In an Iranian digital landscape increasingly fractured by partisan vitriol, vulgarity, and the fog of fake news, this space is a commitment to restrained, academic rigor and clear-headed policy analysis. It is more than a blog; it is a response to a crisis of critical thinking. It is time to heed the call of reason. The Twin Wisdoms (twinwisdoms.org) is the English-language home for Dr Daryoush Mohammad Poor’s essays and critical observations. Its sister site, Malakut (malakut.org), is his long-established Farsi-language platform, where he has published commentary and analysis for a Persian-speaking audience for many years. Both sites are authored by Dr Mohammad Poor and reflect his commitment to thoughtful, rigorous engagement with the political, intellectual, and spiritual questions of our time. The views expressed are those of the author in a personal capacity and do not represent any affiliated institution.
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The following is the full text of my talk delivered at the 13th Annual Iftar at Alyth Synagogue in North London on 8th March. It was offered in the moments before Jewish, Christian, and Muslim guests broke bread together at Iftar — an occasion made particularly poignant by a broader climate in which conflict had created an atmosphere of suspicion and unease. I endeavoured to speak candidly, while remaining true to my humanist sensibilities.
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, MS arabe 5847, folio 1v. Illuminator: Yaḥyā ibn Maḥmūd al-Wāsiṭī. Baghdad, 634 AH / 1237 CE.
On a Pluralist, Non-Eurocentric Modernity
A Sentence That Carries the Argument
There is one sentence that has come to carry the whole of my argument about modernity, and I want to put it down at the outset rather than build up to it. Our future is not their past. Our future is the intelligent use of our past and of anybody else’s past, the responsible and critical creation and invention in the present, and the intelligent prediction of what is to come. That is the formula. Everything else in this essay is commentary on it.
I write the sentence in this compressed form on purpose, because the temptation in our public conversations is to surrender to a much shorter slogan: that to be modern is to follow Europe. The slogan is so well established that even those who reject it tend to argue against it on its own terms. They concede the geography of modernity even as they protest its content. They assume that someone has reached the destination and that the rest of us are still on the road, and they then quarrel about how quickly to walk. The first task of any honest reflection on a non-Eurocentric modernity is to refuse this picture entirely.
There is no destination. There never was. What is called modernity in the European story is itself a particular history, with its own losses, its own injustices, and its own unresolved questions. To take it as the universal template is not to honour it; it is to flatten it. The intelligent thing is neither to imitate that history nor to pretend it never happened. The intelligent thing is to read it carefully, to learn what can be learned from it, to refuse what should be refused, and to set it alongside our own history with the same critical attention.
How the Linear Story Was Imposed
To understand why the slogan has had such a grip on us, we need to recall how it entered our intellectual life. It did not arrive as a gentle suggestion. It arrived together with the military, financial, industrial and scientific might of European colonial expansion. The encounter, for most Muslim societies and for much of the wider world, took place under conditions of subjugation. The first impressions were of overwhelming material superiority. Cities were bombarded; economies were rearranged; institutions were dismantled or made subordinate; languages were displaced from the offices of state. People who had thought of themselves as inheritors of a great civilisation found themselves addressed as backward children who needed to be brought up.
In that situation, the natural human response was a wound to dignity, and the natural response to such a wound is to want to prove oneself. The reformist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grew out of this. Its founders were brilliant and serious people. They took the measure of the imbalance and tried to do something about it. They wanted to show their interlocutors, and themselves, that they too could think, that they too could organise, that they too could legislate, that they too could be modern.
But the manner in which they tried to demonstrate this had a hidden cost. It accepted, as the very ground of the demonstration, the framework that the conqueror had set. The questions to be answered, the criteria of progress, the markers of seriousness, the timeline along which one’s society was to be assessed: all of these were borrowed from the very civilisation whose dominance was the original wound. The result was a curious kind of mirror politics, in which the ambition was to do, in the twentieth or twenty-first century, what Europe had done in the eighteenth or nineteenth. Our future was to become their past. The arrow of history pointed in only one direction, and our task was to walk it as quickly as we could.
Why the Linear Story Misleads
The first problem with this picture is that it is empirically wrong. There is no single line called modernity along which all societies are travelling at different speeds. There are, instead, many entangled processes, technological, economic, political, religious, aesthetic, that have unfolded differently in different places and that continue to unfold. To call only the European version of these processes modern is to mistake one example for the genus. It is, ironically, a provincial mistake disguised as a universal one.
The second problem is that the picture is ethically corrosive. If we accept that our future is their past, we accept by the same gesture that we are behind, that our traditions are obstacles, that our languages are quaint, that our forms of authority are at best transitional, and that the only respectable destination is the one already mapped by someone else. This is not a posture compatible with self-respect, and it is certainly not a posture from which one can contribute anything new to the world. It is a posture of permanent apology.
The third problem is intellectual. The linear story disables the very faculty by which a civilisation renews itself, namely the patient, critical reading of its own resources. If those resources are by definition pre-modern, there is nothing to read; one’s only work is to clear them away. Whole generations have been raised on this assumption, and the result has been a strange amnesia in which our libraries are full of books that no one has been trained to engage.
A Different Picture
Against this picture, I want to set another. To be modern, in the sense that I find defensible, is not to occupy a place on a line. It is to inhabit one’s time intelligently. That has three components, and the order in which I name them matters.
The first is the intelligent use of the past, both our own and anyone else’s. Use is the operative word. We are not asked to worship the past, nor to repeat it, nor to put it on a museum shelf and bow before it. We are asked to use it, which means to read it for what it can teach us about the questions we are facing now. Some of what we will find will still be alive and applicable; some will be dead and best laid to rest; some will be alive but only on condition that we revise it for new circumstances. Discrimination of this kind is itself a high intellectual virtue, and it is the opposite of nostalgia. It also extends across borders. The intelligent use of the past does not stop at the boundary of one’s own civilisation. It includes the European past, the Indian past, the Chinese past, the African past, the indigenous pasts of the Americas. To insist that we draw on our own history is not to refuse other histories. It is, on the contrary, to acquire the standing from which one can engage other histories without flinching.
