The War on Iran: A Conversation

On Monday, April 6, Boston Review convened a panel of four distinguished scholars—Peyman Jafari, Ali Kadivar, Manijeh Moradian, and Naghmeh Sohrabi—to discuss the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, moderated by Alex Shams.

Watch the event above or on YouTube here. The following transcript has not been fully edited; it may contain errors.

Alex Shams:Hello and thank you to everyone for joining us. More than 3,500 people have been killed in Iran since this unprovoked war of aggression began, and nearly 1,500 in Lebanon as well. All of us on this panel have loved ones in the region, and I just want to start by acknowledging that this is a very difficult time.

As with the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, both Trump and Netanyahu have invoked vaguely preemptive rationales in response to unspecified imminent and existential threats from Iran, but this time, the war propaganda has gotten far less buy-in than it did twenty years ago. Congress has not specifically authorized the use of force, as it did with Iraq, and polls show that most Americans think the war should end and that it was wrong to use military force against Iran. We’ve seen both the United States and Israel give changing and inconsistent explanations of the goals, from regime change to the incapacitation of Iran’s navy and nuclear program, with no clarity about an endgame and apparent surprise that the Iranian government hasn’t fallen. Trump and Hegseth have suggested a four- to six-week conflict, clearly in a desperate attempt not to appear too hypocritical after their own earlier statements criticizing undefined wars, including in Iraq. But now there is vague talk of a possible ground invasion as the United States sends more troops to the region. Israel, meanwhile, has stated its intention to occupy southern Lebanon indefinitely with U.S. support. I thought we could start by getting everyone’s perspective on the politics and geopolitics of this war. What’s going on? How should we understand the aims and interests of the United States and Israel right now? What might we expect to happen in the coming weeks? Ali, you’ve been writing a lot on these questions. Perhaps you can start us off.

Ali Kadivar:Thank you for having me. It’s an honor and pleasure to be on this panel speaking about this difficult topic. The war we are observing now is a part of the broader patterns of wars in Iranian history. Starting in the nineteenth century, we see important wars in which Iran has been invaded, and many of them have led to territorial loss or other forms of loss. The wars in the early nineteenth century start with the Russo-Persian Wars, two major wars in the early nineteenth century leading to the territorial loss of the whole Caucasus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkmenistan. Then there were wars with Britain, which did not have borders with Iran, but it was the major global power in that period—similar to the United States right now—which led to the independence of Afghanistan. Then we come to World War I and World War II. Iran was neutral, but it was occupied. Then we have the 1953 coup, which was not a war, but it was sponsored by CIA and intelligence services. Then the Iran-Iraq War, the June war with the United States and Israel, and the current war.

These wars have been very significant in shaping Iran’s political trajectories, shaping different political projects and Iranian society. Any Iranian that has lived in the nineteenth and twentieth century, if they have lived at least forty years, they have witnessed two major wars in their lifetime. I was born under the Iran-Iraq War, and I have memories of bombs being dropped, missiles hitting cities, running into shelters. I have a little injury in my head, it’s not a big one, but this is part of our lives unfortunately. These wars have shaped political projects in Iran, in the sense that each serious political project has had to respond to how to defend Iran, how to defend Iranian sovereignty. The wars have made the fate of these political projects. They have crushed some of these political projects, and they have given birth to some new projects. They have undermined some projects, and they have consolidated some projects.

The Constitutional Revolution was one of these major projects in the nineteenth century. The response to the territorial loss for Iranian intelligentsia is that we can’t be strong in our external response unless we transform the political order, adopt a constitution, parliament, and rule of law. This is a nationalist and democratic response. But this collapses under, again, external pressure, majorly World War I, and then we have the rise of Pahlavi and Reza Shah. This is a different political project. It takes the modernization of constitutionalism, but puts aside the parliament and rule of law with personalization of power. But this project also collapses during the occupation of Iran in 1941, and again, when it happens under Mohammad Reza Shah, it falls from within facing the 1979 revolution. Third comes the Islamist project, which is not democratic, it’s authoritarian, but it’s populist in the sense that it relies on mass mobilization. It’s a religious ideology that builds on Twelver Shi’ism. It was born in response to events such as 1953 and previous invasions of Iran, and the Iran-Iraq War helps this project to consolidate. What we are observing currently in this war is that, again, the Islamic Republic is going back to its setting that was emerging and consolidating in the 1980s, in the sense that there is more militarized politics, hardline elites with a siege mentality, suppression of civil society, and increasing arrests and executions.

Manijeh Moradian:Thank you, Alex, for inviting me. It’s an honor to be among my esteemed colleagues in this really horrible moment. I think what’s going on, maybe to take it from a different angle, is the United States and Israel have carried out genocide in Gaza, and they’re seizing on this opportunity to try to assert control over the region through any amount of violence that they can get away with. They committed war crimes in Gaza, and they’re committing war crimes in Iran. Carpet bombing cities is a war crime. Bombing civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Trump is obviously threatening to carry out even more war crimes, very brazenly and openly. And I think the point here is that the United States and Israel want to normalize this. They want the world to accept that this is the way it is. They can get away with it. They can do whatever they want. And I think one thing that we really have to talk about is, how do we reject this normalization? How do we refuse it? How do we interrupt it?

I think that there’s a highly unequal power struggle going on between the United States and Israel on the one hand, and the Iranian government on the other. And the Iranian people are paying the price. I just want to take a moment and say, as university professors, I think we have to really condemn the U.S.-Israeli bombing of Sharif University. This is such an important site. They’re saying this university is involved in research for defense and military contracts. Like every American university? As we well know, these universities are also sites of contestation over knowledge production, over what knowledge should be produced and what it should be for. Sharif University in particular has a very important role to play in that battle of ideas and over the political future of Iran. It’s particularly devastating to see that outrageous attack. But again, we know they’ve destroyed every university in Gaza. In many ways, this is a continuation. They’ve bombed hospitals, schools, vaccine factories, steel factories, petrochemical complexes, thousands of residential buildings.

