This dossier explores a crisis.
Israel’s twelve-day war on Iran in June 2025, carried out with the backing and participation of the United States, unfolded with startling intensity: aerial bombardments, drones, car bombs, and cyberattacks struck Iranian cities as regional actors and global powers recalibrated their positions in real time. Beyond its immediate destruction and geopolitical maneuvering, the war laid bare fault lines across different spheres of politics. For decades now, scholarship and commentary about Iran have been caught in familiar binaries—namely, reform versus revolution, state versus society, and nationalism versus imperialism. The June war exposed the fragility of inherited categories and the inadequacy of established frameworks. It produced a discursive shockwave, revealing the limits of these binaries more starkly than ever before. In the same breath, it posed urgent questions about how to think—and act—politically.
A crisis is not just a disaster; it is also a turning point.[i]
Modern Iranian history has been marked by upheaval—revolutionary overthrows and protracted wars—widely recognized as conventional markers of social transformation.[ii] These events are not just instances of devastation but opportunities for the reconstitution of political authority and collective life. An eight-year war with Iraq broke out in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Revolution, mixing a heightened sense of fear with hopes for revolutionary possibility. As in the 1980s, so too in the 2020s. The June 2025 war with Israel came on the heels of the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom uprising, once again thrusting Iranians into a state of intense uncertainty, where anxiety about devastation coexisted with fragile hopes for transformation. Confronted with existential threats, communities tend to retreat behind boundaries, distinguishing insiders from outsiders to preserve coherence and survival. As in the 1980s, so too in the 2020s. In Iran, categories like “revolutionary” and “counter-revolutionary,” “friend” and “enemy,” were not just political slogans but also everyday measures of belonging, shaping trust, solidarity, and criteria of exclusion.
We compiled the following dossier in search of a method attuned to the openings created by crises. Much of contemporary political theory treats modern revolutions and wars—particularly the nationalist sentiment and totalizing violence they engender—as separate from politics, instead defined as the capacity for deliberative speech and free thought.[iii] This dossier takes a different approach. Building on critical voices that question this separation in the study of revolution, we attend to forms of speech and thought developed in the midst of war.[iv] The dossier mines wisdom from uncertainty, attending to ideas expressed by people on the ground in Iran alongside Iranian commentators abroad. Likewise, it gestures at a welcome trend in knowledge production opposed to methodological nationalism, pervasive in prior studies of Iran.[v] In publishing with Jadaliyya, a platform that has consistently cultivated intra-regional dialogue and comparative reflection, we wish to invite discussion about the June war on Iran in relation to similar dynamics seen across neighboring Arab contexts.
The dossier is oriented around a digital archive compiled by Leili Adibfar. We present here an interview with Adibfar, who reflects on the ephemerality of wartime statements and the challenge of sustaining them as political memory. These reflections appear in conversation with Azam Khatam, who draws a conceptual map of patterns found across the archive’s contents. Adibfar marks a useful distinction between practices of curation and archival collection. Where curation assumes a coherent authorial vision, “shaped by the curator’s subjective engagements in interaction with institutional expectations or the particular demands of its context,” hers is a concerted effort at collection, designed to give “the archive a degree of objectivity, conditioned by the unpredictable dynamics of an ongoing event.”
Our own editorial efforts are closer to curation, our minimal objective to identify dynamics that may otherwise remain obscured and elaborate expertise developed in times of relative peace and stability. The dossier’s center piece is a roundtable conversation with Setareh Shohadaei, Peyman Jafari, Kaveh Ehsani, and Maziar Behrooz, in which we asked our interlocutors to analyze current events. The idea for the roundtable arose from a collective initiative, an anti-war statement signed by over 1700 scholars. That statement expressed a consensus view among over 20 scholars engaged in robust conversations during the war, tinged at times with disagreement; the roundtable is meant to display some of these internal debates and to consider the different motivations behind a point of consensus. The dossier’s final contribution is an article about anti-war mobilization and civil society practices in Iran. Acutely aware of the interpretive limitations facing scholars living and working outside of the country, we solicited reflections from Payam Roshanfekr, a sociologist based in Tehran and one of the principal organizers behind the Life Against War campaign. This relatively small initiative caught our attention because it indicated nascent possibilities for solidarity beyond the purview of nation-states.
