Someone Else’s War: The Geopolitical Alibi in Iran’s 2026 Protests, by Mina Khanlarzadeh – 20 February 2026

From Mina’s Substack

Despite the Islamic Republic’s transformations since 1979, one governing reflex has remained: it rules through the language of external crisis—war and later supplemented by the nuclear file, regional conflict, and sanctions. Among other uses, these arenas provide the script for explaining away domestic dissent. I call this the geopolitical alibi. Over the past two decades of protest, including the recent January 2026, the alibi has operated through a consistent double move. When the state kills, it frames bloodshed as foreign-authored: the US and Israel are blamed for both the conditions of unrest and the violence itself, either as direct perpetrators or as the unseen hand that forced the state to act. When people protest, the same logic flips onto the crowd: protesters are recoded as infiltrators: foreign agents, domestic spies, or manipulated proxies. Either way, uprising and massacre are made legible as someone else’s war.

In late December 2025, as inflation surged and the rial collapsed, shopkeepers in Tehran’s Alaeddin and Charsou centers shuttered their stalls in a strike that spread rapidly from market districts to universities and across Iran, shifting from economic grievance to a crisis of legitimacy. As opposition figures abroad joined in, Reza Pahlavi called for coordinated demonstrations and urged people to occupy state institutions. At the peak in early January, the state enforced a nationwide communications blackout, severing internet and phone networks, sealing the country inside the regime’s broadcast frame as a lethal crackdown unfolded under constrained reporting.

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Mina Khanlarzadeh (Ph.D., Columbia University; B.Sc., Physics, Sharif University of Technology) is a historian whose interdisciplinary work engages global political thought, literary and translation studies, gender studies, and the history of science.

Someone Else’s War: The Geopolitical Alibi in Iran’s 2026 Protests, by Mina Khanlarzadeh – 20 February 2026

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