Many Iranians have been trying for a very long time to make change. The narrative that Ali gave us of foreign intervention and how that has constrained and shaped different projects of resistance and state-making and society, that is so important. Over the last several decades, we’ve seen, in one form or another, Iranians trying to make their society better, to make it less repressive, more equal, more livable. Protests, whether for reforms or for a different form of government altogether, have been met with intense state violence. Israel, the United States, and Iranian monarchists have swarmed like vultures to feed off the despair and the desperation and helplessness that became widespread in Iran after the unprecedented scale of the crackdown on protesters in January. There’s this word in Farsi, estesal, that is the word of the moment, despair. But despair can be mobilized to many different political ends, and unfortunately, the most right-wing reactionary forces have been able to capitalize off and exploit this despair. People on the ground, having risen up over and over again, and very recently, in January, been slaughtered, experiencing a moment of devastating defeat, are now being subjected to carpet bombing, the destruction of everything needed to live and to organize. At the same time, the Iranian government continues to hold thousands of political prisoners, to carry out executions of protesters and to heavily surveil the population.

I think what makes this so challenging and devastating is that Iranian people are the targets of imperial war crimes and ongoing systematic human rights violations by their own government. I know I’m not alone in being very, very worried. It could be about to get much, much worse, quite frankly, if Trump makes good on his barbaric and maniacal threats.

Peyman Jafari:Thank you, Alex, for bringing us together during these difficult times. I will be brief, not to repeat my colleagues. I think we have seen different rationales given for this war exactly because making the real reason explicit would have been very unhinged, even for Netanyahu and President Trump. At the end of the day, from the Israeli perspective, it is really about eliminating any obstacle to its long-term project, which is the subjugation of the Palestinians. So this really starts from 1948, its invasion of Egypt in 1956 with Britain and France, and then the 1967 war and 1973 war. Those were secular-nationalist projects. It had nothing to do with political Islam, Islamism. I think we have to be clear about it, that this is really about any form of obstacle in blocking Israel’s project, and President Netanyahu has subscribed to the Greater Israel plan. I think that’s the Israeli side of it, and for the United States, obviously, Israel has always been an outpost of the American empire in the Middle East, exactly because of the agency of ordinary people in the Middle East, whether they are Egyptians, Iranians, Iraqis. At the end of the day, they could be a danger when they rise up for democracy, for social equality, toppling those autocratic regimes. But if you have one state that is solely dependent on the American empire, that gives you some kind of assurance about its power projection in the in the region. This is also about, therefore, resurrecting American empire. We Iranians always think it is all about us, but I really think it has to do with the imperial anxieties of the American elite.

Therefore, the messaging has not been only to Iran that we will crush you, we will use enormous amounts of violence, as he has been saying, we will send you back to the Stone Age where you belong. The messaging has been also to Europeans, to the allies: you will be disciplined. The Belgian Prime Minister two months ago in London said, it is one thing to be miserable slaves. It’s another thing to be happy vassals. So that is what the Europeans want to be, and the United States is making clear: this is the imperial hierarchy. We want to keep the United States on the top and then Europeans, and also signal to Russia and China that the United States is still the biggest military power. If its economic position has declined, the United States can compensate through sheer military power.

Naghmeh Sohrabi:I’m not going to repeat what my colleagues have said, but what I will add, which kind of pulls everything together, is that in many ways, this was a foreseeable event. Iran’s response to what happened was foreseeable. I know I have said it in the past several decades. I know my colleagues here have said it. By the way, thank you for having me. But the reason I say that is, you asked us, Alex, about the United States and Israel, but there is also the Iranian Islamic Republic that Manijeh talked about in terms of what it’s doing to its own population. There are three powers in this moment that we’re in. It was absolutely foreseeable, because the primary objective, as we have all been saying, of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is the survival of the system.

Ali drew a historical line, and I’m always really happy when my political scientist friends start thinking about history, and he’s absolutely correct in many of the ways he drew the line, but I would say there’s a difference between this war and those moments that Ali brought up. One of the main differences is that if you think about the way the war is being fought, this is unlike the Iran-Iraq War, when the Iraqis were in Iranian territory, boots on the ground, and in the first two years of the war, the Iranians were pushing the Iraqis back. This is not that moment. This is much closer to the middle of that war, which was a war of attrition, and Iran was continuing that war despite the fact that there was proposals for that war to end much earlier than eight years. This is because of something that my colleagues have already said, particularly Ali, which is that there are political projects connected to continuing this war.

This is where the predictability of Iran’s reaction to what has happened comes in. We have seen it use war to expand its own political project, to make itself more stable and to continue to brutalize its own population. This is no different from that, because if you think about it genuinely, Iran does not control its own airspace. When we talk about Iran fighting, and I know my colleagues, especially my progressive colleagues, sometimes say Iran is resisting. I’m not saying it’s not, but this is the system resisting. This is the system fighting. The country is being bombarded as we speak, literally right now. The Iranian government cannot and will not do anything to control that. What it is doing is lighting the region on fire in reaction to everything that my colleague said as a way to keep itself going. I think we need to keep that in mind when we’re thinking about, what are the various powers that have made this regional moment happen?

Shams:Thanks very much for that and for all of those interventions. Everyone on the panel today has at some point written about the distortions and misrepresentations of Iranian history and society in U.S. media and culture. For the whole group, again, I’m wondering if we could each share an example along these lines that feels particularly relevant to understanding the current moment. If you could correct one major misunderstanding about Iran, what would it be?

Jafari:Thank you for that question. I think for me, the biggest misconception has been this talk about the inevitability of this war, that everything had to lead to this because of Iran’s domestic and foreign policies, which are obviously very problematic if you think about the domestic politics of authoritarianism and repression, and foreign politics of projecting power in the region, the support for Assad in Syria, very problematic indeed. But I think the problem is that we have to understand that these policies did not emerge in a geopolitical and historical vacuum, that actually international politics very much shaped these issues and foreclosed alternative paths and developments. I will just give one example, because we have to think about these moments where change was possible. I think there is a huge underestimation of the 2001 and 2003 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, during which there was a reform project in Iran, which was being undermined by the conservatives. I think that kind of perception of threat in Iran really foreclosed that development and made it much harder for Iranian civil society to fight back and organize because of the militarization of Iranian politics.

