1. The Struggle Over the Meaning of Anti-Imperialism
War not only tears apart bodies, territories, homes, and the conditions of collective life; it also fragments political organisations, collectives, friendships, and families, at times even shared horizons of struggle. Amid this destruction, political and theoretical rifts have deepened over the meaning of imperialism and its relation to the reproduction of global capital, the relationship between foreign war and domestic repression, the possibility of solidarity among heterogeneous struggles, and the conditions for an emancipatory politics that neither submits to power blocs nor postpones struggle until a “more suitable time”. Fundamental questions concerning the meaning of anti-imperialist struggle, anti-war politics, and internationalist solidarity have therefore returned to the center of political struggles.
This collective text responds to this conjuncture from the standpoint of a section of the Iranian left in diaspora and exile, whose point of departure is the historical experience of Iran and the Middle East and whose horizon is the rethinking of anti-imperialism and internationalism from the standpoint of a politics of liberation. It is written at a moment when imperialist warmongers, the colonial state of Israel, the far right, authoritarian nationalisms, and repressive states each, in different ways, appropriate, distort, and weaponise the language of liberation and resistance for their own political ends.
Our point of departure is simple: an anti-war and anti-imperialist politics cannot be satisfied with replacing one power bloc with another. Following through the implications of this position, however, requires conceptual mediation, summoning history into the present, revisiting past experiences, and confronting questions for which there are no ready-made answers. Such a politics must stand against imperialist war, sanctions, and regime-change projects while simultaneously confronting the repression and killing carried out by authoritarian states, as well as their appropriation of emancipatory struggles.
2. The Global War Regime and the Violent Reconfiguration of the Middle East
We live in an era in which contemporary capitalism has normalised war as a mechanism for the reproduction of the global order, extending it beyond theatres of bombardment, scorched earth, destroyed cities, and the bodies of children to encompass sanctions and financial warfare, blockades and economic siege, cyber sabotage, media warfare, tariff wars, the militarisation of society, border control, the repression of migrants, surveillance, securitisation, and attacks on the infrastructures through which everyday life is reproduced. War is no longer a rupture or an exceptional moment within the existing order; it has become constitutive of the existing order itself, a global war regime.
What is unfolding in Iran and across the region is not simply the spillover of previous crises, another episode in the long history of colonialism and occupation, or a series of isolated wars. Rather, it is a set of interconnected processes driving the violent imperialist reconfiguration of the Middle East and North Africa. Since 7 October 2023, this process has taken on new dimensions through Israel’s systematic genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the occupation of southern Lebanon and repeated attacks on Beirut, the de facto annexation of parts of Syria, the bombing of Yemen, and the US–Israeli aggression against Iran.
The Israeli and US military aggression against the peoples of the region is an integral part of a project to restructure the Middle East along political, economic, and social lines within the framework of war capitalism — a project aimed at consolidating a regional order centred on Israel and aligned with the transregional hegemonic objectives of the United States. This process was articulated by Trump in 2020 through the Abraham Accords as a “New Middle East” and is today advancing in a more naked and bloody form: the intensification of settler colonialism in the West Bank and the genocide in Gaza alongside the normalisation of relations with Israel, the integration of Gulf capital into Israeli security and logistical networks, the control of regional corridors and domination over infrastructures of circulation, and ultimately the burial of the cause of Palestinian liberation.
Iran lies at the heart of this violent reconfiguration. The war against Iran and the genocide in Gaza are therefore not two separate episodes, but are embedded within a configuration that connects war, capital, security, borders, racism, occupation, and repression. An anti-war position must begin from this structural interconnectedness, rather than separating different theatres of war or treating any of them as an exception.
3. From Sovereignty to the Right to Self-Determination
The forty-day US–Israeli war against Iran, which began on 28 February 2026, was presented in Washington and Tel Aviv as a campaign against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme, missile capabilities, drones, and regional military networks. Yet the reality of the war contradicted this narrative from its very first hours. Homes, schools, clinics, factories, research centres, energy infrastructures, transportation networks, and infrastructures vital to everyday life were targeted. By the time of the fragile ceasefire of 8 April, at least 3,375 people had been killed and 25,000 injured; approximately 3.2 million people had become internally displaced, and more than 125,630 civilian structures had been damaged, including more than 100,000 residential units and 23,500 commercial properties. Two of the most devastating attacks during the opening hours of the war, in which some of the most lethal American weapons were tested for the first time, struck the towns of Minab and Lamerd: 168 children were killed in Minab, and several dozen people in Lamerd. The targeting of oil, gas, petrochemical, steel, port, electricity, and transportation infrastructures, together with the complete shutdown of the internet — a vital infrastructure for employment and livelihoods for large numbers of people — intensified the employment crisis. According to reports, approximately two million jobs were lost. What was falsely presented as “precision strikes” against “military centres” or a “war against the regime” in practice targeted bodies, cities, livelihoods, and the future of multiple generations. This war must also be situated within a longer history of interventions: the assassination of nuclear personnel, digital sabotage, attacks on sensitive facilities, destruction of vital infrastructures, and economic sanctions that have brutally affected access to medicine, labour, food, energy, employment, and everyday life.
