The war on Iran opens another front in a long history of imperial wars and interventions in the region. Below is a selection of our Jadaliyya content in which the US-Israel-led war on Iran is addressed in its broader context.
Prologue to the Protests
A Retrospective on Iran with Behrooz Ghamari
"At no moment they should separate their struggle against repression, against economic hardship, and demanding social justice. At no point and no moment they should separate that struggle from their anti-colonial, anti-imperialist position."
Long Form Podcast Episode 13: Iran on the Brink? with Sina Toossi
“One thing we can say objectively is sanctions have had a very debilitating economic effect that even beyond the fact of mismanagement, domestic incompetencies, which is real, it is intensifying those effects: preventing the importation of medicine, preventing hard currency from entering into the country, all kinds of effects where it’s just impoverishing the people, shrinking the middle class, and ultimately, what a lot of the academic to my understanding says these kinds of sanction regimes, they’re actually not conductive to democratic change.” –Sina Toossi
War Outbreak
How Might the United States and Israel’s War on Iran Falter? by Bassam Haddad
“What was framed as a swift and definitive strike against Iran is fast becoming something far more unpredictable and potentially more dangerous. The expanding US–Israeli war on Iran was sold, implicitly or explicitly, as a decisive blow: a campaign that would topple the regime, trigger mass protests, fracture the Iranian state, and reassert US–Israeli dominance across the region. The Iranian regime has not imploded and regional tensions are widening.”
Iran on the Brink Podcasts Series: Comparative Wars, Political Economy, and Infrastructure with Golnar Nikpour, Arang Keshavarzian, Asli Bali
“We need to think about the geographic dimensions of Gulf capitalism and how Gulf financial capital circulates through Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. The circuits linking the Gulf to the global economy are far more complex today than they were twenty or thirty years ago. Take the Strait of Hormuz. Roughly 20% of global oil trade passes through it in normal conditions. Because of the war, that flow has been drastically reduced. But the destination of that oil has also changed.” –Arang Keshavarzian
“The war on Iran resembles a familiar pattern that we’ve seen across the region: Technologically dominant states, fewer and fewer of them, smaller and smaller coalitions, using primarily air power, now, also cyber operations, and even emerging AI-assisted targeting systems to discipline or destroy regional states they view either as a strategic challenger or opportunistically low-hanging fruit that they can further remake in their image.” –Asli Bali
Iran on the Brink Podcasts Series: U.S. and Israel's Unprovoked War of Aggression on Iran with Narges Bajoghli, Sina Toossi, Craig Mokhiber
“Ever since maximum pressure starter under the first Trump presidency, [Iran] has been under a relentless, first, economic warfare, psychological warfare, media warfare, cyber-operations, then particular kinds of strikes , and then full on war last year, and then now this year on a bigger scale.” –Narges Bajoghli
Roundtable on the War on Iran and International Law by Noura Erakat, Luigi Daniele, Shahd Hammouri, Ata Hindi, Maryam Jamshidi, and Darryl Li
“The U.S./Israel attack on Iran is a clear and incontrovertible act of aggression. Under international law, states are prohibited from using force against other states unless that force is authorized by the Security Council under its Chapter VII powers or qualifies as self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter.” –Maryam Jamshidi
"According to the rules on the use of force, armed attacks are unlawful under international law, except in self-defence. In this context, Iran did not attack any other state, and it did not pose any imminent threat to any other nation."–Shahd Hammouri
"From the outset, the US attack on Iran was contrary to the rules on the prohibition on the use of force, and would amount to aggression. The illegal use of force is prohibited by the UN Charter and amounts to a serious breach of a peremptory norm of international law." –Ata Hindi
"It is notable that since World War II, almost every U.S. military engagement outside the western hemisphere has avoided the juridical form of international armed conflict (i.e. war between states). The vast majority have been cast as assisting global south sovereigns in their own civil wars (what some legal scholars have called 'internationalized armed conflict')." –Darryl Li
"In Gaza, Israel has de facto abolished the rule of distinction between civilians and combatants, and between civilian objects and military objectives, on a scale and with a level of systematicity unseen in the armed conflicts of contemporaneity." –Luigi Daniele
Media Wars: The War on Iran, A Limited Podcast Series by Noura Erakat, Ryan Grim, Mouin Rabbani, Adel Iskandar, Naveed Mansoori, and Bassam Haddad
Media Wars: The War on Iran, featuring Noura Erakat, Ryan Grim, Adel Iskandar, Naveed Mansoori, Mouin Rabbani, and Bassam Haddad, examines the truths and absurdities of our era. Fast-paced and eclectic, it blends media roundups with commentary and analysis to expose the folly and brutality of empire and imperial media. The program moves between granular detail and broad historical and geopolitical context, treating weighty, world-altering subjects in a casual, sometimes irreverent voice. Not suitable for children.
Media Wars’ pilot episode launched on Saturday, March 28, inviting speakers Noura Erakat, Ryan Grim, Adel Iskandar, and Naveed Mansoori, in conversation with Mouin Rabbani and Bassam Haddad. This episode centers on reports from Cuba following the aid-delivery humanitarian mission in March, countering U.S. sanctions, and how prominent Western news outlets are doing what they do best: manufacturing consent for the war being waged on Iran.
Beyond Iran
Why Iran is Not Venezuela: Iran’s Revolutionary Ideology at a Crossroads by Bader Alibrahim
“The core flaw in Washington’s reading was its conflation of the Supreme Leader with the system itself. That assumption is analytically thin. The Islamic Republic is not a personal autocracy held together by one man’s will. It is a hybrid polity, architecturally designed to balance the logic of the state with the logic of the revolution.”