Externally, everybody is talking about the axis of resistance. It is important to realize where that word comes from. It was invented to counter the axis of evil, the President Bush speech in which he included Iran in that axis of evil, and promised to target Iran after Iraq. That also aligned Iran with allies like the Iraqi militias, Hezbollah, and so on to consolidate that axis of resistance. Iranians have been fighting for democracy on their own, and I think these foreign interventions have made that harder and not easier.

Moradian:There are so many misunderstandings. If I have to only correct one, the misunderstanding I want to talk about is that the only way to oppose imperialist war is to support the Islamic Republic because it’s anti-imperialist. This is still a discourse that circulates on the left in the United States and other parts of the world. I just want to take it head on. It feels like one of the many elephants in the room. Iranians should obviously not be forced to choose between obliteration by the most powerful foreign militaries in the world and submission to a violent authoritarian state. What I want to offer as a correction is that anti-imperialism as it’s been practiced and preached by the Islamic Republic as a tool for shoring up its power and crushing internal dissent, has done great damage by severing anti-imperialism from the ideas of freedom and justice that were once its animating force. I think we urgently need an alternative.

My argument is that we need a feminist approach to opposing genocide and war. I think there’s a misconception that feminism is a Western invention, when in fact, different forms of feminist politics arise from lived experiences and material conditions of oppression all over the world. Yes, there can be right-wing, pro-war uses of feminism. We see those, unfortunately, and we need to counter those with an anti-imperialist feminism, with the kinds of anti-imperialist feminisms that have emerged in Iran, Palestine, Iraq, and really all over the global south over the past several decades. This is not actually a new thing. I think third world or Global South feminists have long had to theorize and organize at the intersection of post-colonial authoritarianism and the relentless pressures of imperialism.

In the context of Iran, a feminist analysis, I think, can account for the ways that imperialist aggression through sanctions and war have exacerbated domestic repression and enriched a ruling oligarchy at the expense of everyone else, and justified violent crackdowns in the name of national security. Feminists have long explained that there’s more than one source of oppression in the world, and that bears down on the same people, the same bodies and lives and futures, and that it’s both possible and necessary to refuse all of the structures of militarism, patriarchy, and domination imposed from above. To wrap up, I think anti-imperialism without feminism can easily collapse into support for authoritarianism, but I think feminism without anti-imperialism becomes cheerleading for empire. The record of Iranian history is very clear. There can be no freedom or democracy under the boot of empire.

Finally, I think we have to clear up the misconception among many Iranians that anti-imperialism means viewing them as pawns in a geopolitical game with no concern for their suffering at the hands of their own government and no solidarity with their aspirations for a more democratic society. We need to reclaim anti-imperialism from the Islamic Republic and refashion it into a feminist anti-war framework. Anti-imperialism has to once again become bound to the preservation and defense of life against the logics of mass death, wherever they come from. And I think that was really the spirit of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. One of my biggest concerns right now is that that not be left to die under the bubble.

Sohrabi:I guess for me, the biggest misunderstanding that has led us to the moment we’re in is this undying idea that Iran is a totalitarian state that has been the same for forty-seven years. Year two, it was a totalitarian state that’s been the same for two years; year forty-seven is a totalitarian state that stayed the same for forty-seven years. I think it’s one of the most dangerous frameworks, and that it allowed for the war to happen when it did and how it did. I think it’s rather obvious, but I’ll just say a couple of words why I think this is the most important misunderstanding.

Iran is not a totalitarian state. It never has been. It’s an authoritarian state. Those are very different things, and the most important difference between them is that in an authoritarian state, as my colleagues have already talked about, actually what Manijeh just said is an important part of this. There is space for people to claw space for themselves, to claw for their own rights. People love to talk about civil society activism and all that. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about, there is space for people to come up with new ideas. The Iranian intellectual scene, which is what I’m interested in right at this moment, and platforming it, is full of people, even at this moment, as the bombs are falling, trying to come up with ways to be in dialogue with each other and come up with new ideas for when the bombs stop falling. That is the number one part. That’s the totalitarian part.

The part about “it’s been the same for forty-seven years” is premised on this idea that as long as you have clerics in charge, or you have an Islamic Republic, or a theocracy, whatever you want to call it, it is always going to be the same, i.e., it is always going to be top-down brutality. The Iranian political system changed from its first decade, which was under the war, to the period of reconstruction under Rafsanjani; it gave birth to the Reform Movement, which is absolutely, in terms of every single measure that you have, a different experience of being in Iran; a different system of governance, a different economic system, different sense of press, different ways in which people interacted with the state, different ways in which the state exhibited its violence towards its population. Yet, every time there was an election, and all of us would be brought out to be pundits for it, every response we got is, it makes no difference if people vote or not, because this is not a free and fair electoral system, and the only time that votes matter is a free and fair electoral system. That is absolutely not true, and we try to argue that, but it never actually entered the discourse of the U.S. government, in particular how it would talk about the Islamic Republic. You get to a point, which is three years after the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, in which the idea is to get rid of Ali Khamenei, and somehow the system is supposed to collapse. It didn’t, and it wouldn’t have.

Kadivar:In terms of foreign policy or the exterior actions of Islamic Republic, the major idea is that Iran is the biggest sponsor of terror in the world and the major source of instability in the region. My response is not to say the opposite is true, no. The Islamic Republic has engaged in destabilizing acts. One of the worst things they have done was supporting Bashar al-Assad in Syria, engaging in the civil war in Syria. In Iraq, they fought with ISIS, but they also terrorized some of the Sunni communities. Nonetheless, Iran is not the only actor in the Middle East with dirty hands. Probably the biggest source of instability in the region is the United States itself. The major case in point is invasion of Iraq, which led to waves of wars and civil wars. Iraq is currently in this war. The wars that started in 2003 still continue. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed during the different waves of violence that followed. ISIS emerged in the context of the power vacuum in Iraq.