The defence of one’s habitat, and more broadly the defence and preservation of collective life, constitute undeniable rights of peoples. Yet there is a fundamental distinction between this right and what is called “patriotic defence”, which often becomes a political code for defending the rulers of the Islamic Republic. From the perspective of the interests of the people, sovereignty means the right to self-determination, autonomy, and the capacity of people to decide the form of their shared social existence. When sovereignty and the right to self-defence are detached from this essential condition of autonomy, they can easily be absorbed into the language of national security and state authority — the legal vocabulary of state power. Emptied of their meaning, the autonomous self-defence of society gives way to the defence of the apparatus of class repression and domination: the ruling political, administrative, and military machine.
With the outbreak of war, this state-centred, nationalist, and securitised conception of defence and sovereignty was further intensified in Iran. Within this framework, the defence of borders, military forces, territorial integrity, and an abstract unity of the nation displaced the defence of collective life itself and the shared spaces of existence. In other words, the defence by people of their homes, environments, social relations, and the material conditions for reproducing their lives was pushed aside in the name of defending the state and the nation.
Under such conditions, social and political rights become more than ever subordinated to state rationality. Demands for autonomy, equality, and self-determination — particularly among oppressed nationalities such as Kurds, Turks, Arabs, and Balochis, whose lives and political activity have long been securitised — are criminalised in the name of national security and the threat of “separatism”.
Against the political logic that identifies sovereignty with the state’s command over the realm of life, we understand sovereignty as the capacity of people to govern, reproduce, and transform their shared existence — a capacity inseparable from autonomy and the right to self-determination across interconnected individual, social, ethnic, national, gendered, and sexual dimensions. Our approach is feminist and centred on social reproduction. From this perspective, the point of departure is not sanctified borders, but lived territories: bodies, homes, neighbourhoods, land and water, infrastructures, reproductive labour, social relations, and networks of care that sustain the continuity of life. The struggle against imperialist bombardment, sanctions, occupation, and destruction cannot be separated from the struggle for self-determination, the protection of life, and resistance against relations of accumulation, exploitation, and domination. A state whose sovereignty is already constituted through patriarchy, chauvinism, and securitisation does not protect society by preserving itself; rather, it restricts collective autonomy and subordinates the resources of life to the survival of its own power.
The consequences of war and militarisation are never distributed evenly across society. Groups already subjected to dispossession, discrimination, and state repression — women, queer people, migrants, the working class, and oppressed nationalities — bear a disproportionate burden of displacement, insecurity, care, survival, and rebuilding. This is precisely what is occurring today, as renewed clashes following a fragile ceasefire have once again transformed Iran’s impoverished, peripheral, and border regions in the south, from Bandar Abbas and Sirik to Bushehr and Chabahar, into major sites of violence. These are regions whose populations were already confronting discrimination, deprivation, and the systemic denial of the basic means of sustaining life, and which must now also bear the costs of the continuation of war and destruction. From this perspective, defending the sovereignty of collective life, or defending one’s habitat, does not mean defending an illegitimate ruling state. It means defending the material and social conditions of life against bombardment, occupation, militarisation, dispossession, internal colonialism, repression, and state racism. What deserves defence is not the sovereignty of dictators, but the capacity of people to construct, preserve, and transform the conditions of their shared existence. Sovereignty becomes popular only when the power to impose death and demand sacrifice is removed from the monopoly exercized by the ruling class and the state, and when decisions concerning security, resources, and the shared future are returned to society itself.
The existence of an anti-popular and repressive state does not in any way justify or provide a licence for imperialist aggression. Likewise, the preservation of borders produced through colonial and imperialist histories, centralism, authoritarian homogenisation, and the repression of peoples does not, by itself, constitute the protection of society.
On this basis, a feminist anti-war politics neither allows the lives of the people of Iran to be destroyed in the name of imperialist “liberation”, nor accepts that opposition to imperialism should become a shield for authoritarian statism. Such a politics challenges the state’s claim to appropriate bodies in the name of the nation: its right to send men to war, impose upon women the reproductive labour of sustaining the nation, control sexuality and reproduction, and sacrifice certain populations as the price of state survival.
4. The State of Emergency as a Mode of Governance
The US–Israeli attack on Iran occurred only a few weeks after the bloody suppression of the 2026 January uprising, a nationwide revolt that began in late December 2025 amid deepening economic hardship and rapidly developed into a political uprising against the state, before being met with mass killings, mass arrests, and a nationwide internet blackout, particularly on 8 and 9 January. The attack led, alongside widespread destruction, to an intensification of domestic repression. From the first days of the war, internet access was severely restricted. According to NetBlocks reports, nationwide internet shutdowns and disruptions continued for more than 1,272 hours, or over 54 days, making it the longest recorded nationwide internet shutdown in the world. Over this broader period of intensified repression, at least 35 prisoners were executed on political and security-related charges, including detainees from the January 2026 uprising, such as a 19-year-old arrested during the January protests, while at least 3,646 people were arrested on political and security-related charges.
