On June 24, 2025, the day after Israel bombed Evin Prison, the Iranian labor activist and former political prisoner Keyvan Mohtadi wrote about the people still held inside. His wife, the labor organizer Anisha Asadollahi, was among them. Mohtadi titled the piece Political Prisoners Between the Two Blades of the Scissors (زندانیان سیاسی بین دو لبه قیچی). Describing families desperate for news and demanding the prisoners’ release, he wrote:
اما ما هم زمان نگران عزیزانمان بودیم و هستیم که بین دو لبهی قیچی گیر کردهاند.
At the same time, we were and remain worried about our loved ones, who are caught between the two blades of the scissors.
A few lines later, the image turns visceral:
ما واقعا بین دو لبه قیچی داریم بریده میشویم.
We are truly being cut between the two blades of the scissors.
The Persian matters. Qeychi (قیچی) is singular, where English ordinarily requires “a pair of scissors.” More important than grammar, however, is where the sentence places its subject. Beyn-e do labe-ye qeychi gir karde-and: they are caught between the blades. Dārim boride mishavim: we are being cut. The proposition is not that the blades are equal, the proposition begins with the body upon which they close. Calling this “double condemnation” already alters the grammar of the claim, because double condemnation begins with an observer weighing two political actors and finding both wanting. The Persian begins somewhere else: we are being cut. The scissors is not primarily a moral inventory of two states but situated knowledge produced by people upon whom distinct forms of power act at the same time.
Siamak Namazi, who spent nearly 8 years imprisoned in Evin, reached for the same formulation shortly afterward, describing what he was hearing from prisoners and friends inside Iran: they felt caught between “the two blades of a scissors,” between the state that imprisoned and tortured them and a foreign power dropping bombs on them “in the name of freedom.”
In August 2026, 23 political prisoners, former prisoners, abolitionists, Marxists, Black radical thinkers, Palestinian scholars and anti-imperialist organizers placed that image at the center of an open letter in The Guardian addressed to Iran’s political prisoners. The chronology matters because international intellectuals did not invent the scissors while searching for an elegant metaphor. Iranian prisoners, former prisoners and their families were already using the image to describe an immediate political reality.
Israel had attacked one of the most notorious institutions of political imprisonment in modern Iranian history while the Iranian state continued holding political prisoners inside a country under bombardment. The prisoners did not stop knowing who controlled their cells because Israeli missiles were falling, and the bombardment did not become emancipatory because its target was an institution associated with repression. The Persian formulation therefore changes the question before us. The first task is not to determine whether the blades possess equivalent military power, historical responsibility or geopolitical reach. The task is to begin where the speakers begin: with the political experience of the people between them.
The person between the blades
The objection to that image came quickly and from serious quarters. Vijay Prashad’s rebuttal proceeds from a proposition that must be granted: Iran faces a war of aggression waged by vastly more powerful states. US and Israeli military power, sanctions, assassination, sabotage and regional domination do not sit on the same historical scale as the power the Iranian state exercises within its own borders.
Susan Abulhawa raises a related objection, arguing that the image of two blades risks manufacturing a rhetorical equivalence between forces whose material capacities and historical relationships to Iran are radically unequal. The warning deserves to be preserved. Imperialism has a history, a geography and a hierarchy. Iranian sovereignty matters. The destruction inflicted on Iranian society cannot become scenery for a generalized indictment of authoritarianism, and Iran’s material resistance to foreign domination cannot be waved away as fictitious or hollow.
None of these propositions, however, answers Mohtadi’s sentence. He is not ranking two states; he is describing what is happening to his wife. The disagreement can therefore be stated more plainly than much of the debate allows. The dispute is not over whether US imperialism is more powerful than the Islamic Republic. Everyone involved agrees that it is. The dispute is over whether Iranians resisting their own state remain political subjects while that imperial war is underway. A prisoner need not demonstrate that two powers are equivalent before both can form part of her political reality. A Kurdish labor organizer can grasp the global asymmetry between Iran and the US while knowing exactly who controls the lock on her cell. An Iranian socialist can defend the country against imperial assault without handing political representation of Iranian workers to the Islamic Republic. An Iranian woman can oppose Zionism without suspending her struggle against gendered state coercion, and a Baloch activist does not become neutral because neither Washington nor Tehran exhausts his political aspirations. Asymmetry does not require singularity.
