More than one voice

Hope and despair coexist in the streets of Iran, settling in ordinary life and a future repeatedly postponed by the hands of men loyal to power rather than to people. For 47 years, Iran has lived under an authoritarian theocratic system shaped by political repression and the weight of suffocating Western-imposed sanctions. Now the country stands at another volatile threshold, shaped by US-Israeli bombs, the killing of the Supreme Leader and renewed uncertainty over which direction this latest wave of struggle will lead. 

This increased repetition of conflict and unrest in recent years is not accidental. Authoritarian systems do not emerge in a vacuum; a century of foreign intervention has helped shape the ground where repression now rests. This moment follows the largest killing of demonstrators in the country since the mass executions of 1988, grown within a working-class uprising shaped by economic collapse and a regime that has extended its control into the most intimate corners of life – rising food prices, reduced access to medication and wages that no longer stretch to the end of the week. 

Yet, much of how these uprisings are discussed travels first through voices far from that material reality. The diaspora – my own community – becomes a megaphone and self-appointed conscience, especially when authoritarianism makes this role feel necessary. But if we are to be anything useful, we must be a bridge, a space where local voices can travel, not a substitute. 

Iranian author, Sahar Delijani, gives language to this position: “For as long as I live, I’ll never advocate for bombs to fall on a people while sitting comfortably in the safety of my Brooklyn apartment. I’ll never sit in that same safety and demand a people endure a brutal dictatorship for the sake of preserving my own ‘anti-imperialist’ talking points.” I too have written these refusals and stand by them, but I am aware that refusals alone are not futures. 

Within Western political discourse, including spaces that consider themselves radical, there is an ever growing hunger for clear answers, but reality is contradictory and uneven, shaped by forces that do not arrange themselves into coherent theories. Freedom cannot be built on bombs and it cannot mean indefinite submission to repression. The space between those two truths feels impossibly narrow, but it exists, and the people of Iran are living inside it.

This piece is built on conversations with four people who have lived their entire lives inside Iran, held after the 2026 protest massacre and shortly before the latest round of bombings. Not analysts or professional dissidents polished for Western consumption, but people moving through the ordinary, grinding texture of Iranian life. Spoken on the edge of further escalation, their reflections now carry a different weight. In moments like this, ideologies grow louder than lives and something essential is lost. These conversations are an attempt to listen for what remains.

Inside this moment 

Outside Iran, this moment is discussed in individual emotions: rage, hope, resistance. What I heard however, was not one feeling, but a messier declaration of a shared condition. One University student, Sitara,* described a low, persistent ache beneath daily life: fatigue sprinkled with anger, fear that no longer functions as it once did and a sense that something is shifting, even if no one can yet name what it will become. “This is my first time seeing everyone this damaged. If you go to a cafe, people might smile for a second, but there is always deep sorrow in the air,” they tell me. 

It’s difficult to know how the emotional landscape has shifted in the days since the latest military strikes. Videos now circulate showing both euphoria in the streets and scenes of panic. But life in Iran has never been defined by a single event – it has been built on repetitions of unrest, conflict and loss. 

Each moment layers, forming how a population sees safety and the future. Several spoke about this year as rupture, shaped less by new injustices than old ones unanswered for too long. From the economic protests of 2017 and 2018, to the fuel-price uprising of 2019, to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, each wave – rooted in a deeper rejection of the systems that produce them – has been met with repression and silence. 

For many, the immediate catalyst was economic, but never only economic. Daily life has become an unstable equation with prices changing hourly and wages rendered meaningless by inflation. “You can buy milk in the morning at one cost and by night it’s different,” Sitara* says.

Roshan*, long-time maker and designer, described how the last protests began among merchants at Tehran’s Grand bazaar, as rising dollar and gold rates pushed up the cost of everything else – bread, cotton, plastic – while taxes continued to climb and purchasing power collapsed. What followed, others said, felt different from previous cycles: less organised and more powerful because of it. 

“In previous protests people would start from a big city and march in an organised way,” a community member named Omid* tells me. “But this time every household poured into their own road to protest. Everyone just wanted to scream and release their anger.” 

Others echoed the sense that fear itself had lost its hold. “People are thinking there’s nothing left to lose. Even losing their lives is no longer a factor in keeping quiet” Pari*, a professional I have come to know through online conversations, explains. What emerges across these accounts is a population living inside overlapping crises – economic, political, psychological – and responding without a unified ideology, but a recognition that life as it is has become unliveable.  

Visibility and repression

If the first crisis is material, the second is epistemic. Not limited to bodies, violence in Iran is inflicted on knowledge itself as numbers circulate and estimates fluctuate. Despite different experiences, those I spoke to returned to the same idea: understanding harm as diffuse, social and long-lasting, rather than a statistic. 

“The number of people who were killed is beyond comprehension,” Roshan* says. They described the conditions that make death uncountable: injured protestors avoiding hospitals for fear of arrest or worse; bodies withheld from families; people taken for questioning who never return. Omid* described the first night they joined the movement: tear gas, mass arrests, gunfire, beatings in the streets – scenes grimly familiar rather than exceptional. 

For others, the deeper question is not how many were killed, but what killing does. “If you are only looking at how many people were killed, yes, it’s a high number,” Pari* says. “But what also matters is the effect of killing. The direct effect is death and injury. The indirect effect is trauma. 80 to 90 million people are now living with the psychological consequences.” 

This framing unsettles a familiar Western impulse to grapple with violence through numbers. In the hours after the elementary school bombing in Southern Iran, coverage abroad turned almost immediately to rising and falling death tolls and an urge to dictate whether the figure was small enough to minimise or large enough to shock. But how do units capture a society twisted around permanent psychological strain?  