Israel is another Middle Eastern actor known as the only democracy in the region, the most moral army in the world, which has been engaged in ongoing genocide in Palestine, which now has been expanded to Lebanon. The UAE, which we know as a close ally and the best part of the Middle East, when the orientalist tropes are not true, has its hands in the bloody civil war in Sudan. Saudi Arabia was bombing Yemen and starving Yemenis for a while a few years ago. Turkey was supporting Sunni extremist groups in Syria, which now former fighter Ahmed al-Sharaa has become president of Syria. The issue is not that Iran has been a source of instability. The issue is that Iran has pursued a different regional order than the United States. It’s not necessarily a better order or worse order. Both orders have been authoritarian. They have been exclusive, and they have been violent to those that are not defined to be included.

Another thing that is mentioned is Iran uses proxies, as if this is the invention of the Islamic Republic. I’d like to remind the readers or audience of a movie they probably have seen or heard of, Lawrence of Arabia, which we don’t think of as a proxy war. Basically, what Britain did to bring down the Ottoman Empire was to work with Arabs there, with others in Balkan Russia, with Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The United States has done proxy work. The Contras in Nicaragua, the Taliban itself, and all the Mujahideen in Afghanistan that the United States paid to fight with Afghanistan. So yes, Iran has used this policy of working through proxies, but it did not invent it. It did not start in 1979. It’s a practice that both imperial actors and regional actors have been using, and we should understand the problem of the Middle East as a region. It’s just too simplistic to say that everyone is doing good and there’s just one actor that is destabilizing everything. It just doesn’t add up.

Shams:Thank you all for those responses. I think that was a really great set of stereotypes and misconceptions, and also a really nice deconstruction of what’s wrong with them. I want to turn now to what’s happening on the ground in Iran. Naghmeh, you’ve been translating articles by Iranian intellectuals and cultural figures on your blog, These Are the True Things, as well as for Boston Review. Can you tell us about that project? What are you hearing these days? How are people in Iran experiencing this war right now?

Sohrabi:Thanks. I’ll talk a little bit about the project, and then I’ll answer the second part. The idea for this came out primarily because of my own shortcomings, which is, I noticed that I was treating Iran basically like a primary source. I wasn’t engaging with the ideas that were coming out of Iran, I was engaging with the raw information. I would read the texts, and then I would incorporate the text into my own writings. I started thinking about, why are we not treating the analyses that are coming out of Iran on a par with our own analyses, particularly since those analyses are based on the lived experience of the people there? I think lived experience actually qualitatively changes the kind of analyses that people can have. I started translating them after that day. That basically is how the project started, and it’s primarily analyses, but for example, today, somebody reached out to me. I don’t know this person, but I know them through people, and they just gave me a letter that they had written, and they just wanted to be heard. And it’s this beautiful, heartbreaking letter. This is the second reason why I wanted to do this. She not publishing it anywhere else. This is not published somewhere and then I translated it, she just wanted to be heard, and I do think when you’re in a situation in which people in the region are right now, having pathways just to be heard, even if the world is doing nothing to stop the bombs from falling, matters. And so that was it.

What I’m hearing, I’ll mention two things. One is something that Manijeh actually started her first comment on, which is a lot of the Iranian intellectuals—and here intellectuals is a very huge idea. It’s artists and writers and journalists and teachers and all these kinds of people. The main thing that people are grappling with is what Manijeh just said, which is the notion of estesal. Estesal means desperation, but it’s actually a lot deeper. And in this particular case, estesal also has a very specific historical meaning. It has existed, but it really came to the fore as a word after the Twelve-Day War, and then it became a problematic to deal with on a societal and political level after the killings of January. That is the one thing that I’m very interested in, and the people that I follow and I translate are. The reason they’re very interested is because they’re thinking past the war. They know this war is going to end. They know there’s going to be death and destruction. What they’re saying is that we need to treat this sense of desperation that led so many members of our own population to initially support this war and maybe even continue to support this war, because they were like, ‘we are so desperate, we just want the government gone.’ We need to deal with this head-on as a political issue and find a way not to just have political dialogue, but also have dialogue within our families, because a lot of families have been torn up over this. That’s the number one thing that I’m hearing and I’m very interested in.

The second thing is that, again, it’s already been mentioned, but it’s very much present in the writings that I read and translate, which is this notion that you can actually chew and walk at the same time. You can be simultaneously against the Islamic Republic and against this war. It is just befuddling to me why so many of us who are not under constant bombardment outside feel we have to pick one of these things over the other when the people who are actually experiencing the violence that has been going on not since February 28 but before that in January, and before that, in December, when the dollar fell, and before that during the Twelve-Day War, and before that during Woman, Life, Freedom, are absolutely capable of saying that being anti-war is not a dependent variable on the Islamic Republic’s actions and that we are going to be both at the same time. It behooves us to learn and do that simultaneously.

Shams:Now, I think that’s actually a perfect transition to the next question, which is directed to Peyman. You’ve written extensively about social and worker movements in Iran. Could you walk us through what was happening before this war, especially the protest movements on the ground, and broadly how things have unfolded since the end of the U.S.-Israeli attack last June?

Jafari:As you know, protests in Iran are nothing new from the last forty-seven years and of course, before that. Iran has a rich history of social movements and struggles, and we have now seen multiple waves of protests emerge during these last four decades around political, social, cultural, economic, and ecological grievances. And sometimes these issues have actually overlapped and converged into movements. Just to give a schematic overview, I would say we can distinguish between three manifestations of protests. First, there have been workplace-oriented protests around contracts, because, as we know, neoliberalization in Iran has meant that many workers are dependent on temporary contracts now, on low wages, pensions, basic living costs. The involved groups vary from teachers, truck drivers, workers in large industries such as the steel and oil industries, and retirees, of course, that have been constantly on the streets in the last few years. This has really been a permanent feature of Iran.

Crucially, I would say this kind of labor activism has involved some important organization. If you think about main organizations that have actually, for instance, come out recently against the Islamic Republic, but also against the war, because of the experience that Naghmeh was describing. They have experienced this kind of repression and the violence of the war. We have the teachers’ union explicitly take a position against the war, the bus drivers’ union of Tehran, the Haft Tappeh Sugarcane factory. Esmail Bakhshi has been one of their leaders. Haft Tappeh is in southern Iran, in Khuzestan. He has been very vocal in the last few weeks against the war, as somebody who has actually led this protest and has been kind of at the receiving end of this repression by the Islamic Republic. And we have dozens of networks of retirees.