Contrary to imperialist propaganda, war brought neither freedom, nor security, nor democracy; rather, it destroyed vital infrastructures, deepened the crisis of social reproduction, intensified class antagonisms and the impoverishment of society, while also consolidating the military-security structure of the ruling order. Following the Memorandum of Understanding between the Islamic Republic and the United States, Iran has entered a condition defined not by peace but by the entanglement of destruction, insecurity, siege, inflation, unemployment, repression, suspension, and precarity.
In this situation, the state deploys the external threat and the resulting state of emergency as an instrument of governance. It closes political space, securitises society, and defines any opposition as “treason”, “espionage”, “collaboration with the enemy”, or “weakening the internal front”.
This mechanism is not new; rather, it belongs to long-standing models of global governance and that of the Islamic Republic. During the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), the same dynamic unfolded. A devastating and attritional war enabled the government to accelerate the concentration of power, expand the security apparatus, consolidate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and militarise society. At the same time, popular councils and revolutionary left and communist forces were suppressed; labour discipline was intensified; and the process of othering and repressing oppressed nationalities accelerated. Popular revolutionary institutions that had emerged from the 1979 Revolution and survived its first years were dismantled under the pressure of war and under the justification of “Sacred Defence”. Thousands of communist and Mojāhedin-e Ḵalq political prisoners were executed in prisons under this state of exception, an event inscribed in collective memory as the “bloody massacres of the 1980s”. Through this process, the authority of the emerging military-bureaucratic state expanded across the territory of Iran. In this very context, the IRGC transformed from an ideological military force into one of the country’s most powerful economic, security, and political actors.
This pattern continues today. Whenever the crisis of legitimacy re-emerges, whenever women, workers, students, teachers, retirees, oppressed nationalities and peoples, and justice-seeking families enter the political arena, the external threat is mobilised to shift the political agenda, suffocate dissent, shut down the internet, securitize the streets, and discredit the voices of victims. The sixteen-day hunger strike of more than 1,500 death-row prisoners in Ghezel Hesar prison (13–28 July 2026), protesting the rapid increase in executions, with 886 cases since the beginning of the calendar year, is a clear example of this condition. Alongside this, the Islamic Republic intensified its attacks on the camps and centres of Kurdish opposition parties from Rojhelat (Eastern Kurdistan, the Kurdish regions of Iran), based in exile in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (Bashur), including civilian spaces such as camp schools and libraries. The latest of these attacks resulted in the killing of nine Peshmerga members of the Komala party.
In such conditions, where people’s lives are held hostage between external threats and internal security logics, an anti-war position cannot be limited to condemning imperialist aggression. It must also expose the internal mechanisms through which war and the atmosphere of war are transformed into instruments of violent and widespread repression. When repression, executions, imprisonment, and torture in Iran have not been suspended because of war but have instead intensified, one cannot ask justice-seeking families to suspend their struggle against these forms of violence in the name of war.
Just as we consider the securitisation and criminalisation of activists and organisations expressing solidarity with Palestine in the West to be a form of extending war into society, we cannot ignore the same mechanism when it is deployed by the Islamic Republic against dissidents, activists, and independent organisations.
Anti-war politics acquires meaning through simultaneous resistance to external aggression and domestic authoritarianism, rather than through protecting one side in the name of opposing the other.
5. From Asymmetry of Power to the Fallacy of Hierarchising Struggles
US imperialism, from the 1953 coup in Iran to the wars, interventions, sanctions, and security architectures of recent decades, has played a decisive role in destroying collective life across the Middle East and North Africa. Israel is a settler-colonial state whose domination over Palestinians has been reproduced over decades through occupation, dispossession, settlement expansion, siege, displacement, and war. The Islamic Republic has its own history of imprisonment, executions, dismantling workers’ councils, subordinating women, violence against oppressed nationalities, repression of its opponents, and regional projection of power. These histories are intertwined, but the states in question do not occupy the same position within the hierarchies of global domination.
Despite the growing multipolarisation of the global order, the United States remains the world’s greatest imperialist power: a power whose military, financial, technological, legal, media, and institutional capacities far exceed those of the Islamic Republic, and which has the capacity to organise war, sanctions, and intervention on a global scale. However, the world of domination is never a simple pyramid with a single summit and countless victims below. Power and oppression are unevenly distributed; their forms, intensities, and centres shift according to geography, class, nationality, gender, and historical position. For many peoples around the world, the United States remains the greatest external threat. Yet for societies directly confronted with debt, extraction, infrastructure expansion, capital flows, and the influence of Chinese states and corporations, Chinese imperialism may constitute a more immediate and decisive reality. The rapid expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative and the growth of investment networks and dependent agreements demonstrate that global power cannot be understood solely through the existence of a single super-imperialist center.
However, recognising asymmetries of power must not lead us to ignore the anti-popular character shared by different forms of power. It must not become a justification for constructing hierarchies between the suffering of peoples under one form of power and those under another, or for assigning greater political value and legitimacy to some struggles while diminishing others. In other words, the military and economic superiority of an imperialist power cannot become a principle for politically prioritising some struggles while suspending others. Likewise, one cannot argue that because the United States is the dominant imperial power, the struggle against the Islamic Republic must be postponed; that because imperialist war and foreign regime change are real dangers, radical critique of the state must wait for another time; or that because power relations are asymmetric, suffering and resistance should themselves be divided into primary and secondary struggles. The United States, Israel, and the Islamic Republic are neither equivalent nor identical. They do not possess the same destructive capacity, nor the same capacity to shape the global capitalist market. But differences in the scale and form of power grant none of them political immunity. Imperialist domination does not erase relations of exploitation and repression within Iran, just as the violence of the Islamic Republic does not diminish the reality of war, occupation, and Western imperialist domination.