Together, these contributions show how politics is not exhausted by formal arenas or the pretension of spectacular rupture but is instead forged in their interstices—somewhere between the immediacy of a crisis and the longue durée of historical experience, between state structures and social imaginaries, and, finally, between the local textures of struggle and their transnational resonances. A number of themes recur across the dossier’s component parts. The first concerns prospects for social change in Iran: how to think politically in a society haunted by the violence of a social revolution and taunted by the empty promises and long frustrations of reform, where resources and repertoires for change have been depleted, yet the search for alternatives continues. The second concerns civil society: how to bring it back in as analytic and practice after decades of repression, cooptation, and withdrawal, how to recognize the fragile but persistent seeds of mobilization that unsettle both statist and imperial logics. A third concerns Iran’s global entanglements: how to confront the overlapping forces of domestic authoritarianism, regional power struggles, and imperial war machinery, and how to navigate a politics that is at once national and transnational, inward-looking and outward-reaching.
The result is an editorial initiative that highlights some dynamics while leaving others aside, a product of selection, juxtaposition, and emphasis. This dossier is one fragment in a broader effort to understand the frictions, convergences, and silences that shape how war, resistance, and civil society in Iran are remembered. Our aim is to re-member—putting pieces together in ways that render some dynamics legible, amplify certain silences, and invite new forms of reflection where we encounter attempts at closure in response to revolution and war.
Reform, Revolution, and Political Deadlock
Few binaries have so powerfully structured Iranian politics as the opposition between reform and revolution. Since the late 1990s, reformism has been heralded as a “pragmatic” alternative to the upheavals of 1979, promising gradual change through electoral openings and institutional negotiation. Revolution, by contrast, was cast as rupture: a radical break that promised to reconstitute political order wholesale. In contemporary Iran, both poles came to appear as dead ends, haunted by legacies of violence and emptied of transformative promise.
For many, revolution remained a horizon foreclosed by the state’s repressive capacity and collective memories of the past. The violence of 1979 and its aftermath—purges, executions, war, and authoritarian consolidation—left deep scars. A society haunted by a recent revolution found it nearly impossible to imagine another without recalling the costs borne by generations past. Revolution persisted as fantasy and fear: desired by some, dreaded by many, and continually invoked by the state as a specter to discipline dissent. The state reduced revolution to a thing of the past to claim it and dismiss present-day aspirations for radical change as betrayals in contravention of the principle.
Reformism, meanwhile, squandered moral and political capital through cycles of promise and betrayal of its own. Beginning with the rise of Mohammad Khatami in the late 1990s, reformist currents promised gradual democratization within the framework of the Islamic Republic. Yet, each wave of reformist ascendancy—from the landslide elections of 1997 to the Green Movement of 2009, the renewed hopes surrounding Hassan Rouhani’s election in 2013, and most recently the victory of Masoud Pezeshkian in 2024—ended in disappointment, its energies depleted by repression from above and compromises from within. As Kaveh Ehsani notes in his contribution to the roundtable, even the paradoxical flexibility that once allowed the Islamic Republic to absorb and defuse crises through limited concessions seems to have vanished among today’s leaders. The standard repertoire of reforms—incremental liberalization, legal tweaks, and electoral openings—has grown threadbare, incapable of addressing structural injustices or sustaining mass hope. What was once a language of possibility has become a language of deferral, a politics of “wait and see” few still believe in.
