cannot assume that its own narrative is a transparent and unmediated reflection of people’s experience inside the country. It must also remain accountable for how its claims shape public understandings of those struggles, political expectations, and assessments of risk. This position, then, is not a ready-made or predesigned “third way.” It is a form of political practice that criticizes foreign domination without dismissing as naive or illegitimate society’s experience of the entanglement between domestic authoritarianism and the state’s policy of “resistance.”
Zamaneh: You see normalization of relations with the United States as, for many Iranians, a way of disarming the language of “permanent emergency” and returning to ordinary life. What political guarantees and forms of social action are needed for normalization genuinely to reduce repression and open democratic possibilities, rather than simply rearranging relations of power, opening markets, or creating a new form of dependency?
Normalization should not be confused with democratization. Normalization, on its own, will neither bring political freedom nor put an end to authoritarian rule. But that does not make it unimportant. Over several decades, the Islamic Republic has built a regional network known as the “Axis of Resistance,” while simultaneously pursuing a nuclear policy that Israel regards as a threat to its survival and that Israel and the United States have used to justify intense pressure and military action. As Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh wrote in an open letter to Ali Akbar Velayati: “You turned the Arab-Israeli war into an Iran-Israel war.” In other words, a confrontation that was supposed—at least according to the official narrative—to guarantee Iran’s security ultimately brought war into Iran itself and imposed its costs on society. Even Hamzeh Safavi, the son of Yahya Rahim Safavi, has questioned the argument of nuclear deterrence. He has said that uranium enriched to 60 percent failed to deter an attack on Iran and that we should ask whether this very policy was itself one of the factors that exposed Iran to attack. The global order is clearly unequal. But recognizing this inequality does not mean Iranian society should have to pay twice: once for the state’s policies and again for the war that emerged from this confrontation—particularly while the state responds to street protesters with extreme violence and uses execution to spread fear and punish dissent.
The question, then, is why society’s demand for an end to the state’s politics of crisis remained marginal for so long, despite being voiced repeatedly across two decades of protest. Parts of the reformist and anti-imperialist currents generally attempted both to support the Islamic Republic’s confrontation with imperial powers and to criticize its domestic repression. Within this framework, the Islamic Republic’s confrontation with foreign powers was treated as necessary and legitimate, while domestic repression was treated as a separate question and as a consequence of that confrontation. As a result, any demand to end the confrontation itself could only be heard as surrender or geopolitical naivety. Other currents within the opposition moved beyond reform after the 2009 Green Movement and concluded that another revolution was necessary, but they arrived at the same dead end by a different route. Their political energy was directed more toward regime change than toward amplifying society’s demands for changes in the state’s nuclear and regional policies. One camp defended the state’s role in the confrontation. The other made overthrowing the state its principal objective, and part of it even aligned itself with powers in conflict with the Islamic Republic. Neither camp recognized or amplified protesters’ demand to end the confrontation itself as a serious political demand.
Even the state’s own narrative now complicates the idea of a unified project of “resistance.” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has acknowledged that infiltration networks within the state passed sensitive information to foreign intelligence services and has said that these networks continue to influence political decision-making. Public debate, meanwhile, contains two equally confident predictions about the future. One side says today’s ruling establishment is younger and more pragmatic than the previous generation, prioritizes the national interest, and is no longer committed to the revolutionary ideals of earlier generations. The other argues, with equal certainty, that the Islamic Republic’s ideological and institutional commitments to the Axis of Resistance have created an institutional configuration that makes such a transformation impossible. Neither claim rests on sufficient evidence. What Araghchi’s remarks demonstrate with greater certainty is that real conflict and competition exist within the state. At the very least, we can say that the meaning of “resistance,” the national interest, and the possibility of normalization are contested even within the establishment itself. The doubts protesters have raised for years about whether these policies genuinely serve the national interest can no longer simply be dismissed as geopolitical naivety.
If normalization takes place, it should become the starting point for political demands on the state, not their conclusion. Lifting sanctions and opening the economy may alleviate some existing crises, but without public oversight they may ultimately do little more than redistribute resources and power among institutions and networks. The question is how normalization can become an opening for expanding rights, accountability, and public demands rather than simply another mechanism for consolidating power. If demands emerging from society have taken this long even to be recognized as political arguments, perhaps the first thing we need to reconsider is our own method. Political thought should begin with the concepts and analyses that emerge from social experience and collective struggle rather than translating them back into inherited frameworks or abstract theories of imperialism.