Prashad’s insistence that “neutrality or a third space does not exist in the midst of a war of aggression” therefore exposes what is actually at issue. His concern is intelligible, and Iranians know its history intimately: imperial wars have repeatedly instrumentalized women’s rights, minority rights, democracy and political repression as ideological preparation for intervention. Iranian prisoners, however, are not asking to occupy a neutral position between two governments. They are speaking from a political position that neither government exhausts. To call that position third-campist is to mistake autonomy for equidistance. A political subject does not stand halfway between two states merely because neither represents the totality of her politics.
Prashad’s argument becomes more difficult when he moves from geopolitical asymmetry to political timing. There is a time to make demands and a time to act in solidarity, he suggests, implying that certain demands upon the Iranian state should recede while imperial war continues. The difficulty is that prisoners live both dangers in the same present tense. An execution sentence does not pause for war, and a prison door does not unlock because the state holding the key confronts a greater external power. The question becomes not whether Iranian repression exists but whether Iranians must postpone naming or resisting that repression until some safer political moment arrives.
Positionality bears directly on that question, though its meaning requires precision. Those of us situated within imperial states carry particular obligations to confront violence carried out by those states and in our names. Someone living in the United States has a specific responsibility to oppose US aggression against Iran. Positionality clarifies where political responsibility begins, but it does not establish jurisdiction over when another people may articulate the dimensions of their own struggle. Fighting imperial power where we live and taking seriously Iranians who describe the totality of the forces acting upon them are not competing commitments. A serious internationalism has to be capable of both.
That leaves the central question this essay is trying to answer: how do we practice international solidarity when people resisting domestic coercion are themselves living under imperial attack? The signatories of the Guardian letter have spent their lives working within and extending traditions that help answer that question. Reading them carefully makes the letter far more coherent than its critics allow, while also revealing a problem in the letter that its critics have largely missed.
Solidarity without equivalence, comparison without identity
Abulhawa’s sharpest objection contains two distinct claims, and separating them makes the disagreement easier to see. The first concerns solidarity. An Iranian citizen imprisoned under national-security law, a Palestinian detained by an occupying military and a migrant held by US immigration authorities occupy different juridical and historical positions. Occupation, citizenship, colonialism and sovereignty cannot vanish into an undifferentiated category called ‘carcerality’. If the letter’s claim were that these systems are the same, the letter would be wrong.
Robin D. G. Kelley, one of the signatories, helps explain why solidarity does not require such a claim. His work on Black-Palestinian solidarity rejects the idea that solidarity depends upon proving that two peoples inhabit identical historical structures. Black radical internationalism never required the claim that Black Americans and Palestinians suffered the same form of domination. Solidarity emerged instead through political relationship, anti-imperialist struggle and what Kelley calls “worldmaking”: movements recognizing one another as participants in projects of liberation larger than any single national history. Solidarity, on this account, does not require equivalence.
Abulhawa’s second objection concerns comparison. The letter does not merely stand with Iranian prisoners, but places Iranian imprisonment alongside other carceral systems and implies something shared. Kelley tells us why the political relationship is legitimate, but he does not by himself tell us what licenses the analytical comparison. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work closes that gap. Her method does not compare institutions by asking whether their legal forms match. She asks what organized coercion does within a particular political economy: which crises get answered through policing, imprisonment, abandonment and what she calls “premature death”. Comparison, on that method, never requires identity. Two systems can perform analogous political functions while remaining historically distinct, and analyzing those functions does not flatten the differences between them.
The strongest version of the letter’s claim, then, is not that Evin, ICE detention and Israeli administrative detention are interchangeable. The claim is that different political orders can use confinement, criminalization, isolation and incapacitation to manage people and contradictions they cannot or will not resolve otherwise. Historical specificity remains essential. Occupation does not become citizenship, colonial military detention does not become national imprisonment, and Iranian national-security law does not become US immigration enforcement. Kelley gives us solidarity without equivalence, and Gilmore gives us comparison without identity. Together, their work answers the strongest version of Abulhawa’s objection and raises a harder question the letter itself does not resolve.
What prisoners produce
Why should the identities of the signatories matter at all? A skeptical reader could reasonably argue that an argument stands or falls on its own. A good argument does not become better because Angela Davis or Mumia Abu-Jamal signs it, and a bad argument does not become sound because famous radicals endorse it. That objection is correct as far as logical authority goes. The signatories matter here for another reason: many have spent decades arguing that prisoners should not be understood merely as people to whom politics happens. Prisoners themselves make politics, produce political knowledge and reshape the movements to which they belong.