The slogan “Neither the Islamic Republic, nor imperialism” does not express an equivalence between these two forces, and it must not be reduced to a mathematical formula for weighing two evils. The question is not to place crimes on two sides of a scale and adopt a safe moral distance from both. The question is to reject a political logic that presents the surrender of people’s agency to one power as necessary in order to confront another. US imperialism and the Israeli colonial state are enemies of the peoples of the region. The repressive actions of the Islamic Republic have also restricted the possibility of liberation for oppressed classes in the region. Emancipatory politics does not begin by searching for a “principal enemy” in order to postpone other struggles. It begins with the capacity to maintain the independence of struggles themselves.
6. The State–Society Divide under the Siege of Two Discourses: From Imperialist Appropriation to Campist Denial
In recent years, Iran has lived through an intense cycle of mass uprisings, external threats, and imperialist aggression. The Jina uprising of 2022 was the culmination of rebellions and social struggles that had intensified since at least 2017, taking new forms through the November 2019 protests known as “Bloody November”, and developing through student movements, workers’ strikes, teachers’ and retirees’ struggles, resistance in Kurdistan and Baluchistan, and the struggles of Arab communities over water and environmental crises. Then, after Israel’s twelve-day war against Iran in June 2025, in the bloody January 2026 uprising the state killed at least 4,000 people in just over two nights. Only six weeks later, the US–Israeli imperialist aggression began.
The threat of war had loomed over Iran for years. But after 7 October 2023 and the regional expansion of the genocidal war in Gaza, it shifted from a permanent horizon into a tangible and terrifying reality.
Within this conjuncture, imperial warfare and domestic repression are not two separate events, but two distinct yet intertwined logics. The escalation of geopolitical tensions creates the conditions for internal securitisation and repression, while the real fractures between society and the state are instrumentalized by regime-change projects and translated into the language of war. Again, the entanglement of these two logics does not mean that they are identical, nor that one can be reduced to the consequence of the other.
The narratives of “maximum pressure”, “targeted sanctions”, and regime change rely upon a fantasy of an absolute separation between the state and society. War is represented as though state power could be sanctioned, isolated, assassinated, or bombed without destroying the infrastructures through which people’s social lives are reproduced. “Smart sanctions”, “precision strikes”, and a war against “the regime” rather than the people are all different expressions of the fantasy of a “good war”. Yet war and sanctions, by targeting financial networks, energy systems, transportation infrastructures, healthcare, communications, and public administration, destroy precisely those infrastructures through which social life is reproduced.
This logic is also accompanied by a colonial-temporal epistemology of history. Within this discourse, the Islamic Republic is not understood as an authoritarian formation within contemporary capitalism, shaped by the contradictions of the global order, but rather as an external aberration, an abnormal entity, and a remnant of a pre-capitalist world. Iran is expelled from “our” time and relegated to a supposedly backward geography where violence can restore it to its “natural” place. The significance of Donald Trump’s statement on 1 April 2026, “sending them back to the Stone Age, where they belong”, lies precisely in the phrase “where they belong”. This is a colonial politics in which the historical time of particular peoples and territories is assigned to a supposedly pre-modern past in order to make violence against them appear natural. Within this logic, bombardment is not only the destruction of space; it is also an attempt to “return” the Other to a time that colonial power has already designated for them.
Yet the divide between state and society in Iran is not imaginary, nor is it invented by imperialism. It is a real historical antagonism, but imperialist discourse detaches the rift from its material history and instrumentalizes it to justify a war represented as targeting only the “regime”, as though state and society were two independent realities and the former could be destroyed through war without leaving the latter wounded, impoverished, displaced, and devastated.
This same real antagonism is, on the other hand, denied or minimised by campist discourse. (By campism we mean a bloc-based politics organised around the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”: a politics that defends any state or force opposed to the West regardless of its political content, social character, or internal relations of domination.) For instance, the anger and deep frustration of the January 2026 protesters in Iran were not the product of a “foreign operation”. Yet one of the first responses of the Islamic Republic, as well as of sections of campist discourse, was to reduce the protesters to “Mossad agents”.
Here we encounter two opposing ideological operations, both of which detach the real antagonism between society and the state from its material history. Imperialist discourse transforms this fracture into a technology of intervention; campist discourse, reversing the same logic, subordinates the antagonism between society and the state to the contradiction with imperialist powers, elevated to the status of the supposedly “primary contradiction”, thereby rendering other struggles secondary and peripheral. The first exploits social suffering and anger in order to legitimize war. The second, because this same suffering and anger might be appropriated by imperialism, denies its autonomy and historical truth. In both narratives, the people, and especially rebellious subaltern classes, are reduced to “collateral damage” in a supposedly more important conflict.