A second manifestation has been more through social movements and activists outside and beyond the workplace, being active around issues such as gender equality, environmental degradation, and academic freedom, like the student movement, for instance. Thirdly, street protests, in which some of these issues have converged in political revolts and have targeted the political system as such. We can go back to the 2017 and early 2018 protests that were triggered by an inflation hike. In early 2009, they were triggered by a fuel price hike. And, of course, in fall 2022, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, which was very much converging many of these issues. And in January, of course, the mass protests that were triggered by the devaluation of the rial and the rising inflation and unfortunately, the thousands of deaths.

There is so much to say about each of these dynamics and their interactions, but let me highlight one specific issue that has shaped all three in ways that undermines their transformative potential. That is the issue of external threat in the form of sanctions and war, to which I already alluded. The economic sanctions have really exacerbated corruption, mismanagement, and social inequalities, this triggering several revolts. At the same time, they have, in many ways, empowered and strengthened the political and military elites while undermining the organizational capacity of society. Therefore, I think there has been a lack of centering these kinds of social movements and revolts. This very much aligns with the estesal that was just discussed, that sense of frustration, but also not seeing a way out. I think we need to take that conversation very seriously and engage with it, because making references to these developments and the alternative paths is very important.

Take the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that has been so magnificent, but I think it has been sidelined, not only because of estesal, but because of a reactionary intentional politics that wants liberation from above instead of from below. During Woman, Life, Freedom, did we have the organizations and strategic thinking about what kind of small steps can be taken, what kind of slogans and demands could have been raised, that could have fractured the political elite and could have united the population around something that, while acknowledging that the goal is the fall of the Islamic Republic, what are the in-between steps that can, by bringing small victories, improve the self-confidence of the movement moving forward? Honestly, I don’t think these conversations were seriously taken up or raised, because there was the tendency of instrumentalizing these movements. Particularly the monarchists were instrumentalizing strikes for their own popularity, rather than actually thinking along and providing the leadership and the organization and the platforms to move these movements forward. So centering them is very important indeed.

Shams:I think that that’s a very important point, and also one that brings us to this next question, which takes us back to something that was mentioned a little bit earlier, but I think we’ve been touching upon in different ways, which is this question of Iranian support for the war. I’d love to discuss the broader picture of the global Iranian diaspora as part of this conversation. Many people around the world over the last month have seen videos of Iranians abroad dancing in celebration at the war. They’ve also seen countless photos and videos of Iranian civilians being killed on the ground. Meanwhile, Reza Pahlavi, the leader of the monarchists that Peyman just mentioned, who is the exiled son of the Shah, deposed in the Iranian revolution in 1979, has gained global visibility as he positions himself as a leader of the Iranian opposition. Manijeh, you’ve worked on the history of the diaspora, and especially the Iranian left; help us understand these different reactions at this moment.

Moradian:It’s been rough. The Iranian diaspora is deeply polarized. The loudest voices are the ones with money and access to mass media, so the sections of the diaspora that are committed to Zionist and monarchist ideologies have had the biggest platforms. Satellite TV stations like Iran International and Manoto, that are watched widely in the diaspora but also in Iran, have been perpetuating a kind of pro-war, pro-Israel, anti-Muslim, pro-Shah propaganda for a very long time, and because of the last year, from the June war and the massacres and everything, this propaganda gained a kind of traction inside Iran that it hadn’t before. It’s been horrible to see so many Iranians in diaspora in the grip of a right-wing frenzy, cheering for war. Some of this really has fascistic elements to it, I want to be clear, that are profoundly disturbing, truly frightening in their alignment with Trump and Netanyahu and callous disregard for the actual human beings in Iran. But I think that aside from these truly ideologically committed Zionists and monarchists and the MIGA (Make Iran Great Again) insanity, I think there’s actually an even larger swath of the diaspora that supports this war because they and their families have, in one way or another, suffered at the hands of the Islamic Republic. They support the war because they don’t want the Islamic Republic. So I think the key question again comes back to, how do we develop and circulate a political alternative that can respond to the real, legitimate grievances that people, in this case, in the diaspora, have against the Islamic Republic, and channel that anger and hopelessness away from support for imperialist war?

I think that there are people trying to do this. I happen to be connected to Feminists for Jina, which is a global network formed to support the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, and that has consistently opposed the U.S.-Israeli wars on Iran in June and now. We had a very long meeting yesterday trying to figure out how to keep raising our voices against war and state repression, how to organize more people to take action. And I think we’re not alone. I’ve seen many efforts in different registers to demand an immediate end to this war. I’ve seen petitions for ceasefire proposals in the UN. Some people may be critical of that, but people are trying. It’s one arena of struggle. Maybe it’s pointless. We’ve seen the whole world let the genocide in Gaza happen. But at the same time, silence doesn’t seem like a good thing either. I’ve seen various petitions. I’ve seen efforts to launch social media campaigns around war crimes that are that are gearing up. And almost every day, I get messages from Iranians and diaspora saying, what do we do? How do we organize? Can we have a teach-in? Who’s doing what? Connect me. I want to oppose this war.

There’s, in some ways, a big political opening for an anti-war movement that is responsive. The sheer scale of the destruction happening in Iran, I think, will push more and more of the diaspora to want to take a stand against it. But again, they don’t want to do this in a way that seems like support for the regime. I think the question is, how do we create the organizing spaces, the campaigns, the initiatives, online and on the ground, in the United States, which is the country that’s doing the bombing, where we can actually unite against this war, to bring people together while foregrounding an ethics of liberation and self-determination? I really think that’s our only hope of shifting the discourse and the sentiments in the diaspora away from these right-wing, really scary forces and towards something that can actually respond to the multiple crises that are threatening the future of Iranians.

Shams:I think that’s a great transition to the next question. I want to take us back into Iran and to the question of oil. Over the last month, a lot of the conversation has focused on the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s ability to shut it down and thus affect global oil markets, which appears to be Iran’s main strategy at this point in terms of spreading the pain globally. At the same time, the United States and Israel have attacked Iran’s oil installations, including in Asaluyeh, which hosted a major workers’ strike back in January. Peyman, could you tell us a little bit more about the role of oil in this conflict and the role of oil workers on the ground as well, who I think are so often forgotten in these discussions?