Dan Berger’s Captive Nation develops that claim historically. Black prisoners in the 1960s and 1970s did not merely endure confinement while politics happened elsewhere. They produced analyses of racism and captivity, organized behind prison walls, shaped movements outside them and altered what Black freedom was understood to mean. Berger’s history therefore carries a methodological demand: write the history of Black liberation without the thought generated inside prisons and you have not written that history adequately.
The Guardian letter grants part of Berger’s premise. Iranian prisoners appear as activists, students, thinkers, workers and artists, as political actors rather than as suffering bodies to be catalogued. That recognition matters because a framework organized around states cannot easily accommodate prisoners as autonomous political subjects. Yet the letter then constructs a theoretical frame around those prisoners without drawing substantially on Iranian prisoner traditions as sources of theory. No Iranian appears among the signatories.
Several plausible explanations exist. The letter is an address, not a treatise, and its authors may simply be situating Iranian prisoners within traditions they know rather than presuming to speak for traditions they do not. Omitting Iranian diaspora figures may also avoid the pretense that a small selection of exiles can represent the ideological, ethnic and political diversity of prisoners inside Iran. More importantly, the structure forces non-Iranian anti-imperialists to own the argument themselves, so Iranian dissidents are not required once again to establish their opposition to US empire before anyone will listen to what their own state is doing to them. That defense is serious, but the deeper problem lies elsewhere.
Iran already possesses traditions that theorize political imprisonment. Golnar Nikpour’s work makes that fact difficult to miss because her research treats Iran’s enormous archive of political-prison writing not simply as testimony but as political theory. Iranian prisons have been sites where organizations, intellectual cultures and oppositional identities were produced, not merely places where already-existing movements were punished. The asymmetry in the letter is therefore not principally a gap in representation. The deeper problem is a gap in reading: Iranian political thought remains largely absent from the intellectual framework through which Iranian prisoners are being interpreted.
That distinction matters. Adding one Iranian name would not solve a problem of intellectual transmission. Reading Iranian prisoners differently might. Berger’s methodological demand can therefore be transposed: write the history of modern Iranian politics without Iranian prisoners and you have not written the history either. The signatories have long insisted upon that principle within their own political traditions. The letter recognizes Iranian prisoners as political subjects, but stops short of fully recognizing them as producers of political theory.
Epistemological agency
One of the signatories has already given us language for understanding the problem. Yasin al-Haj Saleh spent 16 years imprisoned in Syria for membership in a communist organization. His critique of metropolitan anti-imperialism begins from the experience of Syrians living through dictatorship while outsiders explain what their country supposedly means. He calls the pattern a denial of epistemological agency: Syrians may furnish testimony, pain and quotations while outsiders retain authority over analysis. Political agency disappears alongside intellectual agency because local struggles become evidence inside a framework developed somewhere else.
The question beneath al-Haj Saleh’s critique is a question about naming. Who names the world, and on whose terms? Anti-imperialism has a confident answer when the namer is Washington. The tradition has been slower to ask the same question of itself. The problem is not simply whether outsiders speak sympathetically or unsympathetically about another society. The deeper issue concerns who is recognized as capable of producing concepts rather than merely experiences.
The Guardian letter escapes the most damaging version of that problem. Iranian prisoners are not dismissed as dupes of Washington merely for opposing a government Washington also opposes, which is precisely what the framework al-Haj Saleh criticizes would do to them. A smaller epistemological hierarchy remains, however. Iranian experience supplies the urgency, while internationally recognized thinkers supply much of the vocabulary through which that experience becomes universal. Mohtadi’s sentence travels outward and is fitted into abolitionist and internationalist traditions. The letter itself gives little indication of anything traveling back.
Berger offers another way to see what is missing. In his discussion of the intimate project of solidarity, he distinguishes solidarity from allyship. Allyship can leave one person supporting somebody else’s struggle from the outside. Solidarity begins from shared stakes, from people who understand themselves as participants in a political project whose outcome changes the world they inhabit together. Michael Simmons, one of Berger’s interlocutors, puts the distinction simply: he is a participant in the struggle. Iranian prisoners, from this perspective, are not people for whom international radicals perform acts of benevolent recognition. They are potential participants in a relationship where knowledge travels in more than one direction.
