The Mechanism of Turning Diplomacy into Religious Epic

While going through Telegram and Instagram, I notice that the texts I read tend to contain the same mechanism, namely, the negotiator sitting at the table, but no longer functioning as a negotiator. On the contrary, he appears as "a soldier," "a man of the field," "a field commander," and his coming to the negotiating table represents "an order to fight, only in another field." What we are facing here is a mechanism which is meant to transform politics into holy war unilaterally.

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Why Reza Shah Still Speaks to Iran’s Margins

Atatürk, Mohammed bin Salman, Hitler, and Reza Shah. In the time of the coronavirus, those who worked as service providers in Tehran were asked what could be done for the betterment of their conditions. And the thing most often mentioned was that there needed to be someone who would come and do things right. I was hearing Ali Moazami, a translator and researcher of political philosophy, give a speech at a book talk event held at the Damavand Bookshop in Tehran. What was being asked of him was rather straightforward. Does the middle class have a part to play in the emergence of authoritarian regimes? His response takes us from the recent history of Iran to places that the conventional narrative rarely goes: the peripheries of Tehran. Moazami starts off with "transitions" in the literature on politics. The major debate in this field from the 1980s has been about the processes through which an authoritarian regime evolves into a democratic state; however, as examples have begun to multiply, the process of moving from a parliamentary state to an authoritarian regime has gained equal importance. Examples include Bangladesh prior to its recent revolt. From this pendulum swing emerged a new notion.

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Anti-War, but From What Position?

Opposing bombing, sanctions and regime change imposed from abroad is the minimum political responsibility of anyone writing about Iran from inside a hostile country. But being anti-war does not have one fixed meaning, detached from where a person stands. For someone writing in the United States, the first responsibility is clear: stand against the war machine of their own government. That is the minimum, not the end of the discussion. For a citizen of a hostile state, being anti-war means saying no to bombing, sanctions and policies that turn the suffering of Iranian people into a “strategic cost.” But from the point of view of Iranian society, the same term takes on another meaning. Here, opposition to war cannot be separated from opposition to the Islamic Republic, militarism and the repression of workers, women, teachers and journalists. This is the problem with some anti-war analysis, both in the West and among the Iranian diaspora. These analysts see the US-Israeli war, as they should. But they leave out the society living under a security state. Iran is reduced to a foreign-policy issue: the Strait of Hormuz, oil, the Revolutionary Guards, deterrence and the regional order. Society only enters the picture to answer one question: how much does it support the state? Judging an entire society by whether an uprising is taking place is itself one of the cruellest ways of looking at people. Analysis becomes dangerous when the absence of protests, or the presence of crowds organised by the state, is presented as evidence of success against war and foreign intervention. What disappears from both narratives is Iranian society itself: a society that has spent years fighting the same government that geopolitical language now presents as the representative of “Iran.”

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Iran’s Workers and Pensioners After the War

On Sunday, June 14, 2026, pensioners from Shush, Karkheh and Haft-Tappeh, towns in Iran's southwestern Khuzestan province, again gathered outside the local Social Security office, demanding enforcement of Articles 54 and 96 of the Social Security Law and an end to the deductions taken for what the state calls "supplementary insurance." According to the labor news agency ILNA, the protest looked much as it had in previous weeks. It was not a new event but the continuation of one that has not stopped: a week earlier, pensioners had stood in heat above 45 degrees Celsius, and the week before that the same demand went up at the same hour in Shush, Tabriz and Rasht. These lines outside labor offices are the surface of a deeper rupture, one the spring's war accelerated by hollowing out the floor of the country's production. In early April 2026, the joint American and Israeli campaign moved beyond nuclear and military sites to strike the spine of the civilian economy. The pattern was deliberate: not only factories but their utility units, the plants that supply the power and steam without which a whole complex cannot run. According to Iranian economic outlets, petrochemical complexes in Mahshahr, Asaluyeh and elsewhere were hit, but the decisive blow fell on two utility hubs, Fajr Energy and Mobin Energy, in the Pars Special Economic Zone. The zone holds more than 60 percent of the country's petrochemical capacity, and once both went offline, output reportedly fell by more than 80 percent. Refineries at South Pars and on Lavan Island were struck, and in steel the country's two pillars, Mobarakeh and Khuzestan, were damaged. Various estimates put the cost near 270 billion dollars, a figure best treated as approximate. A blow to a utility hub does not stop at one plant. When power and steam are cut, the downstream workshops that depend on a complex's product fall idle too. The aim was not to destroy a single line but to break the chain.