The second component is responsible and critical creation in the present. This is the moment that the linear story most reliably erases, because it cannot imagine that anything new could come from outside the path it has already mapped. But invention does not require permission. The Persian poets did not ask permission to invent the ghazal; the Arab grammarians did not ask permission to invent the science of naḥw; the Iranian filmmakers of the last half-century did not ask permission to make the cinema they have made. Where these inventions have flourished, they have done so by drawing on local resources while engaging the wider world, and by holding themselves to a high standard of craft. There is no reason we cannot do the same now in law, in education, in finance, in architecture, in technology. The question is not whether we are allowed to create; it is whether we are willing to do the work.
The third component is the intelligent anticipation of the future. By this I do not mean futurology, which is mostly entertainment. I mean the disciplined imagination that reads present tendencies and asks where they are pointing, what they will demand of us, and what we ought to be preparing for. Climate disruption, demographic change, the next revolution in computation, the reorganisation of work, the migration of authority away from the territorial state: these are not science fiction. They are the conditions in which the next generation will live. To be modern in any non-trivial sense is to be already thinking about them, and to be thinking about them with our own concepts and our own commitments rather than borrowing the worry list of someone else’s commentariat.
Pluralism Without Relativism
Notice what happens when these three components are taken together. The picture they draw is not of a single arrow but of many traditions, each engaged in its own version of intelligent use, critical creation and disciplined anticipation. This is what writers on the subject have come to call multiple modernities, and it is the only honest description of the world we actually inhabit. It is also the only description that allows us to honour both the unity of human experience and the irreducibility of its plural expressions.
It is important not to confuse this pluralism with relativism. To say that there are several modernities is not to say that anything goes, or that all arrangements are equally good, or that judgement has been suspended. It is to say that the standards by which we evaluate human flourishing, justice, knowledge, beauty, are themselves not the monopoly of any one civilisation, and that any serious conversation about them has to be conducted with humility on every side. Some inventions of the European modern period are durable contributions to the human inheritance and should be received as such. Some are local solutions whose universalisation has done more harm than good. The task is to tell the difference, and the only way to tell the difference is to do the patient work of comparison rather than reach for the slogan.
The Self–Other Trap
The linear story has a habit of producing self–other binaries that, once produced, are very hard to dismantle. East against West, tradition against modernity, faith against reason, authenticity against borrowing: each pair, on inspection, turns out to be a way of organising the question so that whichever side one chooses one has already lost. To be on the side of the East is to accept that one is not on the side of modernity. To be on the side of tradition is to accept that one is not on the side of progress. To be on the side of faith is to accept that one has surrendered the rights of intellect.
The argument I am pressing here is that none of these binaries is real. They are the after-effects of a particular history, and they can be undone by the same instrument that built them, which is sustained intellectual work. To use one’s past intelligently is already to refuse the binary between tradition and modernity. To create critically in the present is already to refuse the binary between East and West. To prepare for the future with one’s own commitments intact is already to refuse the binary between authenticity and engagement. The synthesis of the two wisdoms, philosophical and revelatory, of which I have written elsewhere, is precisely a refusal of the binary between faith and reason. None of these refusals is a piece of theory. They are practices, sustained over time, by which a community demonstrates that it does not need anyone’s permission to be itself.
What This Asks of Us
What follows from this for those of us who write, teach, design institutions, raise children, or simply try to live well in our particular corners of the world? Three things, perhaps, are worth naming.
First, we owe our past more attention than we have been giving it. Not the sentimental attention of identity politics, which uses the past as a costume, but the demanding attention of the student, who reads slowly, asks hard questions, and is prepared to be surprised by what he finds. The library is much larger than we have been told. It contains resources we have not begun to inventory.
Second, we owe the present our courage. The most important inventions of the next decades will not be made by those who are waiting for permission. They will be made by those who have noticed a problem in their own setting, gathered the relevant tools from wherever the tools are to be found, and set to work. This requires a particular kind of confidence that is neither arrogance nor mimicry. It is the confidence that comes from knowing one’s resources and being willing to use them.
Third, we owe the future our seriousness. The ease with which the linear story has been accepted is partly a symptom of a deeper unwillingness to think long. To prepare for the conditions of the next generation requires that we lift our heads from the cycle of headlines and ask the harder questions about what kind of human beings, what kind of communities, what kind of institutions we want to be. This is the work of generations, and it begins with declining the offer to be only consumers of someone else’s plans. It also requires institutions that can carry the work, that is, schools, universities, professional bodies, civic associations, networks of patronage for the arts, and the quieter spaces in which ideas are tested before they are launched. Such institutions are not built by accident. They are built by people who have decided, in advance, that the improvement of the quality of life of those around them is a responsibility worth shouldering and that no one is coming to do it for them. There is, in this commitment, an old and quiet dignity that no slogan can imitate.
A Closing Note
The entire argument can be compressed into the sentence with which we began. Modernity is not a place to which some have already arrived while others lag behind. It is not a terminus to be reached by walking in someone else’s footsteps. It is a practice, and the practice is threefold: the intelligent use of the past, ours and theirs; the responsible creation of new solutions to present problems; and the disciplined anticipation of what is coming. Each of these requires that we refuse the small story we have been told. The small story says we are late. The true story says we are exactly on time, provided we do the work.
That work is not glamorous, and it does not announce itself with slogans. It is the slow accumulation of knowledge about our own tradition, the patient invention of new forms that answer to present needs, the building of institutions that can carry the work forward, and the raising of a generation confident enough to use what it inherits. There is, in this commitment, an old and quiet dignity that requires neither permission nor applause. It simply gets on with living intelligently in one’s time, and that is modernity enough.