The question therefore becomes concrete: what could the international left learn from Iranian political traditions that the international left does not already know? The answer cannot be reduced to information about repression or testimony about suffering. Iranian political history contains arguments about revolution, imprisonment, feminism, imperialism, national liberation and political memory that complicate the very traditions through which the Guardian letter seeks to understand Iran.
Who gets to name the struggle?
Al-Haj Saleh’s argument about epistemological agency raises a larger question than who is permitted to speak. The deeper question is who has the authority to determine what a political struggle means. Colonial and imperial power rarely operate only by silencing people, they also establish the categories through which those people become intelligible. A movement can therefore be heard and still lose political agency if somebody else retains the authority to name its history, define its contradictions and decide which of its demands count as legitimate. The problem is especially relevant to Iran because the argument over political prisoners is also an argument over who gets to say what Iranian anti-imperialism, revolution and liberation mean.
Puerto Rican anti-colonial politics offers a useful example of what refusing those terms can look like. The Young Lords treated the colony and the barrio as a single political field rather than as a homeland and its diaspora. Their demand for Puerto Rican self-determination insisted on “Power in the hands of the People, not Puerto Rican exploiters,” refusing a liberation that merely transferred authority from foreign rulers to a domestic ruling class. At the same time, they located Puerto Rico within a wider struggle against US militarism and capitalism, alongside Third World movements and political prisoners elsewhere, without allowing those wider solidarities to determine the meaning of Puerto Rican liberation for them. Their internationalism joined two commitments that are often pulled apart: participation in struggles larger than the nation and political authority over the meaning of one’s own struggle.
Bad Bunny carries something of that refusal into a cultural form the Young Lords could not have anticipated. His 2025 residency, No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí, reversed the ordinary movement from colony to metropole by making Puerto Rico the place to which audiences had to travel. His subsequent world tour omitted the mainland United States, while Debí Tirar Más Fotos repeatedly returned to displacement, land and the fear that Puerto Rico is being transformed into a place increasingly inaccessible to Puerto Ricans. Then, at the 2026 Super Bowl, he used one of his few English phrases to say “God bless America” before naming countries across the hemisphere and ending with a football bearing the words “Together, we are America.” Rather than asking to be included within a US definition of America, the performance contested the United States’ possession of the word itself.
The linguistic form belonged to the same politics. Bad Bunny did not first translate himself into the dominant language in order to make Puerto Rico politically legible. The largely Spanish performance required the audience to meet meaning on the speaker’s terms. A pop musician is not a revolutionary organization, and a halftime show cannot substitute for the Young Lords’ politics, but the underlying dispute is recognizable: who possesses the authority to name a place, its people and the horizon of its liberation? Internationalism does not have to erase that authority. At its best, internationalism depends upon preserving it.
That is the connection back to Iran. Iranian prisoners should not have to become intelligible only after their struggles have been translated into categories supplied by American abolitionism, metropolitan anti-imperialism or the geopolitics of the Islamic Republic. Their own political traditions have produced languages for understanding revolution, imprisonment, feminism, labor, Palestine and anti-imperialism. The question is whether international solidarity can encounter those traditions without first deciding what they are allowed to mean.
Two archives
The Iranian tradition al-Haj Saleh’s argument implies we should be reading is not hypothetical. The archive exists, is documented and much of the material is in print. Naghmeh Sohrabi’s history of the prerevolutionary Palestine Group (Guruh-e Felestin) recovers a political world obscured by the later identification of Iranian support for Palestine with the Islamic Republic. The group consisted of young anti-Shah Marxist-Leninists, several arrested while attempting to reach Palestinian camps in Jordan and Lebanon. Their politics connected the struggle against the Pahlavi state to an anticolonial revolutionary geography running across Palestine and the Global South.
The Islamic Republic, then, did not invent Iranian solidarity with Palestine. Iranian Marxists were seeking relationships with Palestinian liberation movements before the Islamic Republic existed while opposing a domestic state they understood as bound up with imperial and class power. Their politics should be neither romanticized nor rewritten as contemporary abolitionism, many were Marxist-Leninists who believed in revolutionary state power and legitimate revolutionary coercion. The historical point lies elsewhere: opposition to an Iranian state and opposition to imperialism could belong to the same revolutionary project.
Another such relationship was forming at roughly the same moment in the United States. Manijeh Nasrabadi has reconstructed a genealogy of Afro-Iranian solidarities in which anti-Shah Iranian organizers worked alongside the SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Black Panther formations and Black student movements. Iranian activists joined campaigns around Huey Newton and struggles against racism and war, while Black radicals supported campaigns against the Shah’s political repression. These were not retrospective analogies. Iranian and Black radicals met, organized together and recognized one another politically.