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In Iran internet non è più un diritto, è merce di contrabbando. Il business miliardario di Starlink all'ombra del regime - Valigia Blu

Dopo 88 giorni di blackout in Iran, la rete torna ma è fragile e censurata. Starlink non è né un salvatore né semplicemente uno strumento di spionaggio. È il segno del punto in cui si incontrano censu...

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Migration, War, and the Dirty Work of Empire

Last night, I had a long discussion with an anarchist friend about the movement that today calls itself anti-imperialism. The result was this: I returned to a text I had written a few weeks ago and prepared it for my blog. The argument is simple. Europe produces deniability through distance. It places detention camps in Libya. It pays Khalifa Haftar because Haftar does the work Europe does not want to be seen doing. This is what “dirty work” means. The employer wants the result without paying the visible cost. The cost goes to a contractor. The contractor commits the violence. The employer escapes blame. In Libya, distance is geography. In the West of Asia, it is geopolitics. Friedrich Merz exposed this logic when he described Israeli attacks on Iran as “the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us.” The phrase named a system. Europe outsources border violence to Libya and Egypt. It outsources regional force to Israel. Then it speaks the language of order, security, and civilization. Part of the left repeats the same logic in reverse. Instead of fighting the arms factory, the weapons shipment, the deportation flight, and the border regime at home, it outsources anti-imperialism to the “Axis of Resistance,” in practice to the Islamic Republic. The Iranian worker, the Iranian woman, the protesting teacher, and the executed prisoner disappear from the frame. This is not solidarity from below. It is performance built on erasure. War and sanctions fall on Iranian wages, jobs, and daily life. The regime finances its “resistance” through hunger and silences society through prison. The worst part of being a left-wing political refugee from Iran is meeting this logic among those who were supposed to fight it.

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Komalah, Communism, and the Political History of Iranian Kurdistan

In a recent episode of Asraneh, Ebrahim Alizadeh, the First Secretary of Komalah, the Kurdistan Organization of the Communist Party of Iran, gave a long interview about the history of Komalah, the Iranian left, the Kurdish question, the formation of the Communist Party of Iran, the later splits, and the current political situation in Iran. The interview matters because it is not only a memory exercise. It is not just an older political figure going back over organizational history. For a non-Iranian and non-Kurdish audience, the conversation opens a window into a political history that is usually flattened from the outside. Iranian Kurdistan is often reduced to mountains, armed groups, borders, ethnic conflict, or geopolitical calculations. Alizadeh’s account gives a different picture: Kurdistan as a political society, as a space of left-wing organization, as a place where the relationship between class, national oppression, armed struggle, women’s liberation, social solidarity, and state repression was tested in practice.

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Internet, classe e censura in Iran - Valigia Blu

Quando in Iran Internet viene bloccato, rallentato, filtrato o diviso per classe, non è solo uno strumento di comunicazione a scomparire dalla portata pubblica. A essere interrotta è una parte importa...

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Ecocide in Tehran: When War Reaches the Air People Breathe

The issue is not simply the bombing of several oil depots. The real issue is that in modern wars, energy infrastructure is no longer just a military target. It has become the point where war, economy, environment, and everyday life intersect. When fuel storage facilities in Tehran, Rey, Shahran, Ghoochak, Fardis, and Alborz are attacked, it is not only gasoline, diesel, or natural gas that burns.

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Bread, Speech, and Prison: Remembering Sattar Beheshti on Workers’ Day

On International Workers’ Day, Goahar Eshghi, the mother of Sattar Beheshti, published a message addressed to workers in Iran. It is a short text, but it carries the weight of a whole political history: the history of a worker killed in custody, a mother turned into a public voice of justice, and a society where labor, poverty, censorship, and state violence are tied together. Sattar Beheshti was a 35-year-old worker and blogger from Robat Karim, near Tehran. He was arrested on 30 October 2012 by Iran’s cyber police, known as FATA, after writing critical posts online. A few days later, on 3 November 2012, he died in custody. His family was informed only afterward and was told to collect his body. Prisoners who had briefly seen him in Ward 350 of Evin Prison later said there were signs of torture on his body. Before his death, Sattar had reportedly written a complaint saying he had been beaten during interrogation. The official handling of the case followed a familiar pattern: denial, delay, limited admission, and finally a narrow legal punishment that avoided confronting the system itself. One police officer was later sentenced, but the case was reduced from what the family and many human rights groups considered torture leading to death into a much smaller legal matter. The state tried to turn a political crime into an individual excess. But Sattar’s death could not be contained in a court file. Goahar Eshghi refused to let it disappear.