In our view, the opposition between reform and revolution functions less as a roadmap for political practice than a trap. It channels dissent into recognizable forms only to foreclose other possibilities. Far from resolve the opposition, the June 2025 war re-inscribed it on new terms, intensifying a sense of deadlock.
At first, the war raised the prospect that either revolution or reform might regain traction. It emboldened calls for regime change among prospective revolutionaries, dazzled by the belief that external pressure could sufficiently fracture the state for it to be overthrown. Reformists, too, initially saw in the crisis an opportunity. Only a few months earlier, the election of Pezeshkian revived fragile hopes that gradual change through institutional channels remained possible. The devastation caused by Israeli and American bombardment was further proof that hardline obstruction to nuclear negotiations were a dead-end, and that economic sanctions and looming war would only be averted by strengthening the Reformists’ hand.
In practice, however, the war reinforced the futility of both revolution and reform. A combination of hardline obstruction and calls for “unity” in the face of external aggression suffocated reformist appeals.[vi] At the same time, mass protests never materialized, and the state’s repressive machinery remained firmly intact. Revolutionary slogans risked collapsing into militarized fantasies of “regime change,” amplified by outside powers eager to instrumentalize dissent.
What remains is not the “end” of politics but an exhaustion of its inherited grammars. This points to the need for a new vocabulary, attuned to the provisional, fragmentary, and situated practices that have emerged in recent years. Small acts of refusal and infrastructures of mutual care are not easily legible as reformist negotiation or revolutionary rupture. They are, however, the seeds of an alternative political grammar. In his contribution, Payam Roshanfekr describes this grammar as an “analytical orientation toward safeguarding life through practices of care.” Found in corners of Iranian civil society, it “reimagines social relations around collective well-being, treating vulnerability as a shared condition to be mobilized for justice.”
Civil Society, Beyond Resistance or Capture
Proponents of reform and revolution alike champion ‘the people’ as their favored protagonist—or, in social science terms, as agents of change. Scholars of post-revolutionary Iran are keen to gloss ‘the people’ [mardom] as civil society. The war revealed what should have been evident, but has been obscured in Iranian Studies—that civil society, like the figure of ‘the people,’ is neither unified nor singular. Civil society is a fragmented field of action that appears differently depending on where we look: as practices and infrastructures, as a repertoire of tactics, as an imagined horizon of political possibility.
For years, the language of civil society in Iranian Studies has oscillated between two poles. One analytical approach imagines civil society as the state’s direct antagonist—as that which stands outside and against the state, embodied in protest movements, feminist campaigns, labor mobilizations, student organizing, and cultural initiatives. Civil society’s every advance is measured by the state’s retreat, the latter’s every concession evidence of the people’s power. Another analytical approach treats civil society less like an adversary than a container of dissent: a set of institutions that absorb confrontation with the state, translate insurgent energies into reformist agendas, and, in doing so, blunt transformative horizons. As reform lost credibility, more researchers dismissed “actually existing” institutions—NGOs, unions, and professional associations—now considered ineffective, co-opted by, or even complicit in the reproduction of state power. Despair, thus, fueled abstract projections of civil society as an alternative to an all-encompassing state.
The postwar deadlock challenges both stories, to either romanticize civil society as the state’s opposite or dismiss it as captured. Both miss what Iranian civil society actually is and how it actually works.
Peyman Jafari’s contributions to this dossier help explain why “outside vs captured” is a misleading approach to Iranian civil society. Jafari situates authoritarian durability in the distinct nature of Iranian state-society entanglements. Mass mobilization during the 1979 revolution (and, we might add, the 1980s war) created a diffuse sense of political entitlement across broad strata. Subsequent claims on the state bind large sectors of the population to official institutions even as they demand freedom from them (from welfare and charitable networks to cultural associations).
To the extent that civil society is entangled with the state, it cannot be reduced purely and simply to opposition or co-optation. It is more aptly understood as a relational zone co-produced with state power, where agency takes ambivalent, negotiated forms. From this angle, civil society is not a singular, self-contained entity but polyphonic, comprised of multiple fragments.
