Pardis Shafafi: Can ‘Community’ Survive a War on Our Collective Imagination

Contemporary Iran is often framed as a laboratory of revolution and state violence. Yet, the current conflict reveals an even more insidious strategy: a laboratory for the engineered sabotage of the Iranian opposition and transnational solidarity. Beyond the geopolitical theatre of strikes, the Islamic Republic’s most effective violence has been the quiet dismantling of the community pillars of a sprawling, diverse diaspora and its connections to global political movements.

This talk illustrates the shifts in modes of state violence, from the “public secrecy” of the 1980s to a communication strategy which appears as naked, performative necropolitics on display from 2022 onwards. It contends that this violence extends beyond the regime’s prisons and gallows within Iran; it also traps us in a hostage mindset. We have begun to imagine liberation only through the master’s own tools: unrelenting violence and profanity politics. In this epistemic fog, where algorithms and “bad faith actors” steer us toward vitriol, our collective imagination is under siege. We face a nebulous cognitive dissonance: in our desperation to desecrate the regime’s “sacred” symbols and reclaim our agency, have we rendered the lives of children profane? Can w e move beyond this “death-driven” logic to reclaim a solidarity that proposes a future on our own terms? Ultimately, what can Iran teach us about the vital importance of community in enacting true socio-political change?