Digital Governance in a State of War: From Internet Shutdowns to the Engineering of Collective Perception/ Mina Javani

Sometimes, in the midst of war, what disappears is not only sounds and images, but access to reality itself. The internet, this seemingly obvious and always-available platform, suddenly goes dark in such moments and plunges society into a state of informational rupture; a condition in which the boundary between what is happening and what is […]...

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When the Internet Becomes a Weapon of War/ Abdollah Bai Lashaki

In the contemporary world, the internet is no longer merely a communication tool; it has become one of the fundamental pillars of social, economic, and political organization. Critical infrastructures—from banking and healthcare systems to media, education, and even emergency response mechanisms—depend, to varying degrees, on stable access to the internet. However, in situations of armed […]...

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Internet Shutdowns and Their Economic Consequences for Women and the Informal Economy/ Elaheh Amani

This article is not about the catastrophic depth of war as an absolute evil; it is not about the innocent children who lost their lives and never returned home; it is not about the civilians in Iran and other countries of the region who were killed; it is not about the historical heritage destroyed and […]...

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Internet Shutdowns During Wartime: Legitimate Defense or a Silent Violation of Human Rights?/ Nafiseh Motlagh

In the contemporary world, access to the internet is considered one of the vital pillars of social and economic life, and even a condition for the survival of citizens. However, this reality has not yet been explicitly recognized in international law—neither as an “independent human right” nor as a “critical infrastructure.” This legal gap has […]...

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Iran in a State of Information Blockade / Maryam Shirin Sokhan

These days, Iran is undergoing an unprecedented experience: weeks of widespread internet shutdowns, severe restrictions on media, and the concentration of narratives within a single official channel. For more than two months, access to the internet in Iran has been completely cut off. Although limited access has recently been granted to certain individuals and professional […]...

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Information Security or Narrative Control?/ Hadi Aghazari

This article is being written at a time when more than one thousand hours have passed since the widespread internet shutdown in Iran, justified on the grounds of maintaining security. During this period, communication between Iranians inside and outside the country has been seriously disrupted, and access for those inside the country to the outside […]...

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Securitizing Humanitarian Action and Silencing Independent Reporting in Times of War/Diako Moradi

This article attempts to show that in contemporary wars, the battlefield is no longer limited to the military arena, but that the humanitarian, media, communication, and legal spheres are increasingly integrated into the logic of war. In such a situation, war is waged not only through weapons, bombing, and the destruction of physical infrastructure, but […]...

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Testaments of an Uprising/Naimeh Doostdar

January 1404 was a time for a number of protesters to say their “last words”; a sentence recorded in a few lines on Instagram stories, or in a few-second video, sometimes in a brief call to family, and sometimes in a will that the survivors tried to carry out without fail. These messages, republished in […]...

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De-identification as Politics/Aida Abrofarakh

In the analysis of state violence, a focus solely on the moment of killing or the number of victims often obscures the deeper mechanisms that enable and anchor widespread violence in a social context. Violence, especially in the form of mass killing, is not a sudden, momentary act, but a gradual process that begins before […]...

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Silence for the Killing/Amir Aghaei

The following text is a scribble by a young man from inside Iran about the internet shutdown during the recent protests. It was originally supposed to be a report on the internet shutdown, but I couldn’t. No matter how much I tried to maintain an impartial tone of reporting, I couldn’t. No matter how much […]...

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Digital Isolation as a Power Strategy/Fereshte Goli

…and suddenly, total darkness and a heavy silence of ignorance about what had happened on the streets of Iran. Everything was a sign of a disaster. All communication and information channels had been cut off. News was passed around, with a multitude of worrying and frightening speculations broadcast from satellite news networks. On January 18, […]...

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Narrative Creation in the Communication Void/Sina Yousefi

The recent protests in Iran, accompanied by widespread, violent and unprecedented repression, have once again exposed the established patterns of human rights violations by the government. Along with the killing of protesters, mass arrests and the imposition of severe security restrictions, the broadcast of forced confessions by state media has become a central tool for […]...

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