Internet blackouts are a recurring tactic during moments of unrest in Iran, limiting communication between organisers and restricting footage from leaving the country. This year’s January blackout was described as the longest in Iran’s history, lasting more than three weeks. “The internet cut was predictable,” Pari* adds. “They do not want the news to become global.” But predictable does not mean minor. “It had negative effects on everyone’s business in a time where we cannot afford to lose work.”

Still, it was not only experienced through absence. “Being away from the internet brought me a sense of calm,” Sitara* tells me. It is an unexpected detail, and a revealing one. There are things I can no longer fully recognise from afar – places I have loved now seen through smoke, a heaviness in a country I have always known as light. But I too recognise the instinct to step back from the constant scroll and updates. Even in conditions of extreme repression, people are still negotiating their interior worlds in ways that rarely survive translation.

Foreign hands

If the scale of suffering inside Iran feels uncontested, the path out does not. Iran has lived under western sanctions for decades, intensified dramatically after 2018, when I watched much of the diaspora find alignment in opposing measures that would further constrict ordinary lives. Their effects are tangible: currency collapse, restricted global market access, wage-devouring inflation. The country has been reshaped by years of economic pressure. 

For some, the latest round of sanctions was the fuel needed to revolt. For others, sanctions serve the regime as much as they weaken it. In both cases, ordinary people bear the cost. Research on sanctioned states suggests something similar: as resources become scarce, authoritarian regimes consolidate control, redirecting wealth toward loyalists, hoarding goods and tightening patronage networks. Sanctions shift the internal balance of power, sometimes in favour of the very actors they aim to weaken. 

The question of foreign intervention produced some of the deepest tensions in these conversations. “No alley cat kills a mouse for God’s sake,” Roshan* states, invoking a Persian expression to describe to me how foreign powers rarely act without self-interest. 

To be clear: Iranians are not naive to geopolitics. As Iranian activist and former political prisoner, Arash Sadeghi, put it: “If war was meant to bring freedom, the Middle East would be the freest place in the world.” 

People know what oil, territory and leverage mean, they know the US and Israel want to preside over a region in ruin – and yet, exhaustion reshapes imaginations of the future. “If we leave everything to take its own course, this may take another 50 years” Pari* reflects. “The quickest way is for superpowers to step in, help people remove this government, and leave.” 

Omid*, who once rejected the idea outright, admitted that desperation reframes the question. “No one wants a foreign government to rule their country, but because of our situation we ask ourselves: how much worse could it be?” 

For some outside Iran, myself included, anything short of an outright rejection of foreign intervention can be difficult to hear, especially as we watch missiles rain down, but desperation of this kind has been man-made, shaped through decades of collective trauma to force people in ways that cannot be understood externally. From where some stand, war, and its aftermath is not a distant escalation but an extension of pressures already observed. It bears repeating that even when people speak in the language of risk, what they are reaching for is a safe life. 

Looking ahead

As in any society, Iran’s ideological differences are vast, yet one point that surfaced repeatedly was that there is no clear figure people can rely on. Fear shapes that absence. “Anyone who dares to ask questions or show disapproval has vanished. If any group is forming, it is quiet and underground,” Roshan* says. 

The lack of visible leadership is often read by outsiders as political immaturity, but inside Iran it is understood as political survival. In the diaspora, a parallel belief has begun, that the country’s potential future may lie with its political prisoners, a belief sharpened by events such as last year’s Israeli airstrike that struck Evin prison. A moment that intensified fears that those confined are endangered precisely because of what they represent. 

Questions of the future are shaped by what has unfolded elsewhere across the region too: uprisings that promised transformation have slid into prolonged violence or new forms of authoritarian rule. Contentious names circulating abroad are approached cautiously. People speak about Reza Pahlavi less as a saviour and more as a possibility to be weighed – and feared. 

Omid* puts it more bluntly. “There is no one people truly want. That is why some think maybe it’s better to take whatever is on the table. Desperate people take desperate measures.” Their words show a collapse of faith in internal possibility rather than naivety about empire. 

Beneath this despair however, another form of politics seems to persist, organised around the slow construction of social capacity rather than a singular leader. Sitara* spoke of distrusting internal elites and foreign powers alike. What they described holding onto instead was networks of trust, youth-led organising and working-class coordination – efforts to strengthen the social fabric in the absence of formal political space. 

What it means to listen

These answers may differ from yours or mine, they may feel unsatisfying to those of us accustomed to revolutionary narratives that arrive fully formed, or politics that must perform inspiration to survive on platforms like these – but they are shaped by the conditions they are forced to navigate. The absence of a visible grand plan does not mean there is no alternative. Small acts of courage rarely trend yet forms of leadership are growing in ways that do not always translate to spectacle. 

Amongst those I spoke to there was no consensus on what support looks like. But what is shared is a future where self-determination exists and an insistence on being taken seriously as political subjects rather than symbols.

Pari* supported increasing external pressure in the form of sanctions. Omid* was less interested in prescriptions and more in being understood outside the framing of Western belief systems. Roshan* spoke of material support: platforming Iranians, diverting resources to people inside the country, and creating connections to build sustainable futures for a generation whose talent has been systematically stifled. 

If there is a vision to build around, perhaps it is this: resist the urge to flatten Iranian political imagination into frameworks that feel legible to those of us in the West, and invest in the social foundations that make any sustainable change possible. If we are to speak, it should be in service of all this complexity, not in spite of it.

*All names have been changed for safety.