Life Against War: Spheres of Politics in Wartime Iran

[This article is published as part of a dossier on the June 2025 Israeli war on Iran. To read the dossier introduction and view a complete listing of its contents, click here.] 

With the onset of Israeli attacks in June 2025—later joined by the US in a military campaign that lasted twelve days—anxiety gripped the streets of Iran as warplanes darkened its skies. The sound of explosions reverberated through Iranian cities and its collective psyche. 

Much analysis of Iran—especially in times of war—focuses almost exclusively on the state. This essay weaves across three spheres, tracing how the state, the market, and civil society each articulated divergent narratives in the immediate aftermath of the war: the first seeking legitimacy, the second emphasizing risk, and the third advancing a “politics of life. While distinguished here for analytical clarity, these spheres are in practice porous and mutually entangled, shaping and reshaping one another in contingent and uneven ways. 

Of the three spheres, civil society most decisively moves beyond state-centric or purely strategic calculations, as it is instead concerned with the safeguarding of life through practices of care that counter tendencies toward domination and exclusion. An analytical orientation toward safeguarding life through practices of care, as found within civil society, reimagines social relations around collective well-being, treating vulnerability as a shared condition to be mobilized for justice. In doing so, it sharply diverges from a politics rooted in securitization, militarized control, or nationalist exclusion, carving out a space that resists state domination, domestic factionalism, nationalist-Islamist orthodoxy, and the competitive logics of international geopolitics.

My analysis focuses on Life for All, War for No One, a civil society–driven initiative formed during the war that exemplifies a “politics of life.” Beyond situating the initiative within global antiwar movements and intersectional struggles for justice, the essay also maps the diverse topography of responses to war within Iran, offering a layered portrait of political contestation and pro-life resistance in a moment of profound crisis.

The State: Nationalism as a Mobilizing Force

The Iranian state and its supporters were the first to react to the war—rapidly and with full orchestration—blending visual spectacle, music, statements by public personalities, and layered symbolism. Campaigns such as My Life for Iran(جانم_فدای_ایران#), Iran, My Love (ایران_جان#), and In the Name of Iran (به_نام_ایران#) saturated state media and social networks, urging citizens to post patriotic hashtags, circulate official narratives, and participate in symbolic acts of unity.

While nationalism has not been the Islamic Republic’s dominant discourse, the state has gradually cultivated a hybrid form of nationalism that draws on symbols from Iran’s pre-Islamic past, intertwining ancient cultural pride with contemporary political messaging to broaden its appeal beyond a core ideological base. Although once wary of nationalist sentiment—especially types tied to a pre-Islamic heritage—the Republic has long experimented with selective appropriations of ancient history. In the 2025 war, however, these appropriations became more explicit and entrenched.

This was vividly on display in the My Life for Iran moukeb organized by Tehran’s District One Municipality in Tajrish Square. In contemporary Iranian usage, moukeb refers to service stations for pilgrims during Arba’in—a major Shi‘a observance marking the fortieth day after Ashura, to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in 680 CE. For Shi‘a communities, Arba’in is both a spiritual journey and a public display of solidarity. By adapting this religious format for a nationalist cause, official organizers symbolically linked piety with patriotism, binding Shi‘a ritual to a narrative of national unity.

The choice of Tajrish Square amplified the effect. Bombed during the conflict, an event captured in a viral video, the square is a key cultural hub: home to a bustling bazaar, Imamzadeh Saleh shrine, the gateway to the Alborz mountains, and a lively mix of cafes and shops. Transforming this convergence of leisure, commerce, religion, and everyday life into a site of spectacle allowed the state to overlay nationalist ritual onto a place already dense with emotional and symbolic resonance.

Across the city, epic music reinforced these orchestrated displays. The Tehran Symphony Orchestra performed in Azadi Square—an iconic site that, since its construction, has staged both imperial pageantry and revolutionary gatherings. By selecting this venue, the organizers sought to draw on its layered symbolism to project continuity across historical divides. Here, as in Tajrish Square, nationalism was enacted through urban space, and everyday sites of memory and movement were re-scripted into wartime theaters of loyalty.

Even as fractures persisted within the political establishment over how to confront foreign military intervention, the state reproduced and amplified a binary between of vatan-parast (“true patriots”) versus vatan-foroosh (“traitors”). This rhetorical frame delineated the boundaries of legitimate belonging while also mapping neatly onto the pro- and anti-war divide. By entwining religious symbolism, pre-Islamic heritage, and urban ritual into its wartime messaging, the Islamic Republic reinforced itself as the embodiment of both Islam and nation—casting antiwar sentiment as betrayal, and equating loyalty to the state with loyalty to Iran itself.

This narrative left space for other sectors—most notably market actors—to articulate alternative, if more restrained, responses to the crisis.