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Bread, Freedom and Organisation: Esmail Bakhshi on Iran Today

Esmail Bakhshi is a well-known Iranian worker and labour activist. His name is mostly associated with the struggles of the Haft Tappeh sugarcane workers, the fight for independent workers’ organisation, and his own experience of prison, torture, dismissal from work, and resistance to repression. Over the past years, he has not been known as the spokesperson of a party or an outside political project, but as a voice from inside the working class; a voice speaking about poverty, repression, lack of rights, and the need for independent organisation. In this conversation, Bakhshi starts from something that has itself become one of the clearest signs of the situation in Iran today: the internet. He explains that just to take part in a simple online conversation, he had to rely on friends, a VPN, technical configurations, and a heavy cost. This is not just a technical problem. The point is that even the internet in Iran has become class-based. What should be a basic public means of communication, information, and dialogue has turned into a privilege for those who have money, contacts, tools, and special access. Workers, wage earners, families of prisoners, protesters, the unemployed, and the poor are not only pushed out of the streets and official media; they are also pushed out of the digital space. Internet shutdowns and control here are not only censorship. They are a new form of class repression. The main pillar of Bakhshi’s argument is that Iran today is under the weight of several crises at the same time: poverty, war, repression, unemployment, rising prices, the psychological collapse of society, and the hijacking of people’s protests. He calls war “absolute evil” and sharply rejects phrases like “humanitarian intervention.”

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National Wealth, Private Misery

When we talk about oil, the main issue is not always what we see at first glance. The usual question is this: under war, blockade, and disruption in maritime routes, how much oil can Iran still sell? But perhaps the more urgent question is this: how much of the oil it still produces can Iran actually store? This may sound like a technical difference, but it is decisive. If part of Iran’s oil had already left the danger zone before the escalation of war and blockade, and is now floating at sea in areas around Malacca, Malaysia, or Singapore, oil exports may not be completely frozen in the short term. For one or two months, there may still be some room for sale, transfer, or trade. But the real crisis is not necessarily where the markets and the media are looking. The main knot may form somewhere else: in the chain of production, storage, the arrival of empty tankers, port capacity, insurance, payment systems, and the return of foreign-currency revenue. An oil well is not like a water tap that can simply be turned off and then turned back on whenever needed. Oil production is a technical, expensive, and time-consuming process. If wells are shut down, bringing them back into production is not easy. It costs money, requires operations, takes time, and may make part of production capacity vulnerable. So production has to continue. But when production continues, the oil must be stored somewhere. This is where the issue of empty tankers becomes important. Under a naval blockade, the problem is not only whether full tankers can leave Iran. Sometimes the arrival of empty tankers near Kharg or Jask becomes even more important. Because if empty tankers cannot enter, storage is disrupted. If storage is disrupted, production comes under pressure. And if production comes under pressure, the oil export crisis turns from a sales problem into a crisis across the whole cycle of production, storage, and revenue. This is the point from which we need to understand a naval blockade more seriously. This is not just sanctions. It is not only economic pressure either. When the arrival of empty tankers, oil storage, exports, and the continuation of production are targeted, we are dealing with an act of war. It is an act that aims to lock the country’s economic and operational capacity from within. War here does not move only through missiles and bombs. It also moves through ports, insurance, tankers, payment delays, bank accounts, storage capacity, and the slow return of oil revenue.