Within campist logic, repression becomes merely a defensive reaction by the Islamic Republic against imperialism; class misery becomes solely the result of US sanctions; popular uprisings become foreign infiltration; and the diversity of struggles within the diaspora is reduced to right-wing monarchism. This is not to deny or minimize the very real danger posed by Israeli support for far-right and Iranian regime-change forces. Imperialist projects openly seek to appropriate social anger both inside and outside Iran. Yet none of these realities negates the legitimacy of the struggles of people who have risen against poverty, repression, discrimination, and a stolen future. Reducing a social uprising to the agency of intelligence services erases its material history and denies the agency of oppressed people.
Imperialist appropriation of popular protests does not invalidate those protests, just as the Islamic Republic’s appropriation of the Palestinian cause does not erase the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle. Therefore, the question is how to maintain the material and political independence of struggles in the midst of imperialist attempts to appropriate them based on the fantasy of “attacking the regime without destroying society” and campist denial of the antagonism between Iranian society and its rulers.
7. Antagonisms Erased from Geopolitical Maps: The Material History of Accumulation, Repression, and Resistance in Iran, and the Right to “Revolution from Below”
The accumulated contradictions within Iran cannot be reduced to the Islamic Republic’s relations with the United States and Israel. The Islamic Republic does not exist outside the global capitalist order, even when it is in conflict, competition, or antagonism with particular imperialist powers. Its recent history, likewise, is not a history of resistance to capitalism but, on the contrary, one of deepening violent forms of accumulation, exploitation, dispossession, and the expansion of a predatory capitalism.
US sanctions are among the most destructive weapons of contemporary warfare. Their power does not derive solely from the decision of one state. Rather, it rests upon the dominant position of the US dollar, control over global financial and banking networks, their extraterritorial reach, and the capacity to punish third-party companies, banks, and states. This monetary and financial hegemony allows the United States, without formally declaring war, to disrupt flows of credit, trade, medicine, and technology, as well as access to the global market, while imposing the costs of its geopolitical decisions upon the daily lives of millions.
However, an intensifying factor must not be mistaken for the sole cause. Sanctions have deepened and reconfigured class domination in Iran, rather than creating it. Plunder and dispossession, economic liberalisation, rentier privatisation, the commodification of public services, and the deregulation and precarisation of labour are rooted in the history of the Islamic Republic itself, especially after the end of the Iran–Iraq War in 1988. Many of these processes were already underway well before the major sanctions escalations of the 2010s and were subsequently intensified and reshaped by them. Sanctions have devastated the economy, expanded clientelism, black markets, rent-seeking, smuggling, and the security economy, while increasing pressure on working people. But class relations and mechanisms of repression against the oppressed preceded them.
The Quds Force, transnational networks of power, and oligarchic networks within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps form part of a broader architecture in which the concentration of wealth within quasi-state institutions, foundations (bonyads), and military-economic complexes is bound up with processes of dispossession and privatisation. In many cases, privatisation did not mean the retreat of the state, but rather the transfer of public assets to quasi-state institutions and networks connected to centers of power. At the same time, an order has been imposed upon the working class in which the costs of living increasingly approach global price levels, while wages remain locally determined and suppressed within an economy structured around temporary and precarious labour contracts.
Therefore, the eruption of Iran’s social and political crises cannot be explained solely through economic factors, nor can the economic crisis be attributed only to sanctions. Narratives that attribute all misery in Iran to a “Western-oriented bourgeoisie”, “compradors”, or the reformist faction often function as a shield that absolves the IRGC, foundations, rentier networks, the religious-military oligarchy, and the entire ruling class of the Islamic Republic from responsibility. A class analysis must ask: Who has benefited from sanctions, scarcity, and rentier privatisation? Who has had access to foreign currency, international trade, and major contracts? And who has paid the price of crisis through poverty, unemployment, migration, and repression?
This political economy is inseparable from a long history of elimination and repression: from the purge of communists and revolutionary democrats to liberals and reformists within the ruling bloc; from the first assaults to impose compulsory hijab on women in March 1979 to the suppression of the Jina, Jiyan, Azadî (Woman, Life, Freedom) uprising in 2022–2023; from the dismantling of workers’ councils alongside the establishment of the Islamic Republic to the massacre of thousands of political prisoners in the bloody summer of 1988; and from the violent suppression of the July 1999 student uprising and the chain murders of intellectuals and dissidents to the crushing of the Green Movement in 2009. This history also encompasses a long continuum of humiliation, discrimination, and exploitation directed against Afghan migrants and Afghan-Iranian citizens, a history that cannot be explained through the opposition between the Islamic Republic and imperialism.
To this history must also be added the “civil war” waged by the Islamic counter-revolution against nationally oppressed peoples, including Turkmen and Arab communities, as well as Khomeini’s decree of jihad against Kurdistan on 19 August 1979. The deployment of tanks and helicopters, summary trials lasting only minutes, and mass executions targeted a region that, under the slogan “Autonomy for Kurdistan, Democracy for Iran”, had become one of the most important tests of the meaning of the 1979 Revolution and of the possibility of a democratic future, as well as a bastion against the monopolisation of power by Islamist forces. During the first months after the fall of the Shah’s dictatorship, Kurdistan and Turkmen Sahra experienced some of the most remarkable forms of popular self-government, political participation, and organised resistance, experiences that the newly established Islamic Republic deemed necessary to drown in blood in order to consolidate its authority.