Recalibrating the System: Economic Reform in the Shadow of War

The June 2025 war deepened Iran’s already fragile economy. Stock trading was abruptly suspended at the height of the bombardments, halting panic but also freezing capital. The rial, held unusually stable during the strikes by strict state controls, began to lose ground once the ceasefire took hold. Pent-up demand for dollars was released, driving the exchange rate upward, while inflation accelerated, underscoring the material effects of war on ordinary households.

The effects of market fluctuations were felt most sharply in everyday livelihoods. Stories circulated about contract workers laid off overnight, construction projects put on hold, and shop owners dismissing clerks to cut costs. Rather than absorb the shock, businesses in service, industrial, and retail sectors shifted pressure from capital onto labor, transferring wartime risk to the most vulnerable. In the bazaar, commerce slowed to a crawl, with supply chains interrupted and transactions reduced to essential goods. An “economy of survival” became the organizing logic of daily life: families postponed rent payments, debts were delayed, and communities relied on improvised forms of mutual aid just to keep circulation going.

Amid this instability, a different kind of response took shape. A coalition of 180 economists and university professors issued a statement that invoked patriotic duty but channeled it into a pragmatic call for reforms, with the ultimate goal to restore prosperity and stability. They warned of an “unsustainable trajectory” and the “crippling impact of war and sanctions” on households. Their platform included not only technical fixes—addressing inflation, unemployment, and supply disruptions—but also structural reforms: disentangling the military from economic activities, redesigning fiscal and monetary policies to eliminate rent-seeking and corruption, and curbing privileged institutions that fed off public resources while poverty deepened.

The statement also framed the war as a possible “historic turning point” to end inefficiency, frozen foreign policy, and injustice, calling for new strategies centered on de-escalation abroad and prosperity at home. This meant expanding international relations to secure economic benefits, political and social freedoms, welfare, and meritocracy—placing economic well-being and civic reform in the same frame.

The majority of signatories were former state officials or economists with longstanding connections to government and official policy circles. Among them were Masoud Nili (former economic advisor to the president [2013–2018]), Farhad Nili (former director of the Iran Department at the World Bank [2015–2019]), Valiollah Seif (Governor of the Central Bank of Iran [2013–2018]), Seyyed Mohammadreza Farzin (Governor of Iran's Central Bank [2022–present]), and Mohammad Mehdi Behkish (economist and president of the Iran-Italy Chamber of Commerce [1992–2013]). The involvement of such figures—many with senior policy experience—gave the statement added weight, allowing the intervention to be seen as an “internal structural warning” to the policy establishment, a reading reinforced by extensive media debate and sharp rebuttals from state-aligned commentators.

While they used the wartime opening to make unusually bold claims, these were ultimately undergirded by economic rationales. Governance reforms and media plurality were advocated not as abstract ideals but as necessary conditions to restore confidence, attract investment, and reintegrate Iran into the global economy. In essence, this was political reform refracted through market discipline—understood as cautious, top-down initiatives by policy elites, intended to stabilize the system through technical adjustments rather than to enact structural political change.

The economists’ intervention thus marked the outer edge of elite dissent: ambitious in scope, yet bounded by market ideology. Change was framed not as a challenge to the political order but as its recalibration toward economic rationality. 

An Iranian Politics of Life

For civil society actors, by contrast, the war became a moment to push beyond both nationalist spectacle and technocratic containment. This third response diverged sharply from the logics animating the state and the market. Where the state sought unity through the reproduction of nationalist binaries and the market relied on cautious pragmatism, segments of Iranian civil society advanced a life-affirming politics rooted in care, solidarity, and survival. Unlike state appeals to sacrifice or market-driven strategies of risk containment, these responses treated the protection of life as a collective responsibility—an imperative worth political risk despite restrictive political and economic constraints.

Many Iranians were initially stunned by the sudden escalation of the war. As the initial shock wore off, across neighborhoods, workplaces, and online platforms, informal networks of care quickly emerged. Social media carried accounts of individuals offering shelter, food, medical assistance, and childcare. Neighbors postponed rent or debt payments; volunteers organized carpooling for those unable to leave targeted cities; and small businesses redirected resources toward immediate communal needs. Even after the cessation of hostilities, reports suggest, these groups sustained their activities, extending their ethic of solidarity to Afghan refugees facing mass deportations by the Iranian government. These gestures, however modest, constituted an infrastructure of survival in a moment when state institutions were consumed by war mobilization and markets prioritized capital preservation.

Various anti-war collectives and grassroots groups also emerged alongside these informal practices, articulating dissent against the logic of war itself. Some circulated petitions and statements, while others crafted creative campaigns and cultural expressions to amplify anti-war sentiment. Civil society in Iran had been severely curtailed over the previous decade, its spaces for activism and association steadily shrinking under repression. Yet even within these constricted conditions, it remained vibrant, demonstrating a capacity to mobilize new repertoires of solidarity and care.