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Iran’s Geopolitical Weight, and Its Political Trap

Iran’s place in the world cannot be understood only through the language of its ruling regime. It has to be read as a geopolitical unit positioned at one of the most sensitive crossroads of energy, trade, and security in West Asia. This matters because not all states occupy the same place in the global order. Some shape the rules. Some are forced to live under the protection of stronger powers. And some try to remain in between: not fully subordinate, but not powerful enough to dominate. Iran belongs to this third category. That in-between position gives Iran a real kind of weight. The Strait of Hormuz, its regional links, and its deterrent capacity mean it cannot simply be ignored or removed without consequences. The recent war made this very clear. Iran was not shown to be invincible, but it was shown to be costly to confront. At the same time, the war also exposed the limits of its position. Russia and China offered diplomatic backing, but not a military shield. This is the core contradiction of Iran’s place in the world: bargaining power without guaranteed protection, structural importance without stable hegemony. Iran is neither a global rule-maker nor a passive client. It is a regional power trying to survive, maneuver, and endure inside a deeply unequal world order.

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A Diaspora Misrepresented: Yasmine Mather on War and Media

The war against Iran has made it even harder to sustain the neat, one-dimensional image that many Persian-language and Western media outlets try to present of Iranians living abroad. In this dominant narrative, the “Iranian diaspora” is treated as if it naturally supports foreign intervention, the escalation of war, and even the destruction of Iran’s infrastructure. But according to Yasmine Mather, this image is not only false, it is deeply misleading. Yasmine Mather, a senior researcher at Oxford and editor of the online journal Weekly Worker, speaks about the political, social, and class divisions among Iranians abroad: the differences between monarchists, layers of former reformists who have shifted to the right, professional migrants, students, and refugees; and why pro-war voices get far more media attention than their real social weight deserves. She also discusses the role of Western and Persian-language media in amplifying these voices, and in the end, she looks at Donald Trump’s latest threats and the wider horizon of war.

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Inside Tehran, Under Bombs, Arguing About War and Power

One month after the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, a long conversation was recorded in Tehran between Sobhan Yahyaei, a media researcher and host of the Panorama podcast, and Mohammad Mehdi Ardabili, a philosopher and public intellectual. This was not just an abstract discussion. In the middle of the conversation, they say they could even be arrested for saying these things. The sound of explosions and air defense can be heard in the background. That alone gives the conversation a special weight. But its importance is not only about the conditions in which it was recorded. It matters because it brings up one of the central political questions in Iran today: when a country is under military attack, how should the relationship between opposition to foreign aggression and opposition to domestic despotism be understood? As the interviewer, Sobhan Yahyaei moves the discussion through ideas like homeland, war, responsibility, and everyday life under bombardment. Mohammad Mehdi Ardabili, known as a philosopher shaped by Hegel, continental philosophy, and theoretical debates on politics and suffering, tries to respond to the exceptional condition of war. He clearly says that he is sympathetic to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, that he does not deny the Islamic Republic’s repression, and that he does not defend domestic despotism. But from these same starting points, he reaches a conclusion that has both serious listeners and serious critics in Iran today: in wartime, priority must be given to resisting foreign aggression, even if that means temporarily suspending conflict with the Islamic Republic. This article is written neither to rush into condemning that position nor to defend it. The point is to understand what is actually being said in this conversation, why it sounds reasonable to part of Iranian society, and at the same time what limits and dangers this framework carries.

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Iran Beyond the Myth of a Unified People

One of the laziest clichés about Iran is the idea that a single, unified “people” are standing against a single, unified “regime.” This formula works well for headlines, for rushed journalism, and for simple moral commentary. But when it comes to understanding real politics, it is almost useless. Iranian society is not a homogeneous block. It is a field of conflict between opposing political projects. War, repression, the dead end of reform, the collapse of political legitimacy, and the memory of bloody uprisings did not create these divisions or invent them. They simply brought them back to the surface. This is exactly where the importance of Yashar Darolshafa’s essay begins. He is not merely trying to say that Iranian society is diverse. Everyone already knows that, and repeating it does not clarify much. His real point is something deeper: in today’s Iran, “the people” is not the name of a political unity. It is a site of struggle. Every political project creates its own people, names its own enemy, defines what costs are acceptable, and gives its own shape to the future. That is why the main question is no longer “what do the people want?” The real question is: which people, with what understanding of freedom, survival, justice, war, and change?

