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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A call that never connected/ Mahtab Alinejad

It’s almost three in the morning. The cold light of a mobile phone illuminates the room, and the hands of a young girl in a European city restlessly glide across the screen. She dials her mother’s number for the umpteenth time. It beeps, then hangs up. Again. No messages are exchanged. The internet is down […]...

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Red Iran; From “Disconnection of Contact” to “Disconnection of Life”/ Nafiseh Laleh

Tehran, evening of January 18, 1404, around 8:00 PM His excited voice echoes in the echo of the desperate voices of the street and my heart skips a beat. The call is cut off around the first minute and remains cut off for the following days and weeks; like ourselves, from life. We do not […]...

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When the Internet Was Shut Down, the Image Spoke/ Raha Sabet Sarvestani

The release of videos related to the events of Kahrizak, at a time when the internet was widely shut down inside Iran, triggered a wave of shock and reaction among public opinion abroad—particularly among the Iranian diaspora, international observers, politicians, and human rights activists. This phenomenon cannot be regarded merely as a media event; rather, […]...

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