Our future is not their past. It cannot be. The clock does not run backwards, and the world has more than one centre. Our future is what we will make, by drawing wisely on our inheritance and on the inheritance of others, by creating with care in the present, and by preparing for what is coming with our eyes open. It is the work of intelligent people who know who they are. There is no shortcut to it, and there is no substitute. There is only the work.
Image: Delegates during the Islamabad talks on the US–Iran track, April 2026. Credit: Reuters.
A Dialogue with Ambassador Sada Cumber
Ambassador Sada Cumber’s recent essay for the National Security Institute, “Dialogue to Truce: Pakistan’s Role in Reshaping the Regional Structure,” reads, at its best, as a quiet warning. He argues that what we are witnessing across West Asia is not stability but a pause — a breathing space purchased by pressure, not produced by structure. Ceasefires hold for a season; chokepoints remain latent; dialogue dissipates unless it accumulates into institutions. The core proposition — that durable outcomes require continuity, coordination and institutional anchoring, and that Pakistan is moving from facilitator to potential anchor — deserves to be read carefully by anyone who takes the region’s future seriously. I find myself in agreement with the spine of his argument. What I want to offer here, in the most deferential spirit, is a widening of the frame.
First, a point of reinforcement. Sada is right that the present moment is defined by asymmetry: disruption is less costly to generate than stability is to sustain. That single sentence is, in effect, a theorem of the contemporary regional order. It explains why the Strait of Hormuz functions not as a closed route but as a latent pressure point; why external guarantees have thinned; why time horizons in Tehran and Washington cannot be synchronised by diplomacy alone. It also explains why Islamabad’s convening of the recent US–Iran engagement — not Muscat this time — signals something more than a change of venue. It signals a change in the geography of trust. That is a non-trivial shift, and Sada is right to name it.
Where I would respectfully expand his analysis is on the question of who, precisely, generates the disruption that makes stability so expensive. Sada’s framing is systemic and elegant; it treats fragility as an emergent property of the region’s interdependence. I agree that interdependence without governance produces fragility. But interdependence does not decay on its own. It is actively destabilised by specific actors whose strategic interest lies precisely in preventing the region from consolidating. Any honest reading of the last two years — from the Saudi energy strikes to the Islamabad talks, from the covert logic of sabotage to the overt logic of air campaigns — points to a structural spoiler that cannot be folded neatly into the language of “external actors.” Israel, armed with an undeclared nuclear arsenal and shielded by the American veto, is the central asymmetry the region must learn to speak about in plain terms. No anchor state, however capable, can hold a system that is being actively pulled apart from within. Naming this is not a polemical indulgence; it is a condition of analytical seriousness.
The placard is simple, humane, and emotionally irresistible: “Be their voice.” At first glance, who could object? If people are censored, jailed, beaten, or killed, should they not be heard? Of course they should. But politics begins precisely where sentiment ends. The real question is not whether Iranians should be heard. The real question is this: heard by whom, for what end, and translated into what programme of action?
This is where the slogan begins to darken. Too often, in the online activism of a segment of the Iranian diaspora, “be their voice” does not mean careful solidarity, disciplined witness, or intellectually honest advocacy. It means: amplify the suffering of Iranians until it becomes morally easier to justify sanctions, sabotage, siege, or military intervention. The slogan sounds compassionate, but its political afterlife is often brutal.
I have been circling this problem in several earlier essays. In “The Depth Illusion” I argued that moral language is frequently used as philosophical scaffolding for war apologism. In “The Normalcy We Must Defend” I showed why sanctions do not principally wound repressive elites; they wound the civilian fabric of society—the sick, the poor, the ordinary family trying to keep life going. And in “War Unseen, War Unleashed” I wrote about the peculiar spectacle of distance masquerading as courage: those with no skin in the game speaking as though other people’s ruins were a form of principle.
The slogan sits at the intersection of all three.
Let me be clear, because the fallacy arrives predictably: “So, you want people’s voice not to be heard?” No. Nothing could be further from the truth. I want voices to be heard without being ventriloquised. I want suffering to be witnessed without being converted into a permission slip for more suffering. I want the grief of Iranians to remain Iranian grief—not raw material for the fantasies of exilic heroism, foreign intervention, or civilisational theatre.
The Iranian Abroad: A Shift the Diaspora Has Not Registered
A pro-monarchy demonstrator in Glasgow holds a placard that includes a reference to SAVAK. The event, on February 28, 2026, was a rally celebrating US-Israeli strikes on Iran.
Over the past year, the global perception of Iranians has shifted in a direction that neither passport indices nor the slogan-politics of a loud exilic faction can register. Under sanctions, bombardment and the machinery of media caricature, ordinary Iranians have conducted themselves with a composure that Europeans and North Americans have begun, quietly, to notice. This essay argues that the shift is real; that the myth of a lost universal esteem — that all Iranians were once revered and are now despised — must be named and refused; and that while a loud diaspora, still litigating 1979, cannot see the shift, a quieter and wiser diaspora has long been reading it correctly.
A Portuguese friend, trained in anthropology, Faranaz Keshavjee, wrote to me recently that the forty-seven seconds of Tehran footage looped on her evening news did not square with the voice-over. The voice-over spoke of a horrific theocracy that must disappear; the footage showed women in Zara-adjacent outfits eating ice-cream, men in sunglasses, a bazaar going about its business. She asked, with the honesty of someone untrained to choose a side, whether she was reading her own screen correctly. She was. Her question could not have been posed by most of the louder Iranian exiles of my generation, because the apparatus through which they process Iran was sealed shut in the winter of 1979 and immunised, in the Popperian sense, against every subsequent refutation.
My first submission is that something has shifted in how Iranians are encountered abroad, and the shift is not an artefact of self-regard. The evidence is modest, anecdotal and cumulative, and precisely for that reason social scientists ought to take it seriously. An Iranian passenger at a Frankfurt taxi rank is waved to the front of the queue by a driver following the news. A Lisbon greengrocer presses a second pomegranate into her customer’s bag and refuses payment. A Toronto professor tells her seminar that the most composed work she has received this term came from a student whose cousins were being bombed. None of this appears in any index. All of it circulates, person to person, in the ordinary transactions by which reputations are formed.