This politics of life, however, was not entirely new. It recalled a recognizable genealogy within Iran’s civil society. During and after the Iran–Iraq War, volunteer networks and associations provided humanitarian relief to displaced and wounded civilians—an early life-centered impulse that later reappeared in rights-oriented organizing. In the late 1990s, civic actors pressed for truth after the “chain murders” of dissidents, culminating in the Intelligence Ministry acknowledging its agents’ role in the killings—an accountability campaign tightly linked to protecting life against state violence. In the 2010s, families, lawyers, and activists built robust anti-execution campaigns (such as the viral #اعدام_نکنید / #DoNotExecute drive in 2020), while the Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims sustained a transnational justice campaign for those killed in 2020, following the downing of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 by missiles launched from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards amid heightened U.S.–Iran tensions. The “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising (2022) then explicitly centered life and bodily autonomy in the national discourse.

These struggles do not form a single, continuous movement, nor do they pursue identical aims. Participants have disagreed over institutional reform, geopolitics, and tactics. Yet they converge on a minimal but powerful denominator: life itself, demanded in the face of violence. This convergence cuts across professional, generational, and regional lines, enabling forms of coordination that neither state surveillance nor economic instability can fully suppress. It is in this sense that one may speak of an Iranian “pro-life” movement—pro-life not in the narrow cultural registers familiar in the West, but as a broad and evolving civic politics that demands life for all, and war for no one.

The Life for All, War for No One Campaign

Initiated in mid-July 2025, Life for All, War for No One brought together more than 70 civic organizations—later joined by another 100. Its joint statement opened with a categorical rejection of militarism:

“War is anti-life. We condemn the military aggression of Israel and the United States against Iran and oppose all forms of militarism in the region and the world. The Iranian people, who have endured decades of war, sanctions, and repression, do not want another war.”

Using hashtags like #LifeAgainstWar and #الحیاه_ضد_الحرب, the initiative spread quickly across social media and into transnational networks. Prominent signatories included filmmakers, social activists, academics, authors, artists, athletes, and a broad range of intellectuals. A vast coalition of unions, networks, and organizations from different parts of the country participated, including: the KOMAK[i] Network (11 network and scientific associations); the Network of People with Disabilities; the Network of Environmental Organizations; the Teachers’ Union; the Union of Mechanical Metal Workers; Social Science Associations (17 associations); Student Associations; Retirees’ Organizations; Tourism and Cultural Heritage Organizations; Documentary Cinema Producers; the Writers’ Association; as well as numerous NGOs focused on children’s and women’s rights, charities, and other community-based organizations.

Crucially, the initiative rejected both regime change and geopolitical retaliation—not out of passivity, but as a deliberate strategy to confront entrenched power and the narratives that normalize militarism. Its demands—life, justice, and dignity—addressed both domestic governance structures that constrain civic space and discourses that legitimize global power politics.

Deliberately regional in orientation, Life for All, War for No One has sought to engage with justice-seeking movements in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, occasionally co-signing statements such as the Statement of Solidarity with the People of Gaza and joining coordinated days of action, including those fostered by CIVICUS.[ii] By translating its statements and materials into Arabic, organizers underscored a commitment to cross-border dialogue and mutual recognition—a reversal of the more common Persian-English translation circuit.

Transnational orientation also meant grappling with the Iranian diaspora’s fragmented responses. During the 12-day war, diaspora media platforms urged Iranians to seize the strikes as an opening for regime change, while small anti-war gatherings in Europe and North America staged protests that expressed anti-war positions. The diaspora as a whole experienced an emotional limbo, fractured across generations, memories of exile, and political expectations. Rather than resolve these divisions, Life for All marked out a different ground: situating itself in dialogue with diaspora currents committed to anti-war solidarity while rejecting the binary that cast Iranians as either regime loyalist or pro-war dissidents. Its insistence on life as the common denominator unsettled these polarized framings.

Life for All casts war as a continuation of structural violence: sanctions, economic precarity, epistemic erasure, and bodily vulnerability. In doing so, it highlights how wars, authoritarianism, and imperialism all operate as interlocking forms of violence that negate life. In the face of a political order that rallies unity through nationalist spectacle and a market that manages dissent through technocratic containment, Iranian civil society offers a vital counterpoint: a refusal to choose between domestically restrictive governance and foreign military threats, and a refusal to speak in the language of militarized masculinity or sacrificial nationalism. By asserting that another politics is possible—one that makes life, care, and solidarity its horizon—it unsettles the frameworks through which violence is justified.

Its gesture is radical in its simplicity: No to war. Yes to life! 

[Click here to return to the introduction of the dossier this interview is a part of and view a listing of the dossier contents.]