Why Monarchist Symbols Are Filling Iran’s Political Void, by Mina Khanlarzadeh – 28 January 2026

From Mina’s Substack

Recent discussions explain the visibility of pro-monarchy slogans through external forces such as Israel’s misinformation campaigns, satellite television, and foreign-funded media. By locating the explanation largely outside Iran, these accounts avoid asking how and why such symbols have become visible within Iranian society itself. This habit has a longer history in writing about Iranian political thought: intellectual currents critical of the Pahlavi state in the 1960s and 1970s have often been described as imports from Germany, while today some critics claim that monarchist opposition to the Islamic Republic has been manufactured by Israel. In both cases, foreign origin substitutes for historical explanation. Others dismiss monarchism as a marginal reaction born of despair rather than political substance. But treating monarchism either as an artificial imposition or as a political mistake keeps harder questions off the table: if this support is merely a foreign mirage or a fringe cry of despair, why has it persisted and grown for nearly a decade—becoming a visible language of rejection in some streets—while other political traditions have failed to offer a convincing alternative? I argue that to grasp this moment, we need to read it historically and attend to the emotional responses shaped by lived experience, rather than attributing it to external manipulation alone. I begin by treating collective emotions not merely as immediate reactions, but as clues to how people make sense of political history. I then trace a brief history of recent dissent and conclude by asking how these movements might be better coordinated and more clearly expressed.

Several accounts from Iran in recent days describe public anger as the immediate force driving people into the streets, despite the fatal risks involved. Over the past decades, each wave of protest and its demands has been met with state violence intended to produce fear and silence, even as the underlying reasons for protest have worsened. As a result, anger has accumulated over time and hardened into a durable sense of repulsion directed at the political and social world the state has created. A well-known example helps clarify how these collective emotions take shape. The killing of Jina Amini provoked immediate anger, fueling mass protests that demanded accountability, named a wrong, and showed how harm ran through the state’s entire structure—from street-level repression to violence inflicted in detention. What many came to reject was no longer a single policy or institution, but the entire world that made such brutality possible. In this shift, anger at specific injuries hardened into repulsion toward a political order experienced as uninhabitable. This repulsion reaches beyond the Islamic Republic’s leaders and policies. It extends to its language, imagery, and rituals, and to the world it has built over decades. While anger has driven political action and public articulation against the establishment, repulsion has produced something else: a refusal to inhabit the state’s universe or imagine a future under its rule.

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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.

Why Monarchist Symbols Are Filling Iran’s Political Void, by Mina Khanlarzadeh – 28 January 2026

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