Hazrati Alley in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, April 2011—captured just before the most stringent international sanctions were imposed. The image shows the bustling daily commerce and the civilian economic fabric whose protection is at the heart of the argument that follows.
On Sanctions, the Temptation of a War Economy, and the Quiet Labour of Breaking the Cycle
The sanctions doctrine rests on a falsified premise. For a century, economic coercion has been justified to Western publics as an alternative to military conflict. The empirical record shows the opposite: sustained economic pressure on industrialised states increases the probability of armed confrontation. This is not a marginal effect or a contested interpretation. It is the dominant pattern. The oil embargo on Japan precipitated Pearl Harbour. Maximum pressure on Iran, sustained from 2012 through 2025, has now been crowned by direct American military strikes. The theory fails its own test.
What Esfandyar Batmanghelidj identifies, in his recent conversation with Hossein Hamdieh, is the structural logic beneath this failure—what he terms the cycle. Economic pressure generates domestic instability. Instability, at sufficient magnitude, becomes the justification for the military intervention that economic coercion was purportedly designed to avoid. This is not rhetorical flourish. It is pattern recognition. The question Batmanghelidj places before us is simultaneously intellectual and political: how does one interrupt a cycle when every institution—military, bureaucratic, ideological—has configured itself to perpetuate it?
My purpose here is not summary but analysis. I take up Batmanghelidj’s diagnosis and extend it through three domains: the falsifiability problem in sanctions theory, the regional architecture required to break the cycle, and the structural temptation of the war economy. Each domain reveals hidden assumptions that, once made explicit, dissolve certain comforting binaries and clarify the actual decision space.
How Curated Certainty Replaces Political Consciousness in the Digital Diaspora
A message arrived recently on social media—the kind that has become ordinary in certain corners of the Iranian diaspora. It was a response to someone questioning an unverified claim about alleged government infiltration. The reply was swift and uncompromising: first, the accusation of being a “regime stooge,” then the counter-charge that anyone defending due process must themselves be “working for the government.” No evidence was offered. No space for disagreement was acknowledged. The logic was binary and absolute: if you are not amplifying our narrative with appropriate fury, you are complicit.
I cite this exchange not because it is exceptional, but because it distills a pattern now endemic across diaspora spaces. This is a political consciousness shaped less by disciplined engagement with reality than by algorithmic curation, media priming, and the conversion of geographical distance into epistemic license. The platforms that organize this consciousness—Instagram stories, Telegram channels, Twitter threads engineered for virality—do not merely transmit information. They structure emotion, reward speed over scrutiny, and monetize the collapse of nuance into rage.
What follows is an attempt to map three defining features of this mentality: the compression of moral complexity, the borrowing of certainty disguised as conviction, and the abandonment of institutional imagination. Understanding these patterns matters not because diaspora voices are irrelevant—they are often crucial—but because without self-correction, they risk becoming mirrors of the very authoritarianism they claim to oppose.
Moral Compression and the Evacuation of Complexity
The first signature is what might be called moral compression: the reduction of multi-dimensional political realities into a single emotional binary that tolerates no qualification. In the exchange described above, this manifests as instant diagnosis—anyone questioning a claim about government infiltration must be “one of them.” The logical architecture is familiar across thousands of similar encounters: if you hesitate before amplifying, you reveal yourself as suspect. If you ask for evidence, you expose complicity. If you defend procedural fairness, you betray the cause.
Author: Dr Daryoush Mohammad Poor, Interim Head of the Constituency Studies Unit and Associate Professor at The Institute of Ismaili Studies.
Abstract: This article explores the concept of authority without territory as embodied by the Ismaili Imamat. Shi’a Imami Ismaili Muslims recognize the authority of the Imams descended from the Prophet Muhammad’s household (ahl al-bayt), through Hazrat Bibi Fatimah and Hazrat Imam Ali. The doctrine of Imamat is central to the community’s identity, emphasizing the Imam’s role as the spiritual leader and interpreter of Islam in each era. The article examines how the Ismaili Imamat has adapted to modernity through institutional frameworks, notably the Ismaili Constitution, which codifies the community’s values and administrative structures, and the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), which operationalizes the Imamat’s mission to improve both spiritual and material well-being globally.
Abstract: This article examines the history, geographical distribution, and doctrinal evolution of the Nizārī Ismāʿīlī community, tracing their succession through Ismāʿīl ibn Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and the establishment of the Fatimid Caliphate. The study explores key historical periods including the Alamūt era under Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ, the Mongol invasion, and the community’s subsequent dispersal and transformation.
Credit: Haidar Mohammed Ali / Anadolu via Reuters Connect
[Note: The Reuters Connect page itself says the asset is provided by Anadolu Agency and that Reuters Connect “has not verified or endorsed the material.”]
One of the lazier slogans in recent Iranian political discourse is the claim that Iran has been “occupied” because the Islamic Republic has relied on Afghan, Iraqi, Lebanese and other aligned forces beyond its borders, and at times appears to have drawn on some of these networks closer to home. The slogan is emotionally potent, especially in parts of the diaspora. It converts anger into clarity. It offers a simple culprit. But as political analysis it is weak. It confuses repression with occupation, transnational ideology with foreign rule, and auxiliary force with the replacement of a nation by outsiders.
My first proposition is straightforward. Not every foreign presence amounts to occupation. Occupation, in political and legal terms, implies effective control by an external power over the territory and governing authority of another state. That is not what we are dealing with in Iran. However troubling the presence of transnational Shiʿi networks may be, Iran is not being governed by Kabul, Baghdad, Beirut or Najaf. It is governed by an Iranian state, through Iranian institutions, Iranian elites, Iranian security organs and Iranian collaborators. To say otherwise is not merely exaggerated; it is a categorical error.