The relative invisibility of these traditions cannot be explained simply by a failure of research. Sohrabi’s work is published, Nasrabadi’s work is published, and the Persian-language prison literature Shahrzad Mojab describes runs to hundreds of volumes. The deeper question is why some political traditions remain internationally legible while others become difficult to transmit. States persist in ways defeated movements often cannot. A state that inherits a revolution also inherits ministries, archives, funding, universities, publishing houses and the diplomatic apparatus through which a political tradition can be reproduced internationally. Movements defeated by that same state leave memoirs, exile presses, small archives, family memories and the recollections of survivors.
As major strands of Iranian anti-imperialism diverged after 1979, only some retained the institutional machinery of their own continuation. Many others were violently repressed, dispersed or driven into exile. In the 1988 massacre, thousands of prisoners were killed, among them members of revolutionary organizations and political generations through which Iranian struggles had been connected to Palestine and the wider Global South. The massacre was first and foremost a crime against the people who were killed. The executions also destroyed human networks through which political traditions are transmitted, debated, revised, taught and made legible to internationalists elsewhere.
A second attenuation followed in exile. Iranians who survived found that their opposition to the Islamic Republic could sound, to international ears, uncomfortably similar to Washington’s opposition to the same state, and some were discounted on precisely that ground. Political memory therefore thinned twice: first through repression, execution and dispersal, and again when the conditions of exile made some surviving voices difficult for sections of the international left to hear. Nasser Mohajer’s Voices of a Massacre belongs inside this history. The book does more than document an atrocity, he reconstructs political and intellectual worlds that state violence attempted to render invisible.
Seen from this perspective, the absence of Iranian signatories from the Guardian letter belongs to a much larger history. The problem cannot be reduced to whether one Iranian scholar should have been invited to sign. The more important question is why one lineage of Iranian anti-imperialism acquired the institutional means to reproduce itself internationally while other lineages were violently interrupted. Recovering those interrupted traditions is not an exercise in scholarly completeness. The work requires reckoning with the political conditions under which some histories become transmissible while others become fragmented.
Angela Davis stands at the hinge of those histories. Davis defended Iranian political prisoners when their jailer was a monarchy backed by Washington. Decades later, she wrote the foreword to Mohajer’s book. Her solidarity crosses the rupture of 1979 without transferring its object from prisoners to the state. She also wrote Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), a foundational text of contemporary abolitionism, which makes her signature difficult to read as a narrow humanitarian appeal on behalf of exceptionally innocent detainees. Her work poses a more radical question: why should the state’s classification of a person as criminal settle the legitimacy of confinement at all?
Her trajectory also raises a question for the critics. If defending Iranian prisoners under the US-backed Shah belonged to revolutionary anti-imperialism, why would defending prisoners under a state antagonistic to Washington become imperial complicity? Perhaps Davis has not changed the object of her solidarity. Perhaps one strand of anti-imperialism—the strand that retained its archives—has moved that object from oppressed people toward the state.
Palestine does not require Iranian silence
A practical objection remains, and the objection is often felt more strongly than argued: raising domestic repression during an imperial war can divide a movement that urgently needs unity. Hossam el-Hamalawy’s political history from Egypt suggests another possibility. Describing the mobilizations that preceded the Egyptian revolution, he observed that “the regional is local.” Egyptian demonstrations in 2000 began in solidarity with Palestinians. Protesters entered the streets against Israel and encountered Egyptian police, and confrontation with Mubarak’s security apparatus generated a further question: why was the Egyptian state repressing people mobilizing for Palestine?
Palestinian solidarity did not distract Egyptians from domestic authoritarianism, but exposed domestic authoritarianism. Nothing compelled Egyptian socialists to choose between Palestine and opposition to Mubarak, because each struggle reshaped the terms of the other. Iranian revolutionary internationalists had made a related move decades earlier, when Palestine belonged to the political world through which Iranian Marxists confronted both imperialism and the Shah. These histories do not prove that every domestic and international struggle is automatically one struggle. They demonstrate something narrower and more useful: opposition to imperial domination does not inherently require silence about domination exercised at home. Under some conditions, confronting one can deepen the struggle against the other.