This trajectory continued in later decades: from the bloody November 2019 uprising, when protests against the tripling of petrol prices were met with mass killing, most notably through the deployment of heavy machine guns against Arab communities in the marshlands of Mahshahr; to the killing of more than 220 children during the suppression of the January 2026 uprising, described by Mohammad Habibi, spokesperson for the Coordination Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations, as “an entire school of children”. These are the histories of accumulated antagonisms which, although mediated by global processes, cannot be reduced to those processes.
The Islamic Republic was not born merely from the overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy, which had been an ally of US imperialism. It was equally the product of the violent elimination of forces that had themselves formed part of the revolutionary bloc and stood at the forefront of anti-imperialist struggles. The campist narrative subordinates this class, gendered, national, and social history to the opposition between Iran and the United States, as if the Islamic Republic were synonymous with Iran, the state with society, and sovereignty with the people.
Within this framework, political forces are not evaluated according to their position within material relations of class and state power, or their relation to domination and emancipation, but according to their relationship with one of the competing power blocs. “The enemy of my enemy” becomes a potential ally, while social antagonisms within each camp are expected to wait at the gates of history until the opposition between the camps has been resolved.
This logic merges with a form of inverted Orientalism. Although apparently anti-Western, it nevertheless continues to treat great powers as the only subjects of history. Peoples of the Global South are regarded either as instruments and objects of Western power or as forces expected to become foot soldiers for their own anti-Western states. No space remains for independent political agency outside these two poles. Women and queer people, workers and precarious workers, students and the unemployed, Kurds and Turks, Balochis and Ahwazi Arabs, religious minorities and non-religious populations, Afghan citizen-migrants, residents of urban peripheries, political prisoners and exiles, environmental activists and trade unionists, whenever they appear independently of the state and outside the official national-security narrative, are accused of being pro-Western, collaborating with foreign powers, or lacking political awareness. Campism makes the “South within the Global South” invisible precisely when it claims to defend the Global South.
If Iranian women and queer people are transformed within Western liberal feminism into “civilisational victims”, with their suffering instrumentalised to justify sanctions, war, Islamophobia, state racism, or bans on the hijab in Western countries, the Islamic Republic and its campist supporters similarly cast feminist critique as Westoxification (Gharbzadegi), betrayal, or collaboration with imperialism.
In both narratives, through different mechanisms and within unequal relations of power, women and queer people are deprived of political agency: first by imperialism, which appropriates their suffering, and again by those who deny their resistance in the name of anti-imperialism. For this reason, one of our political responsibilities is to reclaim feminism and “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” from these two forms of appropriation: on the one hand, the imperialist appropriation of women’s and queer people’s suffering to justify imperial warfare; on the other, the denial and delegitimation of feminism in the name of anti-imperialism. For us, “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” is not merely a slogan of protest against the Islamic Republic. It expresses an emancipatory political horizon grounded in the autonomy and political agency of oppressed peoples.
The same logic applies to national oppression. The historical irony is that sections of the Islamic Republic’s supporters and Israel-backed far-right monarchists converge in their denial of national oppression. Through shared invocations of “separatism” and “Balkanisation”, they seek to silence the voices of oppressed nationalities and deny their right to revolution within a strikingly similar political framework. This convergence demonstrates that recognising national oppression cannot be reduced to a false dichotomy between preserving territorial integrity and supporting foreign intervention. The struggle against national oppression can become emancipatory only by breaking with centralism while preserving its political independence from attempts by Israel and the United States to instrumentalize these divisions and use them to legitimize imperialist war.
8. Neither Absolute Enmity nor Complete Alignment: Contradiction, Negotiation, and the Politics of Survival of the Islamic Republic vis-à-vis the West
Even the history of the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy does not conform to the myth of an absolute and continuous confrontation with the West. From the secret acquisition of US weapons during the Iran-Iraq War, including through Israeli mediation in the Iran-Contra affair, known in Iran as the McFarlane affair, to temporary cooperation between Iran and the United States in 2001 following the fall of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein when their interests contradictorily converged; from open and secret negotiations during moments of crisis to attempts to attract foreign investment after the JCPOA; and, more recently, to cooperation between Iranian authorities and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in arranging the deportation of more than 100 Iranians from the United States in 2025 and early 2026, this relationship has always combined hostility and competition with negotiation, bargaining, and periodic cooperation.
The project of deeper integration into the global market and the attraction of foreign capital was not merely imposed “externally” upon the Islamic Republic. Technocratic and market-oriented blocs within the ruling class actively pursued this project.
The contradiction between the Islamic Republic and the United States and Israel is real. But it is not a metaphysical, unified, or unchanging principle. This contradiction is constantly reshaped according to the balance of forces, the imperatives of regime survival, conflicting interests among ruling blocs, and the regional position of the state. A government that has repeatedly accepted negotiations, agreements, tactical retreats, and temporary convergences with foreign powers has maintained far stricter red lines against the independent organisation of women, workers, oppressed nationalities, justice-seeking families, and political dissidents. This very discrepancy demonstrates that the politics of the state cannot simply be inferred from its official rhetoric.