This distinction matters because it separates two different criticisms. One criticism says that the regime has built a regional security architecture and has used ideologically aligned groups for strategic depth. That criticism is broadly sustainable. The other says that Iran has ceased to be ruled by Iranians and has become an occupied country. That second claim does not follow. A state may be authoritarian, predatory and regionally entangled without ceasing to be its own state. To collapse these two claims into one is to replace analysis with slogan.
My second proposition is that states routinely use outsiders, auxiliaries and proxies. This is not peculiar to the Islamic Republic. France has long treated the Foreign Legion as a legitimate arm of state force. Britain has relied on Gurkha regiments. The United States, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, has worked through contractors, tribal auxiliaries and partner militias. European and democratic states also externalise coercion when it suits their interests; they simply describe it in more respectable language. When others do it, it becomes alliance management, expeditionary doctrine or burden-sharing. When Iran does it, some suddenly discover a language of occupation. The hypocrisy is obvious.
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The second place where I would gently extend Sada’s argument concerns Pakistan itself. He writes of a transition from facilitation toward potential anchoring. I would go further and argue that the transition has already begun, and that it carries a contradiction Islamabad must now metabolise in public. The Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement with Riyadh, and the integration of Pakistani airpower into Saudi air defences, has given Pakistan the convening weight that makes its mediation credible. It has also, unavoidably, compromised the appearance of neutrality on which mediation is presumed to depend. Foreign Minister Dar’s visit to Tehran in March, with its explicit disclosure of SMDA obligations, was a first attempt at squaring this circle through strategic transparency. It is, to my mind, the most interesting diplomatic innovation of the year: a wager that honesty about one’s commitments is more stabilising than performative impartiality. If it holds, it may become a template for how medium powers mediate in a post-hegemonic order.
This brings me to the deeper theoretical point. Sada distinguishes between dialogue that dissipates and dialogue that accumulates into structured institutions and practices. I would add a third category, and it is the one on which the region’s future most depends: dialogue that deters. The paradox of the current pause is that it is being held together, in part, by the very asymmetries Sada identifies. A nuclear-capable Pakistan inside Saudi defences raises, rather than lowers, the cost of Iranian miscalculation, and by the same token raises the cost of Saudi adventurism. Mutual deterrence is not an institution, but it can be the scaffolding on which institutions are built, provided it is explicitly linked to a framework of mutual constraint. A mutual cap-and-reduction understanding between Islamabad and Tehran — on enrichment, on stockpiles, on the doctrines governing their use — is, as I have argued elsewhere on Twin Wisdoms, the only credible long-term path. It is also the hardest.
I close with a critical-rationalist caveat, in the spirit of the friendship that animates this exchange. Every framework offered for the region’s future — Sada’s, mine, anyone’s — must remain falsifiable. We should be suspicious of any account, however elegant, that immunises itself against refutation by absorbing every counter-example into its schema. The next twelve months will test whether Pakistan’s anchoring is real or rhetorical; whether the Islamabad channel accumulates or dissipates; whether the spoilers are contained or indulged. Sada has given us the right question. What remains, for the rest of us, is to refuse the comfort of a premature answer, and to keep the dialogue honest enough to survive the asymmetries it is trying to name.
The world already knows that the Islamic Republic is repressive. This is not hidden knowledge waiting for a hashtag to disclose it. The prisons are known. The executions are known. The violations of due process are known. Women’s struggles are known. Labour grievances are known. Ethnic and religious marginalisation are known. What, then, is really being added when the slogan is repeated with such fever? Very often, not knowledge, but pressure—pressure towards a conclusion already desired.
And that conclusion is almost always sold dishonestly. It is rarely stated in full. Nobody wants to say openly: I want sanctions that will make medicine scarcer; I want instability that will make daily life harsher; I want foreign powers with their own strategic interests to decide that Iran is now a suitable site for managed destruction. So the cruelty is wrapped in the language of care. A poster says “Be their voice”, but the subtext is too often: help intensify the conditions under which ordinary people will break.
Yet life inside Iran, however wounded, is not reducible to a theatre of total despair. People still bury their dead, celebrate their children, translate books, fall in love, quarrel, study, work, laugh, pray, and endure. This does not mean life is normal in the shallow sense, nor does it excuse repression. It means that a society is more than its torment, and that those who claim to speak for it must not desire its collapse as proof of their moral seriousness.
If one wants a more rigorous test of this matter, one might begin not with a slogan, but with coherence. That is precisely why I created the Political Consciousness Toolkit: not as a test of loyalty, but as a test of symmetry, consistency, and moral seriousness. Can one oppose authoritarianism and foreign bombing at the same time? Yes. Must one? I would argue that any politics worthy of the name requires precisely that double refusal.
To refuse the slogan in its current usage is therefore not an act of silence. It is an act of resistance—resistance to sentimental blackmail, to bad faith, and to the cheap moral glamour of speaking for others while prescribing the instruments of their further harm. Solidarity does not mean borrowing another people’s pain and spending it recklessly. It means refusing to make their pain serve the ambitions of empire, exile nostalgia, or dynastic fantasy.
Iranians do not need ventriloquists. They need honesty. They need political literacy. They need allies who can distinguish between amplifying a voice and hijacking it, between witness and weaponisation, between conscience and performance. A slogan is never innocent when its consequences are not.
So yes, hear the people of Iran. But hear them as human beings, not as ammunition. Hear them in their plurality, their fatigue, their endurance, and their right not to be “saved” into rubble. The task is not to become their voice. The task is harder, humbler, and far more moral: to stop drowning it out with the echo of our own desires.
The second submission is that this shift has been produced not by diaspora advocacy but by the conduct of Iranians inside the country — the very population a loud segment of the diaspora addresses as a silent object awaiting liberation. Under sanctions that have hollowed out the middle class, under a war economy imposed from without and an ideological economy imposed from within, Iranians have continued to run schools, stage concerts, publish poetry, conduct weddings and bury their dead with a dignity no foreign observer can entirely unsee. The women walking through Tehran with their hair uncovered are not staging a photo-op for a Washington think-tank; they are negotiating, piecemeal and at real risk, the terms of their own ordinary life — a form of moral seriousness legible even to audiences who cannot name a single Iranian poet.