Jafari:Thank you for that question. Let me start with the oil workers, because I have studied the role of oil workers during the Iranian Revolution, and many of us know of the kind of pivotal role they played in bringing to success that revolution. But then, as Naghmeh was also pointing out, Iran has changed. There was repression during the 1980s, but there was this revival in the 1990s and actually the oil workers’ strike in 1997 played a great role in reviving the labor movement in Iran. Although that strike was repressed itself, it actually gave rise, for instance, to the emerging of the bus drivers’ union of Tehran. It really was a point of inspiration. Recently, in 2022, we saw workers in Asaluyeh and Mahshahr stage strikes in explicit solidarity with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Therefore it is more than ironic that these bombs that are supposed to bring liberation have been falling on Asaluyeh and Mahshahr, on the heads of people who were one of the first organized groups to actually take the risk and organize strikes in solidarity with that movement. Let’s not forget that. Both places have been bombed. Recently in the last day, in Mahshahr, more than five workers have died. Dozens have been taken to the hospital because of the toxic gases. And thousands of workers have lost their jobs, both in Asaluyeh in the gas and petrochemical industry, and in the steel factories of Ahvaz and Mahshahr.

These are impoverished communities, so this is really a huge impact on their life. And there are so many communities depending on them, like the bazaars in these cities. Therefore it is also important to understand the importance of the gas and petrochemical industry for the larger population. These are civilian economic infrastructures, and harming them harms the larger population. For instance, Asaluyeh processes the South Pars gas field, which delivers 70 percent of the consumption gas for the Iranian population. Iran has actually, in the last few decades, really invested in the petrochemical industry, because now it is responsible for 40 percent of its non-oil exports. It brings in revenue. It is a major source. Targeting them has really only one goal. It is the economic implosion of Iran. And I want to point to the dual-use argument that always comes here. It really goes against international law, because dual-use was actually introduced for protecting civilians. If there was an installation that was mainly military, but it had also civilian use, you should not attack it. But now they have reversed it. If something is really actually civilian, but it has some kind of military use to it too, it is not legitimate, so therefore it disregards proportionality. This is also about universities and other academic institutions.

Therefore, I think this war is mainly about bringing forward the economic implosion and social implosion of Iran, making post-war reconstruction really impossible, bringing Iran into a situation comparable not to Iraq in 2003 but to Iraq in 1991, actually imploding the country a decade of sanctions and misery until regime collapse ensues, either through military invention or otherwise. The main victims will be ordinary Iranians and the undermining of their democratic struggles.

Shams:The United States and Israel have recently bombed Iran’s main steel plants, speaking to exactly your point, and which seems to confirm this idea that the goal isn’t just to weaken the government, as you’re mentioning, but also to de-industrialize Iran more broadly. Ali, in your recent article on Substack entitled “The Factory Was Always the Target,” you describe how the United States has long sought to undermine Iran’s quest for industrial independence. How do you understand what we’re seeing today within this broader question of U.S. global dominance and the role of states like Iran that have positioned themselves outside that order?

Kadivar:What I did by zooming out and looking at these wars was going beyond the immediate reasons of the war—which are important. Each of these wars had its own particular context. But when we zoom out, we see what government was in power, what particular policies of those governments matter, in the sense that these wars happen frequently, and certain imperial policies were adopted by imperial powers. We can again see some patterns when we zoom out. You mentioned the bombing of Iran’s steel plants. It’s been now a few days that very intentionally Iranian infrastructure has been targeted. The steel plant is one of them, Pasteur Institute, where Iran produces its own vaccines, millions of doses of vaccines per year for domestic consumption, for export, other pharmaceutical factories. Sharif University was bombed today. What we are seeing is destruction of Iran’s industrial capacity, productive capacity, under the Islamic Republic. One rationale presented for the war is that this is to undermine the Revolutionary Guard. This is to undermine the Islamic Republic. This is because of Iran’s nuclear policy, so on and so forth. But the history of the steel plant is particularly revealing in in this case.

Iran’s first attempt to have its own steel plant was in the late 1930s under Reza Shah. It was part of his modernization programs, and he couldn’t get, he couldn’t get help from Britain or the United States which was a rising power. So he made a contract with Germans to build a steel plant in Karaj. They started working and bringing parts, but then Iran was occupied in 1941 because of sympathies, not even policies, for sympathies of Reza Shah with the Germans. They removed Reza Shah, he was deposed. His young son, Mohammad Reza Shah became Iran’s new king. A new political era started in Iran. At the same time, the Allies intercepted the parts of the factory on the sea. They did not let the building continue, even though the Germans were defeated, there was no German threat. There was also not a king, then, that would sympathize to the Germans, because Reza Shah was removed.

On this side, there has been a lot of talk about regime change. Trump and Netanyahu both spoke of regime change. Parts of the Iranian diaspora and parts of Iranians inside also have been cheering for regime change through foreign intervention. But we shouldn’t forget this already happened in Iran more than once. In 1921 Reza Shah rose to power through a coup that was supported by Britain. That’s the first one, at least. In 1941 we have the first occupation of the country, which led to the removal of the head of state, and they put in place a regime that they supported. They still didn’t support young Mohammad Reza Shah for his industrialization policies. Then came, in 1951, the premiership of Mohammed Mosaddegh, their secular Prime Minister, backed by different segments of the population. When he nationalized oil, we saw this similar response from the west. They put sanctions and embargos on Iranian oil. They also refused to provide technicians and parts for the Iranian oil industry that now Iranians wanted to run on their own. As I mentioned, Mosaddegh was toppled in 1953 and Shah was brought back, reinstalled. Now he’s very close with the West. He’s pretty much an American client, if you don’t say puppet. He posed no threat. Iran’s nuclear program also hadn’t started there. There was no Soviet threat, and so on and so forth. He again tried to pursue this industrialization policy, modernization policy. Two times, Iran requested a loan from World Bank and were turned down on technical issues or developmental issues or whatever. Iran had to go to the Soviet Union to get their support to build this industrial steel plant that was just bombed in Isfahan.