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Council of the Left: An Iranian Experiment

On 10 January 2026, a cluster of Iranian Marxist parties and organizations will gather in Stockholm under the banner of the “Council for Cooperation of Left and Communist Forces.” On paper it’s just another exile conference. In reality, it’s a rare attempt to weld together fragments of a socialist left that has been scattered by prison, executions, and forced migration, and to reconnect them to the living movements inside Iran. The council was born in 2018 with a bold claim: a socialist alternative to the Islamic Republic is not only necessary, it’s possible. Its parties call openly for the revolutionary overthrow of the regime, the dismantling of its military-clerical apparatus, and the establishment of a council-based workers’ democracy. Their language stands sharply apart from both the monarchist right and the “campist” currents that still excuse Tehran in the name of anti-imperialism. This Stockholm meeting takes place after years of nationwide uprisings – from the “Woman, Life, Freedom” revolt to thousands of labor strikes and the “Tuesdays against Execution” campaign in dozens of prisons. The question hanging over the conference is simple and difficult at once: can this exiled socialist bloc turn its slogans into a credible roadmap that speaks to the generation risking everything inside Iran?

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The War on Minds: Inside Regime’s Coordinated Arrests of Left Scholars

In the past 24 hours, security forces carried out coordinated raids on the homes of several left-wing researchers and translators in Tehran, arresting Parviz Sedaghat, Mahsa Asadollahnejad, and Shirin Karimi. They confiscated the belongings of Mohammad Maljoo and summoned him for questioning; the home of Heiman Rahimi was also searched, and he, too, was called in for “questions and answers.” Reports say the arrests were made without any charges being announced and involved sweeping seizures of laptops and books. The repression of the left in Iran has a long, well-documented history. From the Shah’s regime to the present, left-wing, justice-oriented, emancipatory ideas have been consistently crushed, with the security apparatus particularly fixated on blocking their growth in universities and the labor movement. Even so, this latest wave pushes the old pattern of targeting activists into a new phase: it now reaches people whose work had, until recently, been tacitly tolerated. Who are they, and what have they done to be detained?

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Political Maturity in an Age of Binaries

Ignorance is not harmless once it walks into the street. I learned that in 2004, watching Iranian football fans do a Nazi salute to German players, not out of ideology but out of emptiness — no history, no memory, no sense of what that gesture meant. Today I see a similar emptiness in parts of European solidarity with Palestine. Many people are sincere and right to oppose genocide, blockade, occupation. But around them there is a louder layer that repeats a second-hand story of “resistance” and ends up whitewashing a religious, authoritarian project. For people who have actually lived under clerical rule, Hamas is not a romantic underground — it’s religious fascism turned inward on its own society. The political illiteracy comes from confusing symbols with life. Flags replace civilians. Slogans replace women, workers, prisoners. Real solidarity is simpler and tougher: protect civilians unconditionally, end the blockade, stop settlement building, free prisoners and hostages — and at the same time draw a hard anti-fascist line. We can oppose Israeli state crimes and refuse to sanctify misogynistic, anti-union forces. That’s not a contradiction. That’s adulthood in politics.

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After Jina Amini: Bodies, Labor, and the Regime’s Social Defeat

After “Woman, Life, Freedom,” Iran’s hijab law has neither changed nor been repealed; yet in social reality the state has failed to enforce it effectively. The streets of Tehran and other cities now look less like scenes of discipline and more like a daily referendum: women without hijab or with diverse forms of dress move about, while the government wavers between tougher coercion and temporary retreat. In 2024, parliament pushed forward the “Chastity and Hijab Law,” but last winter an official said the process of issuing it had been halted and enforcement was “not possible for now.” This pause has laid bare political rifts. On one side, influential conservatives have openly said there is no “binding hijab law” in force; on the other, the bill’s designers and hardline media accuse the presidency and the speaker of parliament of “obstructing” the issuance. This intra-state tension is not just a matter of jurisprudence; it is a struggle over whether to accept the post-2022 social reality: the state can write laws, but it can no longer reproduce its previous hegemony over women’s bodies and dress. The struggle over hijab is not only about a headscarf; it is about the right to bodily autonomy, the right to move in the city, freedom from violence, and the right to work. The state has tried to build “effortless discipline” by harsher penalties and smart surveillance; society, through everyday disobedience, has created an alternative norm. For the regime, this is a “social defeat”: the instruments of coercion still operate, but they no longer reproduce the desired order. Today—with the law still on the books but enforcement on hold, with a police force that both patrols and retreats, and with a generation that no longer believes the official narrative—the state has lost on the hijab question, and beyond that, on the politics of the body.