To be sure, its polyphony strikes uneven chords. Fragments are subject to differing degrees of surveillance, control, and curtailment depending on their proximity to particular nodes of power. They are also unevenly recognized and showcased by virtue of their relationship to state institutions, nationalist agendas, or global circuits of publicity.
The June war heightened these asymmetries and brought them into sharper relief. At first glance, the war seemed to reinforce the poles of interpretation common to Iranian Studies. One strand, oriented toward global audiences, envisioned civil society as an entity standing apart from the state in attributing blame for the war to the state’s nuclear pursuits. Some voices in this register declined to condemn Israeli aggression, while others adopted what Setareh Shohadaei calls in her contribution a strategy of double condemnation—denouncing the Islamic Republic and Israel at once without regard to global hierarchies of power.
Another stratum of civil society—anchored in state-aligned institutions, public ceremonies, and nationalist discourses—trumpeted official calls for unity, sacrifice, and steadfastness. A not insubstantial portion of the Iranian populace, citizens in these spaces aligned themselves with the state’s nationalist-Islamist idiom as wartime nationalism surged. They embraced a “rally around the flag” effect meant to erase distinctions between state and nation, drawing equivalences between the Islamic Republic and Iran. Thus, civil society appeared to reinforce rather than contest the state.
Taken together, these hyper-visible fragments—one amplified by global circuits of recognition, the other embedded in national infrastructures of publicity—risk eclipsing other, more fragile grassroots infrastructures of care and refusal. During the June war, nascent collectives and campaigns emerged, drawing from practices and discourses that had long persisted beneath the radar. Some resembled earlier mutual aid networks from the popular mobilizations of the 1979 revolution and the eight-year war with Iraq, while others sought to redefine care and collectivity, experimenting with new forms of association and forging tentative political visions from acts of survival. The Life Against War campaign is one such fragment, thinly institutionalized yet dense with invention. Its opacity is a mode of survival and a politics in formation, stitching together infrastructures of endurance (food, medicine, legal aid), registers of voice (documentation, translation), and circuits of coordination (safe networks, digital hygiene).
These quieter formations promise an alternative, however faint, to the dead-ends of reformist negotiation or revolutionary rupture and, in turn, to limited horizons of analysis that view civil society through its more visible parts. These formations are not inherently emancipatory. They may subsequently align with, or be co-opted by, existing powers. They may be stifled and disappear altogether. Yet, attending to them alongside the more conspicuous strands of Iranian civil society allows us, as curators, to trace practices and orientations in the polyphony that would otherwise remain obscured.
Global Entanglements
The June war laid bare the depths to which Iranian political life—both its state projects and opposition to them—is entangled with imperial formations across the region. It forced a reckoning beyond recourse to formal diplomacy or military analysis, located instead in public expression where new vocabularies and affective registers took shape.
The most immediate effect was a surge in anti-Israel and anti-US sentiment, expressed through slogans long monopolized by the state and confined to official rallies. Slogans that once functioned primarily as regime property—signifiers of loyalty to the Islamic Republic—were taken up en masse as a language of critique directed outward, at Israel, the United States, and the imperial machinery of war. Their adoption and newfound circulation did not signal unqualified endorsement of the regime. Rather, the war unsettled symbolic boundaries between “state” and “society” by transforming the meaning of anti-Israel and anti-US idioms. What previously functioned as state property now traveled across constituencies, used by some to reinforce loyalty, by others to denounce imperial violence while opposing the regime, and still by others as an ambivalent register of survival. In some corners, resignification of familiar slogans permitted a dual critique of empire and state. Further still, it destabilized categories once used to police the distinction between US empire and the Iranian state.