It is imperative to name a myth that has hardened into diaspora common sense: that all Iranians, before 1979, enjoyed a universal esteem that has since been forfeited, and that we now carry an unearned stigma. The myth is seductive because it contains a fragment of truth — the green Pahlavi passport did open certain counters at certain airports — and dangerous because the fragment has been inflated into a metaphysics. Pre-revolutionary Iranians abroad were, like every other migrant population, a mixed constituency whose standing varied by class, language, comportment and the prejudices of their hosts. Orientalist caricature did not begin in 1979; nor did European warmth towards Iranians end there. What changed was the arrival of a regime whose conduct supplied new material to old caricatures. To say that Iranians were once universally revered and are now universally suspect is to trade a complex sociological reality for a consoling fairy tale.
Here a loud segment of the exilic diaspora misreads the score. The typical polemical post that circulates in Farsi these days — and such posts are abundant — rehearses a familiar choreography: a catalogue of real grievances, a rewinding of the tape to 1979, and the nomination of a single legitimate heir who alone can restore the train to its rails. The diagnosis of diaspora vanity is often sharp and in many respects just. The prescription, however, reproduces the very structure it condemns: a politics of restoration staged in Paris or Los Angeles, addressed to an Iran that no longer exists. The binary my Portuguese friend was cautioned against — the people want regime change / the people are content with theocracy — is the same binary the loud diaspora keeps reinscribing in monarchist, republican and leftist variants alike.
But the diaspora is not monolithic, and to speak as though it were would reproduce the very error under examination. Alongside the loud faction there is a quieter diaspora that has been reading the situation correctly for some time — scholars, physicians, engineers, teachers and unshowy artists who carry Iran in their work rather than their slogans. They mentor students without auditioning for television, fund clinics and archives without branding them, translate without proselytising, and decline the invitation to convert grief into spectacle. They are less vocal and more resolute; less photogenic and more useful; less certain about the next slogan and more disciplined about the next decade. Much of the shift this essay traces has been prepared, invisibly, by their conduct.
There is a structural reason for the louder faction’s blindness. Exile, as Said reminded us, is first a condition and only afterwards a vantage point; when the condition hardens into an identity, the vantage point narrows. A self-understanding predicated upon 1979 has a powerful incentive to keep the catastrophe freshly lit, because the alternative — conceding that Iranians inside the country are now generating their own reputations without exilic intermediation — is to concede that the forty-nine-year vigil may not have been the axis around which Iran was turning. The vigil has had its dignities. But dignity is not accuracy, and grief, however earned, is not a method.
What, then, should be said to the interlocutor trying in good faith to read past her evening news? The answer is not a counter-slogan but an invitation to attend to the texture of ordinary Iranian life — the cousin’s wedding, the school run, the queue at the bakery — and to the parallel conduct of the quieter diaspora whose daily work has been slowly restoring what the louder faction imagines was permanently lost. A theory that cannot be refuted by any observation has become a creed; a politics that cannot be revised by the conduct of those in whose name it is conducted has become a performance. Iranians inside the country, together with the wiser part of the diaspora outside it, are conducting the actual refutation. The question is whether the rest of us will learn from them, or go on carrying, in Hafez’s phrase, a smiling lip over a bleeding heart — mistaking the bleeding for the argument.
The Sanctions Doctrine and the Problem of Self-Immunisation
Premise one: economic coercion is presented as a substitute for armed conflict. Premise two: if this claim were empirically sound, we would observe a negative correlation between sanction intensity and subsequent military engagement. What we observe instead is a positive correlation. Nicholas Mulder’s The Economic Weapon documents this pattern across a century. More careful economists warned in the 1920s that accumulating pressure on large economies tends to make war more likely, not less. The prediction has been borne out repeatedly.
A falsifiable theory, confronted with systematic disconfirmation, would be revised or abandoned. The sanctions doctrine has instead been immunised through auxiliary hypotheses: sanctions were insufficiently comprehensive; the target regime was unusually resilient; the next iteration will succeed. What cannot be entertained—because it would destabilise too many institutional commitments—is that the core premise is wrong. This is Popperian self-immunisation: the theoretical framework survives not through empirical adequacy but through the continuous addition of ad hoc protections.
Batmanghelidj observes that the sanctions imposed under Obama in 2012 and rebranded as Trump’s maximum pressure in 2018 are substantially identical. This dissolves the partisan narrative by which American liberals reassure themselves that present cruelty is a Trumpian aberration rather than bipartisan structural logic. The cruelty is encoded in the system. Iran has been constructed, across decades and administrations, as a target rather than a negotiating partner.
The Ideological Incoherence Hypothesis
A second binary requires dismantling: the current American administration characterised as either civilisational crusader or transactional deal-maker. Batmanghelidj’s diagnosis is more precise and, I submit, correct: the obstacle is not excessive ideology but insufficient ideological coherence. Incoherence is the problem.
This matters because a segment of Iranian opinion has convinced itself that Western antagonism is metaphysical—that an independent Iran is ontologically intolerable to the West. If true, diplomacy is theatre and fortress politics the only rational posture. But the historical record contradicts this. The United States has negotiated settlements with governments whose ideology it finds repugnant—Vietnam, contemporary Syria—when structural conditions align. To foreclose diplomacy on civilisational grounds is sophisticated fatalism, and fatalism is typically the rationalisation of abdicated agency.
The task is harder and less dramatic: identify the political conditions under which agreement becomes possible, and cultivate them. Batmanghelidj’s suggestion that transformative diplomacy—a non-aggression framework, explicit mutual economic benefit, regional normalisation architecture—may be required rather than narrow technical fixes deserves examination. These are not utopian aspirations. They constitute the minimal vocabulary of any durable settlement.