What anti-imperialism is for
Prashad’s strongest argument should therefore be met at full strength. Iran’s confrontation with US-Israeli power is materially anti-hegemonic. Sanctions, military encirclement, assassinations and bombardment are real instruments of domination, and Iranian support for Palestinian resistance has had material consequences. Describing every Iranian challenge to US power as hollow would be analytically indefensible. A sharper distinction is necessary: state anti-Americanism describes a geopolitical position, while anti-imperialism, in its emancipatory sense, describes a politics. The two can overlap without becoming synonymous. A state can obstruct imperial power materially while reproducing class, gendered, national and carceral domination within its own territory, and recognizing the first relationship cannot dissolve the second.
The deeper disagreement concerns where the anti-imperialist inheritance of a revolution resides. A revolutionary state may inherit institutions, sovereignty and geopolitical commitments without becoming the exclusive bearer of the revolutionary agency of the people who made the revolution. That inheritance remains contested among workers, feminists, socialists, national minorities, prisoners and other movements whose histories may predate the state or place them directly in conflict with it. A state can inherit a revolution without owning the revolutionary agency of everyone who made the revolution possible.
This is also the point at which the political traditions discussed stop agreeing with one another, and the disagreement should be stated rather than smoothed. Marxism offers no escape from the problem. Marxism-Leninism is neither inherently anti-state nor inherently anti-carceral. Revolutionary Marxist movements have often understood capitalist imprisonment as class repression while retaining theories of legitimate coercion under revolutionary state power. The Iranian Marxists of the Palestine Group are a case in point. They were not proto-abolitionists, and reading them as such would repeat, in a friendlier register, exactly the error this essay has been objecting to: fitting Iranian political thought into a frame produced elsewhere. Many believed in revolutionary state power, and some would have distinguished revolutionary from counterrevolutionary imprisonment and defended the former. An abolitionist reading of their imprisonment therefore cannot simply claim them. Their politics present a genuine problem.
The history after 1979 sharpens rather than resolves that difficulty. A revolution against a monarchy whose prisons had become synonymous with torture produced another state capable of incarcerating and executing people drawn from revolutionary political worlds, including people whose own politics had allowed for legitimate revolutionary coercion. Two easy answers fail. The liberal answer says revolution leads to tyranny, but that conclusion explains little given the enormous racialized prison systems, colonial detention regimes, policing apparatuses and imperial militaries built by liberal capitalist states. A statist revolutionary answer fails just as badly when repression becomes legitimate merely because the state administering it holds anti-imperialist credentials. The harder question therefore remains unavoidable: what prevents a revolution from converting yesterday’s revolutionaries into tomorrow’s legitimate prisoners?
Marxism does not resolve that question alone, but neither does abolition, which has its own difficulty confronting imperialism, counterrevolution and material security. Michael Löwy supplies part of a method rather than an answer. Writing within revolutionary Marxism, he warns against two opposite failures: denying national liberation in the name of an abstract internationalism and absorbing the nationalist ideology of an oppressed nation uncritically. Revolutionary internationalism must navigate between them through concrete analysis. Iran demands precisely that discipline. Defending Iranian sovereignty against imperial war does not require identifying the Islamic Republic with the total political agency of Iranian people, while criticizing the Islamic Republic does not erase the reality of imperial aggression against Iran. Holding those propositions together is not equivocation. The difficulty belongs to the history itself.
Positionality without jurisdiction
Prashad asks why signatories based largely in the United States address Iranian prisoners rather than their own government. The question conflates two different political acts. A petition addressed to Washington makes demands upon a government; a letter addressed to prisoners establishes a relationship with prisoners. Berger’s account of solidarity makes the distinction clear. Political correspondence, friendship and shared struggle across prison walls do not substitute for organizing against the state. They are among the means by which people become participants in one another’s political worlds, and such relationships involve intimacy, risk and a willingness to remain in connection through serious disagreement.
That tradition runs through the signatory list. Davis has spent decades in prisoner-solidarity movements. Mumia signs the letter from prison. Ricardo Jiménez brings the history of Puerto Rican political imprisonment, while Berger’s own political formation was shaped by relationships with incarcerated Black radicals. The letter also condemns US-Israeli warfare and sanctions explicitly.
Prashad’s principle grows harder to sustain when applied to Iranian prisoners themselves. If wartime politics permits no position outside the binary of aggressor and resisting state, what becomes of the Iranian prisoner who rejects Israeli aggression and continues resisting her own imprisonment? Must labor struggle pause? Must opposition to execution wait? Must Kurdish, Baloch, Arab or feminist organizing become strategically subordinate until some indefinite future moment when foreign powers can no longer instrumentalize their grievances? If the answer is no, solidarity with those struggles cannot become illegitimate merely because the solidarity crosses a border.