What connects all of this is that we see four different governments. Reza Shah’s government, which is a modernizing Shah with sympathies to Germany, but backed previously by Britain. Mohammad Reza Shah, backed by the United States again. Then we have Mosaddegh, who was a democratic, secular Prime Minister. And then we have the Islamic Republic. Four governments, different regimes, different ideologies, but the response from the West has been similar, not to support Iranian industrialization, and right now destroying Iran’s industrialization. And it’s not because it’s written in the western DNA or Iranian DNA that they cannot work together. I think it’s just part of geopolitics. The United States has been the top global hegemon, which does not support other countries becoming independent and building their own products and policies. What is Iran? Iran has certain geopolitical features. It’s sitting on vast resources of oil, of gas. It’s a large land. It’s a big population. It’s educated in terms of geopolitics, it has connections to the subcontinent, to Central Asia, to the Caucasus, to the Middle East. For these reasons, it has not been so far in the interest of the world’s top hegemon to support neither Iran’s political independence nor industrial or developmental independence.

Shams:Thank you. I think that was a really good summary of recent history, and the political and geopolitical aspects of that history and how they relate to the present. Now we’re reaching the end of our panel, and I want to end on a slightly different note. And I think this is a question that’s very dear to my own heart in these moments. As you all have described, Naghmeh most poignantly, this idea of estesal and hopelessness that’s really, really strong among Iranians today. It feels overpowering, and I think for a lot of people outside the country as well who are watching this catastrophe unfold, it really, really feels hopeless and overpowering. So my final question for everyone is, how are this war and the recent protests in Iran reshaping political opinion and mobilization? Where do you see alternatives to the darkness of the present emerging? And most importantly, where do you see reasons for hope in this moment? Let’s start with Naghmeh.

Sohrabi:I was thinking to myself, don’t start with me. I’m just going to be very honest. I’m heartbroken. I’m heartbroken because it did not have to be this way, for everything that’s already been said. It’s not that it was inevitable, as Peyman said, it’s you could predict how it was going to play out. My heart brokenness is not just for the over 3,500 people who have died. It’s for the 91 million who are living there and are scared at night. The whole country hasn’t slept for over a month. If you have not experienced what it feels like to have bombs constantly blow up, the fear is not that you’re going to die, because when you die, it’s over. The fear is that it’s fallen two streets down. That sound, if you’ve ever experienced it, you’re never going to forget it. You can never listen to fireworks. You can never have a door bang. As one of the people that I translated said, it lives in your body. I’m really going to claw at something like hope, because I’m something between anger and and heartbroken, and it’s not estesal because I don’t live in Iran. I think it’s going to be really dark when this war is over. I think it’s going to be dark economically. I think it’s going to be dark politically.

Already, the Islamic Republic has not stopped arresting people and it has not stopped executing protesters against its own protocols, which is, you have to have a year and a half of appeals over a month between the arrest and the execution. It’s been a month. It has disconnected the country from the World Wide Web, from the internet. And what that means is, actually, if you have the means, you can connect. It’s unclear actually, if they even want to connect the country anymore, because they have an internal web. And once again, a system that others have already talked about that is economically, a very unequal system, on a basic right like having internet access, it’s fallen already along those lines. If you have money, you can connect. If you don’t have money, you don’t connect.

My hope is because all these people who use the one second that they have to connect and send me a message, they haven’t given up hope. They are in a sense of estesal, but they are trying to think it through, and they want to talk to me about it. I want to talk to them about it, but I take my cue from them. I would like to curl up in a ball and not leave my bed, but I feel like it’s really disrespectful to people who actually are in that again, both bombardment and repression, who are just like, let me think this through. What do you think? How should we think about getting over estesal? How should we think about having some hope? How should we think about reforming the political system? My hope is the fact that they haven’t given up hope, and as long as they don’t, I’m not going to either.

Shams:Let’s go with Ali next.

Kadivar:I think one positive thing that may be coming out is a serious assessment of some of these recent political projects that have gained traction, the major one in Farsi is the politics of regime change. When we hear the law here in the United States, it has a counterpart in Iran as barandazi. It’s a project that prioritizes toppling of the Islamic Republic as the priority that overrides every other thing. It is based on anger and hatred. There are, of course, a lot of many reasons to hate the Islamic Republic and to be angry at it. We all are. But what this project sold is this type of politics without strategy, relying on geopolitical pressure and imperial intervention. It was sold as an easy project in different ways. In January, the easy idea was like, just come out in a few days, Trump will come. The regime will collapse. A plane will bring Reza Pahlavi back, and Iran will just become like before. We are in the era of AI, and there are a lot of videos created by AI that actually depict what I just narrated.

When it didn’t work out, the idea was just that the United States bombardment of Israel would kill Khamenei, and then everything would go. Now we are observing the destruction of infrastructure, and it is becoming clear that you cannot just order a nice and clean war that takes out just Khamenei and whoever you don’t like, and the political order changes. Now there is an understanding that these were all too simplistic. It’s a fantasy. It doesn’t work. Iranians are not connected to internet, so I still don’t know what the public idea would be. We hear voices from here and there, as Naghmeh has been translating, but we have to wait for public sphere to emerge again online to see how interactions would be. But we can have a hope that this type of delusional politics will go aside, and we can have some serious strategic thinking in terms of what do we want, but what are also our resources? What are the sources of power of the government, of the regime, and with all these three together, how can we have meaningful, small progress towards our goal?

Jafari:Yeah, these are times that is important to remain optimistic, but just like Naghmeh I find it very, very hard to be and we are all exhausted and heartbroken and feeling the pain of 91 million Iranians. It is also frustrating then to hear that we have to come up with solutions, right? Because I feel there is a bunch of pyromaniacs running around, setting the world on fire, and then we have to solve it. The question is, if not war, what is your solution? Our solution was impose crippling sanctions on Iran that will make the state only stronger, more authoritarian, and weaken the society. They did not listen. At every step, they set the world on fire. But nevertheless, I do think it is important to kind of try to create some agency. At this point, the positive issue in Iran is like the mutual aid, people helping each other and trying to survive practically, emotionally and all of that. I think those kinds of conversation and practical issues are providing some hope for what is possible.