Anti-Israel sentiment, we should note, is not the same as pro-Palestinian solidarity. The two are not interchangeable. Anti-Israel critique can align comfortably with nationalist logics: it identifies an external enemy while reaffirming a national “we.” Genuine solidarity with Palestine requires a transnational orientation—the ability to transcend immediate interests and to recognize how one’s fate is entangled with others confronting the same imperial machinery.
Notwithstanding some important exceptions, including a significant grassroots rally staged shortly after the war, Iranian civil society has been a reticent participant as global Palestine solidarity movements grew in the face of Israeli genocide. Hesitations found in Iranian civil society reflect the peculiar relationship to imperial entanglements harbored by people living in a “rogue” state at the helm of the Axis of Resistance.
Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has folded Palestine into its revolutionary mythology, using it as an anchor to bolster the state’s revolutionary image and as justification for military interventions to exert regional influence, all while presenting itself as a custodian of the Palestinian struggle. State efforts to subsume Palestine into its political agenda and tether global solidarity to its ambitions have long constrained independent articulations of solidarity by civil society activists.Many activists, wary of appearing to echo state propaganda, retreated from the cause altogether. Alienation ran so deep that opposition slogans during the 2009 Green Movement notoriously declared: “Neither Gaza, Nor Lebanon, My life for Iran.”
The June 2025 war unsettled this long-standing equation in contradictory ways. On the first day, as ‘targeted strikes’ eliminated senior officials and Revolutionary Guard commanders, some Iranians openly welcomed Israel’s intervention, convinced that foreign force might finally deliver regime change. A caller on BBC Persian said: “These are not strikes on the people. They are designed to obliterate those in charge. We are, indeed, very happy about these strikes.”[vii] Whatever sense of relief existed was fleeting and quickly gave way to disillusionment as civilian deaths mounted.[viii] It soon became clear that ordinary Iranians were, indeed, collateral damage. For those invested in the fantasy of salvation through imperial violence, the war punctured the cherished illusion that Iranians would be spared what Palestinians, Afghans, and Iraqis had long endured.
Presumptions of immunity—an Iranian exceptionalism nurtured by both nationalist pride and state propaganda—collapsed over the course of the war. Decades of watching neighboring societies unravel into war and chaos had reinforced a belief that Iran was uniquely insulated. The June war struck at a national psyche long sustained by a superiority complex rooted in the notion that Iranians are heirs to an “ancient civilization” and set apart from their neighbors.
The demise of exceptionalism also exposed vulnerabilities across two constituencies who, to the contrary, placed their hopes in the Islamic Republic’s military might: loyalists who derived pride from state projections of power and others less loyal to the state but nonetheless reliant on its promise of protection. On the one hand, Iran showcased the capacity to use force effectively beyond its borders, striking at the heart of Tel Aviv with drones and missiles, puncturing the mythology of Israel’s invulnerable Iron Dome, revealing its susceptibility. On the other hand, Tehran itself lay exposed under sustained bombardment, reactivating buried traumas from the Iran–Iraq War. The stark contrast between external projection and domestic defenselessness crystallized the paradox of Iran’s military posture: a state capable of destabilizing its adversary, unable to safeguard its own population.
New grounds for recognition emerged as the June war stripped away illusions of Israel’s invulnerability and the Islamic Republic’s stability, as the twin fictions of state protection and imperial salvation fell apart. With demystification, Iranians could see themselves more clearly caught between authoritarian rule at home, regional power plays, and the violence of global imperial machinery—much like Palestinians, Iraqis, Syrians, and others across the region. The plight faced by Iranians was not distinct. It had to be recognized (or disavowed explicitly) as part of a shared condition.