At the same time, the Islamic Republic’s hostility towards the United States and Israel must not be reduced simply to a “useful enmity”. A real opposition and its political instrumentalisation can exist simultaneously. The United States and Israel have used the threat posed by the Islamic Republic to militarise the region, expand arms sales, and consolidate security alliances. The Islamic Republic, for its part, has used the real threat posed by the United States and Israel to securitise society, expand its regional power in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, repress opponents inside and outside Iran, and impose a forced national unity upon society.
Opposition to war cannot lead to the suspension of the history of struggles of the Iranian people. Likewise, defending these struggles does not provide any licence for their imperialist appropriation. Our social and political position as people connected to this geography, a position formed through precisely this history of struggle, requires us to insist on the independence of these struggles from both logics: neither war against society in the name of confronting the state, nor defence of the state in the name of confronting imperialism.
9. Palestine, the Axis of Resistance, and the Contradictions of State-Centered Anti-Imperialism
Placing the real antagonisms of Iranian society at the center of our analysis is neither an arbitrary choice nor merely a moral gesture, even though a politics grounded in ethics is not only legitimate but necessary. Rather, it emerges from our social position and historical experience. Our position in diaspora and exile has been shaped through our connection to sites of violence and histories of struggle within the geography of Iran. Yet this position does not entail retreating from the question of Palestine, nor does it mean relativising the colonial and imperialist violence of Israel and its Western backers.
Occupation, apartheid, siege, and genocidal war against Palestinians are undeniable material realities. The issue is not replacing Iran with Palestine or Palestine with Iran. The issue is understanding the relationship between emancipatory struggles and states that seek to present themselves as the exclusive representatives of peoples and their aspirations. From this perspective, the relationship between the Islamic Republic and Palestinian resistance constitutes one of the central sources of confusion in contemporary debates about Iran.
At a moment when independent left forces in Iran committed to a path beyond both imperialism and authoritarianism are denied even the right to organise an independent demonstration in support of Palestine, and when any form of independent organisation can immediately face repression, reclaiming the Palestinian cause from its monopolisation by the Islamic Republic becomes part of any politics of liberation. This means defending the principle that Palestine, like every emancipatory struggle, belongs to its people, not to states or power blocs seeking to transform it into an instrument of domestic repression.
A misunderstanding of what is called the “Axis of Resistance” can also lead to decisive analytical errors. The “Axis of Resistance” is neither simply a network of “proxy forces” taking orders from Tehran, nor a unified emancipatory bloc. It is a heterogeneous formation composed of state, quasi-state, and non-state actors with different histories, social bases, interests, and varying degrees of autonomy. One part of this formation, in Palestine, operates within an anti-colonial struggle, while another, in Iran, functions within a context of internal colonial domination against oppressed nationalities. Its constituent forces have emerged through specific histories of imperialist occupation, civil war, state collapse, and social contradictions, and cannot therefore be reduced to passive instruments controlled by the Islamic Republic. At the same time, these forces are embedded within a military and security network in which Tehran has played a central role in financing, arming, organising, and providing strategic direction. Some of these forces have genuinely fought against occupation and colonial domination, while others, together with the Islamic Republic, particularly during the Syrian war, have participated in repression and violence against the people. The simplistic language of “proxies” is therefore insufficient for understanding this complex formation, and the language of “resistance” does not absolve its constituent forces of their contradictions.
The Islamic Republic has provided material support to parts of the Palestinian resistance while it has instrumentalised the Palestinian cause as part of its doctrine of “strategic depth”, and the imperatives of regime survival and regional power projection. Resistance against an external power, by itself, does not exempt any force from examination of its internal relations of power, its relationship to society, or its forms of rule.
Syria represents one of the clearest expressions of this contradiction. It is impossible to defend the “Axis of Resistance” without confronting the role the Islamic Republic played in sustaining the Assad regime through violence, a regime that responded to a popular uprising with imprisonment, torture, bombardment, siege, and displacement. Iran’s policy in Syria was based on protecting an ally, maintaining strategic depth, and expanding aligned military networks. This demonstrates that the language of resistance, when detached from concrete relations of power, can itself become an instrument of domination in other geographies. What signifies resistance and liberation in one geography can become an instrument of repression and domination elsewhere. Names cannot substitute for an analysis of actual relations of power.
This critique must not lead to an inverted exceptionalism concerning Iran. The role of the United States and Israel in occupation, genocide, and the militarisation of the region remains central. Yet the centrality of this violence does not erase regional powers from history. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in Yemen, the UAE in Sudan and the Horn of Africa, Turkey in the repression of Kurds and military interventions in Syria and Iraq, and the Islamic Republic in Syria and Iraq each, in different ways, participate in the reproduction of war, authoritarianism, and militarisation. The point is not to place these powers on the same level, but to refuse a politics that fixes its gaze on one pole while rendering the violence of rival blocs invisible.