The Regional Horizon as Strategic Depth
Thesis: the decisive plane of action has shifted from bilateral (Iran-US) to regional (Iran-Gulf). This is not a geographical observation but a structural one. The seven years of diplomatic groundwork towards normalisation with Riyadh, Doha, and Abu Dhabi was not sentiment. It was the construction of strategic depth through economic interdependence—dense transactional webs with co-geographical actors.
Batmanghelidj’s analogy to postwar Europe is apt. Airbus is the institutional residue of a Franco-German decision to become co-owners of prosperity rather than perennial combatants over territory. The mechanism: create joint economic assets sufficiently valuable that their destruction becomes mutually ruinous. Why should Iran-Saudi Arabia, or Iran-Qatar, not follow this logic?
The recent conflict has imposed costs on this project. Targeting Gulf infrastructure has depleted Iranian political capital in capitals where it was beginning to accumulate. But the project is deferred, not terminated. The critical variable is whether Iranian leadership resists the Hormuz temptation—the idea that a choke point, tolled or closed, can substitute for regional partnership. It cannot. A demonstrated deterrent is not equivalent to a structural economic position. Confusing the two is a category error with generational consequences.
Hidden assumption made explicit: regional economic integration requires Iran to function as a normal state—predictable, treaty-abiding, oriented towards mutual gain—not as a revolutionary vanguard. This is not a moral judgement. It is a structural prerequisite. Revolutionary rhetoric is incompatible with the trust infrastructure required for joint economic projects.
The Asymmetry of Societies
Batmanghelidj notes an asymmetry that Western discourse systematically inverts. For all the rhetoric about an ideological Islamic Republic, Iranian society has not been mobilised into the expansionist, revanchist, paranoid politics observable in contemporary Israel. The dialogue between state and society in Iran is strained but extant. Demands are still made from below; power, however reluctantly, still responds. This is the empirical foundation for any claim to normalcy.
The human being is the measure and axis of value—madār va miḥvar-i arzish mā ādamī ast. A society that mourns its dead as persons, not as units in a cosmic drama, that seeks functional roofs and competent schools, is a society whose normalcy warrants defence. Defending it is the political project. This is not sentimental. It is the criterion by which state legitimacy is assessed.
The War Economy Threshold
Batmanghelidj’s reference to Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction functions as a structural warning. Interwar Germany’s trajectory was not solely ideological derangement. It was the economic reorganisation of an industrial base under sustained external pressure, combined with unresolved resentment, until weapons production became more profitable than welfare production. The state ceases to serve society; society is conscripted into serving the state’s armament requirements.
Iran has, to date, avoided this threshold. Its industrial economy remains predominantly civilian-oriented. But the capacity to tip is latent. Every month of attrition marginally increases the probability. The deepest defence of the nation is not state armament but protection of the civilian fabric upon which any legitimate state must rest. This is the Popperian criterion: what would falsify the claim that Iran is defending itself? Answer: the subordination of civil society to permanent mobilisation.
Indigenous Economic Thinking as Exit Strategy
Batmanghelidj’s final recommendation—Isabella Weber’s How China Escaped Shock Therapy—points to the necessary intellectual labour. The answer to imposed orthodoxy is not counter-orthodoxy but the patient excavation of indigenous economic frameworks capable of articulating a development path that is neither IMF template nor autarky. Iranian economic debate has oscillated between state dirigisme and market fundamentalism. Neither is sufficient. What is required is unglamorous, iterative, fallibilist work to construct a model fitted to Iran’s actual contingencies.
The Cycle and Its Interruption
The cycle Batmanghelidj identifies is the machinery that disperses collective agency—through sanction, war, and manufactured emergency that suspends ordinary reasoning. Breaking the cycle requires protecting the conditions under which a society can think, argue, build, correct, mourn, and begin again. This is not heroic. It is daily. And it is the measure of seriousness.
I return to the image: we are droplets, and the river forms only when the space between us opens. The work is to defend that space against the forces—external and internal—that profit from its closure.
This is not rhetorical excess. It is a cognitive mechanism performing political work. Compression prevents the questions that would slow the machinery of outrage: What exactly is being claimed? What evidence supports it? Who stands to benefit from this framing? What are the consequences of getting it wrong? These are not academic luxuries but basic epistemic hygiene for any movement claiming accountability and truth as values.
Yet in the compressed universe of the algorithmic militia, such questions are not answered—they are treated as betrayals. The middle ground, where evidence can be weighed and complexity acknowledged without abandoning moral clarity, is systematically evacuated. What remains is a landscape of two positions: collaborator or patriot, regime stooge or freedom fighter.
The consequences are predictable. Justice collapses into revenge. Accountability becomes indistinguishable from punishment. Coalition-building devolves into standing beside anyone who hates the same enemy with sufficient volume. The platforms reward this collapse because outrage spreads faster than analysis, because certainty generates more engagement than hesitation, because the algorithm does not ask whether a claim is true—only whether it makes people feel something strong enough to share.
Borrowed Certainty and the Illusion of Independent Judgment
The second signature is more paradoxical: fierce personal conviction built almost entirely on borrowed narratives. Many in the diaspora speak as though possessing direct, unmediated access to Iranian realities—as if distance sharpens rather than obscures vision. Yet the language, framing, and specific claims often trace back to a narrow media diet: partisan broadcasts, curated Instagram accounts, Telegram channels optimized for maximum outrage, Twitter threads designed for viral spread.
This is epistemic dependency at scale, rendered invisible by emotional investment. The consciousness feels independent because it is performed in the first person, wrapped in personal commitment, spoken with passionate certainty. But the narrative infrastructure is prefabricated. Half-truths arrive pre-formatted for consumption: selective footage, decontextualized slogans, inflated claims, captions that tell viewers what to feel before they see.