Thus, feelings of despair may give way to solidarity—not as moral sentiment but as political practice, linking struggles and exposing their entanglement. The Life Against War campaign crystallizes these possibilities. Rather than turn inward, as Iranian civil society has done so often under repression and geopolitical isolation, this campaign looks outward, articulating solidarities beyond the nation. We see in it a fragile but vital horizon: a politics no longer grounded in illusions of state protection or imperial rescue, but in solidarities forged through recognition of shared precarity. What kinds of solidarity are possible under war? How can critique avoid capture by the logics it opposes? What forms of collective life endure when reform and revolution feel exhausted? This dossier does not pretend to answer these questions once and for all. It invites the reader to consider and inhabit them.
Dossier Contents
- “Introduction,” by Arash Davari and Nazanin Shahrokni
- “Archiving War,” interview with Leili Adibfar and Azam Khatam
- “Echoes of a Short War: Critical Reflections on Israel’s Attack on Iran,” featuring Kaveh Ehsani, Peyman Jafari, Setareh Shohadaei, and Maziar Behrooz
- “Life Against War: Spheres of Politics in Wartime Iran,” by Payam Roshanfekr
[i] Reinhardt Koselleck, “Crisis,” trans. Michaela W. Richter, Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 2 (2006): 357–400.
[ii] Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge University Press, 1978).
[iii] Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Penguin Books, 2006), 8.
[iv] Arendt’s work has become a guiding light for new social science research about revolutions. Alternative readings of Arendt inspire critics to understand social change beyond conventional binaries. See, e.g., Colin J. Beck, Mlada Bukovansky, Erica Chenoweth, George Lawson, Sharon Erickson Nepstad, and Daniel Ritter, On Revolutions: Unruly Politics in the Contemporary World (Oxford University Press, 2022), 131–58. Recent works in political theory similarly challenge divides between structure and agency, ordinary politics and moments of extraordinary upheaval. For example, see Eva von Redecker, Praxis and Revolution: A Theory of Social Transformation, trans. Lucy Duggan (Columbia University Press, 2021), 12–15, 149–52.
[v] One trend situates Iran in global history. See e.g., Arang Keshavarzian and Ali Mirsepassi, eds., Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Another studies the Persianate beyond modern Iranian borders. For example, see Alexander Jabbari, The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
[vi] At the outset of the war, Reformists were already mired in delayed, tightly constrained nuclear talks with the United States, forced at every step to yield to hardline veto power in Tehran. Conservatives cast the negotiations as capitulation, using delays and political curveballs to erode the Reformists’ hand. Reformists countered that, had an agreement been secured under Rouhani, the war might have been averted and Iran spared its current vulnerability. Now, they argued, only by empowering Reformists could sanctions be lifted and the crisis contained. The war gave them no such leverage. Rather than relent, hardliners doubled down—tightening surveillance, carrying out mass arrests, and targeting Afghan refugees and undocumented migrants who were cast as internal security threats and conveniently blamed for the country’s instability at this juncture. Frustration deepened when a judiciary-backed “combatting false content in cyberspace” bill, widely criticized for curbing free speech and undermining government promises of transparency, was met not with confrontation but with Pezeshkian’s formation of an expert panel—a move read as a concession to the hardliners, emblematic of his administration’s tendency to avoid direct clashes, rely on back-channels, and pursue negotiations that diluted Reformist positions while yielding little change. The episode underscored, once more, the futility of relying on reform as a vehicle for genuine transformation.
[vii] Regime outlets in the United States, like the New York Post, gleefully echoed the sentiment. For example, see Janata Sayeh, “‘They strike, we dance’—Iranians damn the regime amid Israeli barrage,” 17 June 2025.
[viii] Reports indicate between 5,356 and 5,665 casualties across 28 provinces, including between 610 and 1,190 deaths as well as 4,475 and 4,746 injuries. The Iranian Ministry of Health reported a lower number of civilian deaths (610). The Human Rights Activist News Agency (HRANA) reported nearly double that amount (1,190). According to the latter, 436 civilians died, 435 deaths were military personnel, and 319 went unidentified. See HRANA, “Twelve Days Under Fire: A Comprehensive Report on the Iran-Israel War” (28 June 2025).