The Ghost in the Machine: Iranian Society and the Failure of Opposition Politics, by Mina Khanlarzadeh – 1 April 2026

From Mina’s Substack

As American and Israeli bombs fall on Iran, a question long central to Iranian political life returns with new urgency: How did we reach this point? If you walk through the bookstores of Enqelab Square in Tehran, you will find book after book organized around some version of this question. I want to ask it again now, even though, under current conditions—with civilians killed, homes and civilian infrastructure destroyed, nuclear sites struck, and water, air, and electricity themselves under threat—it is hard to look anywhere but at the geopolitical forces closing in. That investigation is necessary and must be pursued as rigorously as possible. What is less often examined—and what risks being lost under the weight of geopolitical accounting—is Iranian society itself, and the oppositional forces closest to it. My focus here is on Iranian society, which spent years trying to prevent this moment and is now too often treated as a mere backdrop to a geopolitical drama. I argue that Iranian society has been made into a ghost in the machine: present, vocal, and costly in its resistance, yet repeatedly denied recognition as a political force in its own right. That denial is one reason the present catastrophe became possible.

What the Street Was Already Saying

Over the last several years, especially after the presidency of the reformist Hassan Rouhani (2013–2021), as the limits of reform from within the state became increasingly clear, Iranians in the streets—and in statements issued by labor unions, student groups, and teachers unpaid for months—made clear that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear, military, and regional policies were not in their interest. They saw those policies as exposing society to sanctions and the threat of war. While the state insisted that “nuclear energy is our absolute right,” protesters answered with a bitter reversal: “nuclear energy is our absolute pain.” In recent years, they chanted, “Leave nuclear policy alone and do something about us”—haste’i ro raha kon, fekri be hal-e ma kon, or “Stopping nuclear energy – this is the national slogan“. Worker activists pushed the reversal further in a joint statement issued a few months after the twelve-day war of June 2025, insisting on ghani-sazi-ye zendegi, the “enrichment of life,” instead of uranium. “Water, electricity, and life are our undeniable rights,” they wrote, turning into organized political language what others had already been chanting in the streets. “Defending our livelihood is our undeniable right.” And more explicitly still: “Ballistic missiles and nuclear enrichment are not our choice; the enrichment of our lives is our undeniable right.” What began as a slogan of sovereign entitlement was turned into a language of social suffering, shifting the meaning of enrichment from uranium to livelihood, from state ambition to the material conditions of life itself.

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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.

The Ghost in the Machine: Iranian Society and the Failure of Opposition Politics, by Mina Khanlarzadeh – 1 April 2026

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