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Panahi’s Cinema and the Art of Smuggling Truth

At an event held in honor of courageous, resilient cinema, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi and legendary director Martin Scorsese sat down for a deep conversation about obstacles, inspirations, and the power of film under extreme restrictions. The talk, in New York, gave Panahi space to speak about the roots of his passion and how a 20-year filmmaking ban pushed him toward new forms of storytelling. Panahi traced his stubbornness to a working-class childhood and a father’s command never to bow. When a 20-year ban tried to turn that command into silence, he answered with form: first the provocation of This Is Not a Film, then the street-level confession of Taxi. Half the labor, he says, is learning to think like a thief—moving sets, hiding rushes, trusting villagers, and letting humor disarm fear so the last blow of truth lands harder. The city he films has changed. After “Woman, Life, Freedom,” unveiled and veiled women stand side by side. He won’t recostume reality. Superstars who stood with the streets were faded out by censors; crews worked through threats; at Cannes, actresses went without hijab anyway. Exile remains a fact of Iranian cinema, but Panahi refuses it. He stays, betting on a new generation that will not accept any censorship. His latest ending is an eighteen-and-a-half-minute act of faith. It leaves one question hanging over the credits: will we carry this cycle of violence into tomorrow, or finally cut it?

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Iran’s New ‘Hijab Situation Room’ and the Failure of Control

On Friday, October 17, 2025, the secretary of Tehran province’s “Enjoining Good & Forbidding Wrong” headquarters, announced a new “Situation Room for Chastity & Hijab,” alongside the organization and activation of “more than 80,000 trained volunteers” plus 4,575 trainers and judicial auxiliaries (“zabet-e qazaei”). Officials framed it as a cultural-social campaign run with “cultural and security” bodies. This isn’t rumor; multiple Iranian outlets carried the remarks. Is this the morality police by another name? Not exactly—but it’s meant to do similar work through a different architecture. The “Setad” in question is a policy/coordination body that operates countrywide under the 2015 “Law on Supporting Enjoiners of Good & Forbidders of Wrong.” That law is very clear: verbal/written “enjoining” is for everyone, but any “practical” enforcement is the state’s job only. In other words, volunteers can't arrest, detain, or use force. At the same time, the statute allows designated auxiliaries—often trained via Basij and certified as “judicial officers”—to document, report, and trigger referrals that plug directly into police and prosecutors. The Setad itself doesn’t have police powers; it builds the pipeline. Expect coordinated reporting, documentation, and faster hand-offs to law enforcement, not vans dragging people away from the curb Why now? Because the regime is stuck between law on paper and a social reality it can’t reverse. After the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, compulsory hijab statutes were never repealed—but enforcement has been erratic and contested. In late 2024, the government publicly paused the new “Chastity & Hijab” bill’s issuance after inter-branch talks; Vice President Shahram Dabiri said parliament should not forward the law “for now,” and in May 2025 Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf disclosed a written instruction from the Supreme National Security Council telling parliament not to promulgate it. Translation: the text exists, but its activation is frozen at the highest security level. That pause has exposed rifts. Senior conservative Mohammad-Reza Bahonar bluntly argued the mandatory-hijab bill is “no longer legally enforceable”—a remarkable admission from a stalwart insider—while Judiciary spokespeople have insisted the underlying hijab rules still “remain in force.” The contradiction isn’t cosmetic; it reveals a stalemate where the state writes rules it can’t reproduce socially, and different power centers are improvising. Enter the new “Situation Room.” The regime is shifting from street-level confrontation (the classic morality-police model) to a hybrid of organized vigilantism, administrative punishment, and digital policing. Since 2023–24, authorities have revived patrols and layered on “smart” enforcement: mass CCTV, license-plate tracking, facial recognition at university gates, and a reporting app (NAZER) that lets officials and the public flag “violations” in cars and public transport; automated texts warn owners and lead to fines or impoundment. UN reporting this year confirms the pivot: drones, apps, and data streams now backstop hijab enforcement even as overt public compliance erodes. The “Noor Plan” in 2024 showed how quickly these levers can be switched on. Does any of this restore control on the ground? Not really. Tehran’s streets still look like a rolling referendum, with widespread non-compliance despite periodic crackdowns. That’s why officials are leaning into a governance model that tries to make discipline “ambient”: volunteers who warn and record; auxiliaries who file and escalate; cameras and apps that punish without the spectacle of arrests. It’s enforcement by paperwork and pixels, not by persuasion. Consider one emblematic knot: women and motorcycle licenses. Years ago, Iran’s Administrative Justice Court held there was no legal basis for denying women motorcycle licenses. Yet traffic police kept saying “the law” forbids it. Just last month, a former traffic-police deputy again admitted there’s no specific legal ban—only practice. This is the matrix at work: the law is silent, enforcement is rigid, rights are “possible,” access is blocked. The new “Situation Room” slots neatly into that administrative choke point Structural violence against women forms the wider backdrop. A January 2025 briefing by the Center for Human Rights in Iran documented a rise in femicides and the absence of comprehensive protective law—light sentences for “honor” killings, permissive statutes that empower male guardianship, and a weak shelter/aid system. Meanwhile, international monitors reported a spike in executions overall in 2024, including women—part of a broader climate of punitive coercion. Hijab enforcement sits inside that carceral landscape, not apart from it The economy underwrites the politics of the body. Female labor-force participation in 2024 was just 13.4% in Iran, versus 66.3% for men, per World Bank/ILO estimates—among the lowest globally. That’s not a “cultural preference”; it’s a policy outcome: family law, hiring practices, and precarious work that keep women dependent. A state that shouts “chastity” while refusing to guarantee equal access to jobs and job security merely reproduces the inequality it then disciplines through dress codes. So, what is going on? The authorities are trying to solve a legitimacy problem with logistics. The morality police (a police unit) still appear in waves, but they carry a high political cost and trigger backlash. The Setad-driven “Situation Room” promises something else: a bureaucratic-digital mesh that spreads responsibility outward (to “the people”), formalizes documentation (via auxiliaries), and automates penalties (via cameras/apps). Legally, volunteers cannot arrest you. Practically, they can surround you with a reporting system that gets you fined, flagged, or referred to a prosecutor—and that’s the point Two hard truths follow. First, the state has lost hegemony over women’s appearance in everyday life; the pause on the new law is a tacit acknowledgment of that defeat. Second, it’s compensating not by conceding rights, but by lowering the visibility of coercion and raising its efficiency—moving from truncheons to terminals. If you’re asking whether this is “the return of the morality police,” you’ll miss the redesign. The old vans never fully left; the new model turns everyone’s phone and every camera into the patrol. And a “Situation Room” in Tehran aims to keep that machine humming, even while parliament and the security council argue about the letter of the law. In short: no, this Setad is not, on paper, a police force. But it’s building the operating system that lets policing flow through society, and right now, that is the regime’s main bet to claw back control it can’t win in the streets.