But what concepts can Iran’s experience contribute to our understanding of politics beyond Iran itself? To my mind, one possible answer concerns how we see and produce political knowledge. The ways different political currents have responded to the struggles of Iranian society show that theoretical frameworks and languages of solidarity—even when used with the intention of defending people—can filter those very people’s voices or interpret them in advance.
One habit among parts of the Left in Europe and North America is to look for resistance precisely where theory has already instructed them to find it: in states and movements that use anti-American or anti-Israeli language. In this way of seeing, reality is examined not in order to test concepts, but in order to find examples that confirm existing theories. As a result, solidarity with the opponents of these governments can sometimes take the place of any serious attempt to understand those actors’ own political thought and political projects. A state or movement need only target the “right” enemy to be recognized as resistance, without anyone asking what conception of freedom, equality, or collective life it actually offers. When the social experience of a group contradicts these formulations—when Iranian protesters, for example, understand policies pursued in the name of “resistance” not as a path toward liberation but as sources of poverty, corruption, repression, and crisis—that experience should force theory to reconsider itself. In practice, however, the opposite often happens, and their suffering is reduced to the unavoidable cost of the struggle against imperialism.
The same experience also draws our attention to another danger within certain forms of liberal solidarity. These currents may recognize the repression of marginalized groups by governments despised in the West and express solidarity with them. But they may also detach those groups’ experiences and political languages from their own historical and social contexts and insert them into a ready-made, Eurocentric narrative of freedom, progress, and Western superiority. Their voices are then heard only insofar as they conform to that narrative, while their critiques of war, sanctions, foreign intervention, coups, or the limitations of the liberal order may be ignored. This Eurocentric perspective is sometimes unwilling to take seriously the political thought and language emerging from the experiences of teachers, retirees, political prisoners, and even people imprisoned for ordinary criminal offenses in Iran. They are seen primarily as victims who need to be rescued, rather than as people who are themselves thinking about justice and the forms collective life might take.
These patterns are not produced only outside Iran. Iranians living in Europe and North America may, because of their geographical location and political culture, participate in or be influenced by these circles. Analysts and political activists inside Iran can also reproduce the ready-made frameworks of both currents.
The Woman, Life, Freedom movement offers a clear example of how two different approaches can follow separate paths while still understanding Iranian society through the West. Part of the anti-imperialist Left could not simply dismiss a movement centered on gender justice. It therefore accepted the movement and, unlike in some earlier protests, did not attribute it to Mossad or the CIA. But in attempting to counter anti-Iranian racism and the narrative of “Iranian exceptionalism”—the idea that Iran is an exceptionally terrible place for women—some commentators equated Iranian women’s struggles with those of women in the United States. It was said, for example, that Iranian women, like American women fighting for abortion rights, were struggling for control over their own bodies. The intention behind this comparison was understandable. But the result was that Iran was once again explained through American experience and American political language, while the movement’s own history and distinctive features were pushed to the margins. In liberal narratives, by contrast, the movement was often presented as the result of young Iranians gaining access to social media and supposedly becoming liberal through that access. But this explanation did not tell us why a generation that had supposedly become liberal simply through social media would take to the streets knowing that it faced imprisonment, massacre, and even execution. There is no comparable example of this degree of risk-taking among young people in the West itself. The more important question was what political culture and inheritance this protesting generation in Iran carried with it, what understanding it had developed of freedom, gender justice, and the right to choose, and how it was transforming what it had inherited from the past.
These two responses had different motivations. One took the West as its model. The other was concerned about reproducing racism and imperial narratives. But both arrived at a similar result: Iran was transformed either into a version of the United States or into a student that had learned freedom from the West. In both cases, rather than being treated as a producer of political thought, Iran became an object used to confirm narratives developed elsewhere.
For all their differences, these two approaches share a common danger: they turn society from a producer of political thought into the raw material for a narrative whose meaning and destination have already been decided. Perhaps that is the most important conclusion of this conversation. The point is not to romanticize society’s voice of protest, to accept it as an unmediated truth, or to speak on society’s behalf. The point is to remain in sustained and critical conversation with the political thought society itself produces—and to allow that thought to transform our own concepts and frameworks as well.