Otherwise, empire acquires an extraordinary political power. By threatening to exploit an injustice, an imperial state could render resistance to that injustice politically suspect. Iranian women, workers, prisoners and national minorities would find themselves most constrained precisely when imperial danger becomes greatest. International solidarity cannot grant empire that veto. A responsibility to stop one’s own government from bombing Iran cannot require Iranians to surrender authority over the timing, language or content of their own struggles.
Innocence cannot determine whose life matters
Abulhawa raises another difficult question: who counts as a political prisoner, and what should international movements make of people accused of espionage, terrorism or serious crimes? Her concern exposes a real problem in the language of innocence. Political imprisonment and wrongful conviction are not equivalent categories, so estimates of ordinary wrongful conviction cannot establish the legitimacy of Iranian political imprisonment.
The abolitionist signatories challenge the premise of the question more fundamentally. Are Prisons Obsolete? did not ask merely whether innocent people were being imprisoned. Davis challenged the assumption that imprisonment should remain a naturalized institution for managing social harm at all. Gilmore likewise criticizes what she calls the problem of innocence: movements weaken themselves when opposition to state violence depends upon presenting the victim as morally blameless. Once innocence becomes the threshold of solidarity, the state retains enormous authority over which imprisoned lives remain intelligible.
Iranian prisoners are approaching a related question from an entirely different genealogy. The No to Execution Tuesdays campaign, launched in 2024 and now extending across dozens of prisons, has refused to restrict opposition to execution to celebrated political dissidents. Prisoners condemned on drug and other nonpolitical charges have entered the struggle alongside political prisoners. Calling that movement an Iranian version of American prison abolition would impose an external genealogy—the same move this essay has been arguing against. A more interesting development is taking place. The classical defense of the political prisoner holds that resistance to oppression is legitimate and the revolutionary must therefore not be treated as a criminal. The anti-execution movement raises a further question: what happens to the person whom the state successfully names criminal?
Abolitionists elsewhere have asked a related question, but Iranian prisoners are posing the question from another history and under conditions neither Davis nor Gilmore has faced. Mojab’s work on Iranian women political prisoners places the development within a longer archive: former women prisoners have produced an enormous Persian-language literature documenting collective resistance, political education, torture, execution, gendered punishment and the social worlds built inside prison, most of which remains peripheral to international abolitionist discussion. Here we can begin to see what solidarity moving in both directions might mean. Iranian prisoner politics need not become an illustration of American abolitionism, and abolitionist theory need not be discarded because its genealogy is different. Each tradition can unsettle the other.
Abulhawa’s sharpest analogy remains: Davis and Mumia would never have signed a letter in the 1970s condemning “COINTELPRO on one side and the Black Panther Party on the other.” She is right about the underlying principle. A revolutionary movement subjected to state counterinsurgency should not be placed on the same political plane as the state apparatus attempting to destroy the movement. The analogy fails because the political actors have been assigned the wrong roles. The Islamic Republic is a state. Iranian political prisoners, workers, women and oppositional movements are political subjects living under that state. Replacing the Islamic Republic with the Black Panther Party silently transfers revolutionary agency from Iranian people to the Iranian government.
That substitution contains the entire disagreement. Does anti-imperialist legitimacy reside primarily in a state because that state confronts an imperial power, or can people and movements living beneath that state retain their own anti-imperialist agency? The history of the Panthers supports the second possibility. So does the history of Iranian anti-Shah Marxists, the Young Lords, Egyptian socialists mobilizing for Palestine against Mubarak and Palestinian movements whose liberation has never been reducible to the diplomacy of states claiming to support them. The Iranian state does not exhaust the political meaning of Iran. No state ever has.
From “uplift” to relationship
The twenty-three signatories do not represent a single political tradition, and their differences should remain visible. The coalition spans Black radicalism and abolition, Marxism, Palestinian scholarship, Puerto Rican anti-colonial struggle, Chicana feminism, anti-globalization movements and multiple histories of political imprisonment. Walden Bello brings decades of opposition to US hegemony alongside resistance to authoritarian rule in the Philippines. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor situates abolition and racialized state violence within a Black liberation critique of capitalism. The signatures of Palestinian scholars Rashid Khalidi and Nadia Abu El-Haj matter for a further reason: the refusal to subordinate Iranian prisoners is articulated from within, not against, traditions shaped by the history of Palestinian dispossession. These are not political biographies easily explained by liberal interventionism.