The fundamental contradiction of the Islamic Republic’s state-sponsored anti-Westernism is that, by suppressing the left, workers’ organisations, feminist movements, national struggles, and other forms of independent politics, it has weakened precisely those forces capable of sustaining a genuine popular resistance to imperialism. Appropriating the language of resistance does not transform Iranian society into an anti-imperialist subject. Rather, it reduces people to silent soldiers of the state, expendable victims, or spectators of geopolitical competition. An anti-imperialism that destroys the possibility of independent organisation undermines the very foundations of anti-imperialist politics.
10. Beyond the Camps: Internationalism from Below
Negating campism does not, in itself, constitute a positive politics. Refusing to surrender the political agency of peoples to states and power blocs is merely the starting point. The more difficult question is how to articulate struggles shaped by different geographies, temporalities, and relations of power, struggles that do not necessarily share a single language, priority, or political horizon. The further question is how, despite all these fractures, a powerful anti-war bloc can be constructed.
Here, there is neither a pre-existing universal subject at work nor a pure political camp that one can simply join. At the same time, the goal is not to construct a “Third Camp” positioned between two existing blocs. The goal is to return politics to where it must begin: to concrete lives, bodies, historical experiences, and struggles that emerge not from the logic of states, but from the drive towards liberation.
Within the framework of campist anti-imperialism, the geopolitical positioning of a state or political force often determines its moral and historical standing a priori. Yet the experience of oppressed peoples demonstrates that power and domination do not emanate from a single center alone, nor is resistance defined solely against a single form of power.
Afghanistan constitutes one of the clearest examples of the dead end of a purely geopolitical anti-Westernism. If opposition to the United States were the sole criterion of emancipatory politics, that same criterion would place the Taliban among liberatory forces. But for Afghan women, Hazaras subjected to systematic persecution and mass violence, progressive forces, dissidents, and minorities whose access to education, labour, bodily autonomy, and security is being systematically destroyed under Taliban rule, the slogan “Neither the Taliban nor the United States” is not a liberal abstraction; it is a vital political necessity. Slogans such as “Neither Shah nor Mullah” similarly break open the false dichotomy between the status quo and the supposedly liberating West, opening a path towards the construction of an emancipatory horizon independent of both poles. Contrary to what is often claimed, such a horizon is not a repetition of failed Western political projects, because its constituent elements are not predetermined; they are forged and transformed through autonomous struggle.
This internationalism is founded not on the sanctification of identities, but on an analysis of concrete situations, their contradictions, and their possibilities and, more importantly, on the mutual recognition of forms of resistance and oppression across distinct political geographies. A collective identity or political force can be subjected to discrimination and oppression in one arena while assuming a position of domination in another when organized through state power and military apparatuses. No identity is inherently liberatory; what is decisive is its relationship to power, the state, class, gender, and structures of repression. A child killed under the bombardment of an imperialist power and a child whose life is claimed by the repressive apparatus of an authoritarian state are both part of a human and political reality that must be seen.
From this perspective, an internationalist anti-war bloc is meaningful only when it places at its center those who bear the marks of war, occupation, siege, and repression on their bodies and in their lives. Such a bloc is constructed not through an identity of experiences, but through the possibility of translation across differences. Articulating a shared political voice from below requires translation across temporal asynchronies, divergent experiences, and fractures in the political imagination across different geographies, and it cannot emerge overnight. Yet the conditions for constructing such transversal connections already exist, as does a wealth of local and regional political traditions: councils, communes, self-governance, pluralism, and democracy from below.
The experiences of the early twenty-first century offer vital lessons in this regard: from the Sudanese Revolution to regional solidarity with Palestine against genocide; from the experience of self-governance in Rojava to the October 2019 uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq and the transnational Jina uprising in Iran. These experiences offer neither a singular blueprint nor flawless models; the limitations, defeats, and internal contradictions of each form part of their history. Yet taken together, these heterogeneous experiences demonstrate that the alternative to the imperialist order need not take the form of authoritarian, patriarchal, and militarised nation-states.
An emancipatory internationalism is not a complete or predetermined blueprint, but an open and unfolding process: a connection among those who challenge domination in its various and intertwined forms. It is forged by those who, under bombs, in prison, in exile, amid states of emergency, and at the intersections of oppression, keep alive the imagination of freedom and equality; by those who, through strikes and revolts, justice-seeking and care, solidarity and the creation of alternative worlds, refuse to suspend their struggles at the gates of history under the injunction that “now is not the time”.
Roja is an independent, leftist, feminist, collective based in Paris. Roja was born in September 2022 following the femicide of Jina Amini and the simultaneous onset of the “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” [Woman, Life, Freedom] uprising. The collective is composed of political activists from various national backgrounds and from across the political geography of Iran—including Kurds, Hazaras, Persians, and others. The collective operates not only in relation to social movements in Iran and the broader Middle East, but also participates actively in local struggles in Paris, aligning itself with internationalist movements, including those in support of Palestine. The name “Roja” draws inspiration from overlapping meanings in several languages: in Spanish, roja means “red”; in Kurdish, rož signifies “day” and “light”; in Mazandarani, roja refers to the “morning star” (Venus), the brightest celestial body in the night sky. Follow Roja here.
The Persian original of this text was first published on Naghd. This English translation first appeared on Portolan.
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