On a more political level, I do think that it is also important to take anti-war activism very seriously and to organize it independently from the Islamic Republic, because that is a way of pushing forward an agency and confronting the Islamic Republic, very practically, in Iran and outside of Iran, going onto the street and saying, we are here. We are not with you, but we are against the war. They have two options. They either have to allow it or not, and then they will have debates and fractures in their own group if they don’t allow it, because they cannot pretend that they are anti-war. Even in the darkest time, I think we can come up with ways of creating a larger space. And I want to be realistic about that. That space is not very large, not because of our doing, because of people who have been taking away that agency. And for us outside of Iran, it is very important to understand that politics is always geographical. We have to speak truth to power. When President Trump and Netanyahu are violating human rights, international law, you name it, we have to stand up. When they are bombing Iranian universities, and I’m speaking because we are academics here, but at any level, we have to speak up. We have to organize.

Moradian:I agree with everything that’s been said. I just keep going back to the famous Gramsci quote, that we’re living in the time of monsters. The old world is dying, and the new one can’t yet be born, and it’s just producing fascism and war and genocide. I think hope has to be grounded in a sober assessment of how we got here, like people have been talking about, like Peyman was just saying, that it wasn’t inevitable. I think that feelings like estesal have a history to them. They have actually a historical materialist process by which they came into being as a dominant emotion of a society. It doesn’t just happen out of thin air. Embedded within that feeling is the lived experience people have been through, of being on the receiving end of everything. The sanctions, the internal repression. At any given moment, the Iranian government could have granted concessions. They didn’t have to put the reformist leaders under house arrest. They could have removed mandatory hijab, they could have redistributed wealth. They could have given people back wages. They could have, and they didn’t. They didn’t. They chose again and again, repression and violence, even when people had very concrete demands that were not regime change. One of the things that’s driving me crazy is the way regime change has become this overarching umbrella that means everything and nothing. This is a word from the neocon lexicon of imperialism, and the way that it got adopted by Iranians inside and outside the country as the way of talking about transforming that society has done a great disservice to any kind of independent self-determination, because it’s conflated the whole thing and helped the co-optation of the whole thing by imperialism. I think we have to not use regime change for talking about the desire of ordinary people for self-determination and transforming their own society. It’s a colonial term.

In order to have hope that’s grounded and real, we have to understand how we got here. And I have to give a shout out to the Jadaliyya dossier that Ida Nikou and I edited, which has seven essays that are really looking at, from different aspects, what are the different compound crises that are gripping Iranian society. It came out just before the war, but I think it’s still really important for understanding what people have been through and what this war comes on top of. What gives me any kind of hope at all is just that Iranians have been struggling for freedom for a very long time. This is a moment of defeat. This is a moment of defeat, but it doesn’t last forever. It doesn’t last forever. And the ways in which people interpret their feelings, the collective feelings that come from this lived experience, the meanings attached to those can change over time. That is why the battle of ideas, the discourse, the way that we talk, the concepts we use, actually matter. Because if we can’t name a thing, if we can’t imagine a thing, it’s very hard to organize for it. So here in diaspora, what is our job? I’m just going to repeat, we have to rebuild an anti-war movement that has an ethical, moral compass, that’s against imperialism and demands, lift the ban on the internet, free political prisoners, no death penalty. We can do these things. We can have an ethical, accountable, anti-war movement that puts the project of human liberation at its center. Because what is happening in Iran is about our collective future, politically, economically, and ecologically. That is the future that these fascists have in store for everybody you know. I think if there’s any hope, it’s that this has provided a new opening for rebuilding forms of international solidarity, internationalism from below, that can link our movements and our desires to find a path out of the nightmare that capitalism and imperialism have brought.

Shams:Thank you for sharing. I think those answers both had reasons for hope and reasons for despair, but I see this thread that links them, of this question of agency, of the importance of theorizing and understanding where we are and reshaping as well how we understand the present. I’ve heard some people, especially in the weeks leading up to the war, saying things in the Iranian diaspora, like we don’t have the comfort of theorizing. But I think, as we’ve all shared, people in Iran are themselves theorizing. They’re trying to understand the situation. They’re trying to figure out how we got here, where to go from here, and I think it’s crucially important, not just for the future of Iran, but also, as you point out, because this is something that connects Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and it’s something that could also reach every corner of the world. The moment we’re living in is one in which Trump is trying to do this to many other places. Netanyahu would love to continue doing what he’s doing in many more places. And we’re in this moment where suddenly it feels like these questions that we’re asking about Iran, Iran’s place, how we got here, are universally relevant and are extremely important. And the entire world is watching to see kind of what happens and where we go from here.

I want to thank you all for your contributions today, I want to thank you all for everything you shared, for adding to our ability to understand what’s happening in Iran and also remembering the alternative paths not taken, imagining different kinds of interactions between Iranians inside and outside of the country, based on liberation, feminism, anti-imperialism, and a historical memory of how we got here, and what has been overlooked, or what has been fit into paradigms that don’t fit with that liberatory feminist and anti-imperialist perspective that I think we all share, and how to imagine forms of mobilization that can move us beyond the prison of the present. I want to thank you all for your participation. Thank you to the audience for joining us. Just to close, I’d like to say, let’s hope this war ends soon. Thank you so much, everyone.

Peyman Jafari is Assistant Professor History and International Relations at William & Mary. A scholar of labor, oil, and revolution in Iran and the Middle East, he is author, most recently, of Class Formation and Re-formation in the Iranian Oil Industry, 1908–1978 (in Persian).

Ali Kadivar is Associate Professor of Sociology and International Studies at Boston College and a Fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. He is author of Popular Politics and the Path to Durable Democracy and writes the Popular Politics, Unbound newsletter on Substack.

Manijeh Moradian is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States and a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective.

Naghmeh Sohrabi is the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History and Director for Research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of Taken for Wonder: Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts from Iran to Europe and writes the These Are the True Things newsletter on Substack. For Boston Review she recently translated a war diary from the director of an art center in Tehran.

Alex Shams is a writer and anthropologist with a PhD from the University of Chicago and editor-in-chief of Ajam Media Collective. His latest contribution to Boston Review is an interview with Asef Bayat about the January 2026 protests in Iran.

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