The letter closes by asking international civil society to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices. The first demand is more radical than the second. Uplift preserves a hierarchy between the person who holds a platform and the person whose voice requires amplification, while relationship, in Berger’s sense, points toward something more reciprocal: Read Iranian prisoners. Translate them. Publish them. Argue with them. Place Iranian political-prison writing beside George Jackson, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Palestinian prisoner texts – not because their situations are interchangeable but because each tradition has theorized captivity from within a distinct history.
Bring the women who survived Iran’s prisons into sustained conversation with Davis, Gilmore and abolitionist feminism. Place Iranian Marxists who traveled toward Palestine inside histories of Black and Palestinian revolutionary internationalism. Place those killed in 1988 inside the history of revolution rather than outside the history as proof that revolutionary transformation should be abandoned. Bring No to Execution Tuesdays into international debates about abolition without assuming that Iranian prisoners are reproducing concepts generated in the United States. None of this is scholarly courtesy. The work involves repairing a political transmission that violence helped break.
Nor can that repair mean reconstructing the politics of 1970 unchanged. No pure revolutionary internationalism waits behind us for rediscovery. Iranian Marxists, Black Panthers, Palestinian revolutionaries, Puerto Rican nationalists, communists, feminists and contemporary abolitionists never shared one theory of the state. Some believed in Marxist-Leninist state power; others developed anticolonial nationalism, revolutionary socialism, anarchism or abolitionist politics. Those differences should remain visible rather than be retrospectively reconciled. The achievement lay elsewhere: movements could recognize connected struggles without requiring ideological identity or geopolitical obedience. Iranian students could oppose the Shah and US imperialism while organizing beside Black radicals. Iranian Marxists could seek relationships with Palestinian revolutionaries without surrendering their struggle against an Iranian government. Egyptian socialists could mobilize for Palestine and discover through that struggle the necessity of confronting Mubarak. Puerto Rican radicals could fight US colonialism while insisting that Puerto Rican exploiters would not constitute liberation. Black prisoners could participate in international political thought from inside American prisons.
Too much history has intervened for that internationalism simply to be resumed. Any reconstruction has to carry the unresolved conflicts of those traditions forward. Marxism must confront the persistence and legitimacy of coercion within revolutionary state projects. National liberation must confront class domination, patriarchy and internal colonialism. Abolition must confront imperialism, political economy and organized violence rather than imagining prisons in isolation. Feminism must resist both the imperial appropriation of women’s suffering and patriarchal domination inside movements resisting empire. Anti-imperialism must recover the people whose liberation once supplied its emancipatory meaning. The measure of an internationalist anti-imperialism therefore cannot finally be whether we correctly identify the most powerful state or the principal geopolitical contradiction. The harder measure is whether our practice enlarges or constrains the capacity of the people with whom we claim solidarity to organize, resist, think politically and determine their own future.
That is why the Persian matters:
ما واقعا بین دو لبه قیچی داریم بریده میشویم.
We are truly being cut between the two blades of the scissors.
The sentence does not ask us to decide that the blades are identical, and the speaker requests no neutrality between them. Its grammar turns our attention away from the powers claiming history for themselves and toward the people living inside history’s consequences. The most important question raised by the Guardian letter therefore reaches past the symmetry of its metaphor, the timing of its publication and even the absence of Iranian signatories: what would international solidarity look like if Iranian revolutionary and abolitionist thought were not merely something the global left stood in solidarity with, but something from which the global left understood that it had to learn?
Such solidarity cannot begin by deciding which parts of another people’s struggle are permissible to speak, nor can political agreement become a prerequisite for relationship. Iranian political history already offers another way: revolutionaries moving toward Palestine, students organizing beside Black radicals, women producing political thought from prison, survivors refusing the erasure of the dead and prisoners withholding their bodies from the machinery of execution. These histories offer no position safely outside the scissors. They offer something harder: a way of remaining in political relationship across profound difference without surrendering anyone to the blade that happens, at a particular moment, to appear less dangerous. Internationalism begins there, not above the struggle and not between its antagonists, but beside those who refuse to disappear inside either.
Farah Mokhtareizadeh is an Iranian-American scholar and organiser.
This article was first published on Farah Mokhtareizadeh’s Substack.
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