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How Taghvai’s Cinema Teaches Us to Replace Paranoia with Practice

Nasser Taghvai, a renowned Iranian filmmaker and creator of enduring works, who for years resisted censorship and chose seclusion rather than making films under official policies, has passed away at 84. He was a pioneer of the Iranian New Wave and, at the same time, widely known to the public for his popular works. His legacy shaped my generation through “Captain Khorshid”—a creative adaptation of Hemingway—and the generation before mine through “My Uncle Napoleon.” In Iran, Nasser Taghvai’s work cuts through the fog of easy explanations. “My Uncle Napoleon” skewers the reflex to blame a hidden enemy for every bruise in public life. When institutions of truth and collective action are weak, paranoia becomes a shared language—and responsibility evaporates. “Captain Khorshid” answers with another language: practice. The captain navigates a borderland where legal paths are blocked, risk is shared, and choices are stubbornly gray. He balances loyalty, livelihood, and care, paying the price of each decision. That, not slogan or hero-worship, is the ethic we need. Today’s solidarity spaces—from Tehran to the diaspora—often inherit the Uncle’s mindset: single-cause stories that flatten local realities into geopolitical scripts. Taghvai points elsewhere. Organize many voices—workers, women, queers, ethnic and religious minorities—in the same room. Translate pain both ways, not just toward Western attention. Replace types with characters and metrics: what changed, for whom, by when? Standing on the desk, as in “Dead Poets Society,” is only the first move—changing the frame. The second is the captain’s move: translating the view into material action. Networks over heroes; outcomes over noise. That is how Iran moves past paranoia—by doing, together. Measure results, then repeat—quietly, persistently, with others, over time.

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