Topic
Category: Opinion
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Dirty Purification in the Islamic Republic: Purity, Ummah, and Stain Immunity
How can the production of atrocity in Iran become politically possible—how can mass killing, dispossession, and extreme coercion be carried out, repeated, and defended…
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The Secret of Missing and Mutilated Bodies of Women Protesters: Women’s Bodies as a Statement
An opinion piece argues the state hides women protesters’ bodies to erase evidence—yet enforced disappearance deepens justice-seeking, from Kurdistan to all of Iran. The…
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The IRGC: State Terrorism at the Heart of the Islamic Republic
The EU’s designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization recasts the Islamic Republic as a system sustained by organized violence—and opens new legal…
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The Middle East Chessboard with Three Pieces: The King, the Queen, and the Tiptoeing Elephant
An Iran-based analyst compares Iran, the U.S., and Israel to chess pieces, arguing negotiations are unlikely to succeed and a large strike may follow,…
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Violence, Ambiguity, and the Engineering of Narratives in Iran’s Protests
Edward Said, in his book Orientalism, examines the decisive role of narratives in structures of power. In his view—particularly in the realm of media—power…
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Why the Islamic Republic of Iran Has Not Collapsed?
The Islamic Republic survives through ideological coalition-building, disciplined crisis management, propaganda, and coercion, exploiting religious authority and social fragmentation to outlast repeated shocks, protests,…
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Iran’s Political Capitalism and the Western Left’s Hesitation: How a Revolt Gets Filtered Through Ideology
Iran’s “political capitalism” fuses sovereignty and accumulation, fueling recurring revolts. Sanctions and repression create epistemic fog, while campism and “no-lever” activism mute Western-left solidarity…
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Turning Doctors into Partners in the State Narrative
Eleven days after the crackdown, Pezeshkian urged doctors to align with the official narrative and prioritize “calming” interventions—while hospital accounts describe systematic, targeted lethal…
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Blood-Soaked Maturity: Grief, Resistance, and Responsibility After the Mass Killings
After mass killings, this essay centers collective responsibility: rejecting reckless calls and war rhetoric by self-appointed leaders abroad, and turning grief into durable, life-protecting…
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Undeclared Martial Law in Tehran: Propaganda, Curfew, and the Architecture of Bloody Repression
Tehran and other cities face an undeclared curfew, coercion, darkness, and plainclothes repression—de facto martial law after a massacre—despite the regime’s normalization campaign. The…
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Iran’s Protest Cycles: Exclusion, Contention, and the Path to Anti-Discriminatory Politics
A compact way to read the last decade of Iranian protest waves is to treat them as the political expression of a specific accumulation…
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An Analysis of Slogans from the First Six Days of the Nationwide Dey 1404 Protests in Iran
Anti-regime slogans are composed of 65% targeting Khamenei/the Islamic Republic, 20% invoking Pahlavi, and 14% focused on economic demands—while democracy, organization, and “Woman, Life,…