From Palestine to Lebanon, A War Without Limits and the Wages of Impunity by Maya Mikdashi
"The seventh Israeli invasion of Lebanon is being waged in both the shadow of genocide in Gaza and within the world that Israel’s permission to commit genocide has created. This is a world where international law has become a punchline, where there are no innocents and where there is no form of degradation—starvation, siege, ethnic cleansing—that is off limits."
Calories, Circulation, and Crisis: The Gulf States and the Regional Food System During Wartime by Christian Henderson
"Despite the preparedness of the Gulf states, the disruption to commerce will have consequences. Owing to its agribusiness and logistics sectors, the UAE is at the heart of the Gulf food system."
The Gulf’s Security Comes Apart by Elham Fakhro
"The Gulf states have increasingly avoided relying on Washington’s deterrence alone. Instead, they developed a strategy built on three interlocking elements: cultivating deeper security guarantees from the United States; pursuing de-escalation with Iran; and, for some states, engaging Israel."
Overlooked Lessons from Iranian History
Iran in Crisis: Seven Essays on the Obstacles to Freedom (Introduction) by Ida Nikou and Manijeh Moradian
“This dossier starts from a basic question. How did we arrive at a moment in which imperialist powers that have waged war across the region and enabled Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, can appear as plausible agents of ‘freedom for Iran?’ How did the son of the deposed Iranian monarch, who long had negligible support inside Iran, come to appear as the only plausible alternative to a regime that many Iranians experience as hostile to their lives and future.”
Reactionary Politics in the Iranian Diaspora and the Crisis of International Solidarity by Mehrdad Emami
“Consequently, progressive segments of the Iranian diaspora have been pushed to the margins of internationalist attention and solidarity. On one side, monarchists and regime-change advocates function as open supporters of imperialist agendas; on the other, neo-campist leftists operate as discursive and media extensions of the Islamic Republic abroad. Between these poles, progressive diaspora actors are rendered politically invisible. The resulting fragmentation and invisibility of progressive diaspora actors not only weakens transnational solidarity but also reinforces a false binary in which imperial intervention and authoritarian state power appear as the only available political options.”
Autonomy's Travels: Feminist Vocabularies and the Politics of Appropriation in Iran by Sara Tafakori
“Since the WLF uprising, right-wing, pro-Pahlavi politics have gained renewed visibility within diasporic media spaces, presenting the vision of a restored Pahlavi monarchy as a coherent alternative to the Islamic Republic. This formation draws on a nationalist logic of legitimacy that prioritises unity, homogeneity and the recovery of an authentic Iranian essence, while treating internal difference, whether grounded in ethnic belonging, feminism or leftist politics, as destabilising threats. In this framework, political credibility is claimed not through the transformation of social relations, but through the promise of restoring a wounded national sovereignty.
Kurdish Political Mobilisation During Iran's Transformative Epochs by Allan Hassaniyan
“The conflict in Rojhelat is not only waged through coercion and securitisation; it is also reproduced through political control over land, water, and subsoil resources. Extraction, therefore, functions as a quieter modality of domination that shapes everyday life and the material bases of resistance.”
The Invisible Role of Ethnic Relations in Iran’s Current Crisis by Aghil Daghagheleh
“These capital-intensive, resource-extractive projects may be familiar to readers, as they resemble development models imposed on many Global South countries by the IMF and the World Bank and have been widely condemned by anti-colonial and environmental justice movements. In Iran, however, it is the central state that acts as the agent of extraction and dispossession, and these policies are structured through long-standing ethnic hierarchies. My focus here, however, is not on documenting the marginalization of ethnic minorities, which is important in its own right.”
From Revolution to Multi-Crisis: The Political Economy of Iran’s Present Conjuncture by Kayhan Valadbaygi
"The following contribution advances a structural and historical framework for understanding Iran’s crisis-ridden present by tracing two key dynamics that shape it: 1) the neoliberal restructuring of the state and class relations from the early 1990s onward, and 2) the interaction between these domestic transformations and successive waves of sanctions."
Gender, Crises of Social Reproduction, and Iran’s Neoliberal Policy Regime by Asma Abdi
“‘Crisis of social reproduction’ refers to the mounting inability to sustain and reproduce life—to secure food, shelter, care, health, and education. In this sense, crises of social reproduction are fundamentally, crises of life itself. Such crises emerge when the institutional, material, and social infrastructures that render life livable are hollowed out, when the labour required to maintain bodies and social relations is systematically devalued, and thus rendered impossible.”
The Politics of Non-Negotiability: Labor and the Making of Recurrent Uprisings in Iran by Ida Nikou
“Iran’s street protest cycles over the past decade have developed through continual intersection with labor struggles. Sanctions tightened fiscal space, and the state adopted accumulation through intensified surplus extraction, subcontracting, wage suppression, and risk displacement. Labor institutions, including independent and state-controlled forms, remained formally present, but they lacked enforceable power. In strategic sectors, economic governance fuses with coercive authority. The result was a regime in which grievances are registered but rarely settled, where temporary relief substitutes for structural change, and where escalation invites repression.”
Culture Essays
Pipeline Cinema: The Cultural Infrastructure of Oil Extraction in Iran and Iraq (New Texts Out Now) by Mona Damluji
“What compelled neocolonial oil companies in Iraq and other oil-producing countries of the Global South to produce such documentaries? Who participated in their making? Who watched these films and how were they received? What were the social and political stakes of oil company film sponsorship and cinematic representations that claimed to document the culture and history of countries where major oil companies carried out their extractive operations and which the economies, military power, and societal status quo of the Global North relied upon?”