The consumer does not interrogate these inputs—they inhabit them. They do not ask what has been omitted, what evidence could challenge the narrative, who curates the feed. Instead, they ask which fragment can intensify the emotion they already carry. The result is not knowledge but a simulacrum of it: curated realism where everything already means what the audience has been primed to feel.
Certain media outlets function not as news sources but as emotional architects, structuring feeling before transmitting information. Their editorial choices prioritize speed over verification, spectacle over substance, maximal accusation over measured analysis. In the diaspora context—where geographical distance creates epistemic vulnerability and longing makes people hungry for certainty—this architecture is especially potent. Viewers watch not to learn but to have convictions validated, rage dignified, exile morally elevated.
What makes this dependency insidious is its invisibility. Because the borrowed narrative aligns with pre-existing wounds—anger at brutality, grief over lost futures, humiliation at national decline—it does not feel borrowed. It feels discovered, like truth finally being told. And because the same narrative echoes across multiple platforms, it acquires the appearance of self-evidence. Repetition is mistaken for corroboration. Virality becomes epistemology. A claim can circulate ten thousand times and remain false, but in this ecosystem, frequency substitutes for verification.
The tragedy is not that diaspora communities seek information—it is that they mistake curation for discovery, amplification for courage, and emotional resonance for truth. A critical diaspora would pause before sharing. It would ask: what is being left out, who benefits from this framing, why does this claim feel so satisfying precisely when it becomes harder to verify? Without that discipline, discourse degenerates into factional mythmaking with better production values.
Procedural Illiteracy and the Fantasy of Cathartic Dawn
The third signature is what might be called procedural illiteracy: a striking inability—or refusal—to think politically beyond the emotional satisfaction of removal. One hears constantly the vocabulary of republic, freedom, democracy, secularism. But these words float free of institutional content. What kind of republic? Which constitutional safeguards? What legal framework for accountability? What protections for dissent when the revolutionary majority grows impatient? What mechanisms to prevent the next cycle of purges?
On these questions, the discourse thins rapidly or falls silent. The future is imagined not as the difficult architecture of law, rights, and institutional restraint, but as an emotional afterglow—a cathartic dawn that will somehow organize itself once the hated object disappears. This is not politics. It is political theology without the honesty.
The social media exchange mentioned earlier exemplifies this pattern. The accusation is instant, absolute, unencumbered by process. There is no question of evidence, no space for response, no conception that political disagreement might occur between people who share opposition to authoritarianism but differ on strategy, timing, or means. The move is pure: you are either with us or against us, and if against us, you deserve the label and everything it implies—moral exclusion, reputational destruction, and in extreme formulations, elimination.
This is not incidental rhetoric but the logical endpoint of replacing procedural thinking with emotional identification. Any movement that cannot defend human dignity while angry will not reliably defend it when victorious. Any political culture treating disagreement as treason before the revolution will not suddenly discover pluralism after. The habit of postponing principle—”later we will build institutions, later we will worry about due process, later we will protect dissent”—is usually the beginning of abandoning it permanently.
One of the most revealing phrases in these exchanges is the insistence that “now is not the time.” Not the time for criticism. Not the time for nuance. Not the time to object to dehumanizing language. Not the time to ask what justice means beyond punishment. This temporal blackmail is among the oldest devices of authoritarian politics. It licenses today what tomorrow will be called regrettable excess. It suspends the ethics of means on the promise that righteous ends have already been settled.
But history suggests otherwise. Movements that defer accountability until after victory rarely rediscover it. Movements that cannot articulate the institutional shape of the future they claim to want rarely build it. The algorithmic militia does not prepare people for democratic citizenship—it trains them for permanent mobilization, where every question reduces to friend-enemy identification, every complexity flattens into a loyalty test, every call for restraint registers as collaboration.
The Weight of Distance and the Obligation It Imposes
None of this means that diaspora anger is illegitimate or ungrounded. Much of it emerges from grief, helplessness, and the unbearable experience of watching a country suffer through screens while living in safety. The wound is real. Distance does not erase moral standing. But it does impose obligations that curated outrage systematically violates.
If anything, distance demands greater rigor, not less. Those who speak from safety bear fewer immediate risks, which means they carry greater responsibility to verify before amplifying, to resist the pleasures of borrowed certainty, to refuse the fantasy that others should pay the price for policies endorsed from abroad. Exile does not confer moral authority—it imposes epistemic humility. The further you are from consequence, the more careful your speech must become.
The problem is not that diaspora communities feel strongly. It is that intensity has been mistaken for insight, volume for validity, circulation for verification. Pain does not become wiser by becoming louder. Grief does not translate into strategy by being broadcast. And rage, however intelligible, is not self-justifying simply because it is sincerely felt.
What Replaces the Militia?
The alternative is not neutrality or silence—it is epistemic adulthood. By that I mean the capacity to hold grief without converting it into method, to oppose tyranny without sanctifying revenge, to distinguish solidarity from surrender to the loudest voice in the feed. It means recovering disciplines that algorithmic culture punishes: hesitation before amplification, verification before sharing, proportion in judgment, willingness to revise when evidence demands.
It means recognizing that a slogan is not a program, that fury is not analysis, that repetition is not proof, and that the human being remains the measure and axis of political value—even when platforms invite us to make exceptions. It means asking what kind of political culture is being built right now, in exile, in the comments sections and group chats and curated feeds. Because that culture is not preparation for a democratic future—it is the dress rehearsal.
If the Iranian diaspora is to become politically generative rather than theatrically combustible, it must unlearn the pleasures of curated outrage. It must recover harder virtues: institutional imagination, moral consistency across contexts, courage to refuse emotional shortcuts even when the algorithm rewards them. Otherwise it will continue to mistake amplification for courage, borrowed certainty for knowledge, and hatred for seriousness.
A democratic future cannot be built on that foundation. The blade, however righteous its rage, cannot construct what justice requires. And the simulacrum of knowledge, however emotionally satisfying, will never substitute for the patient, unglamorous work of building a politics worthy of the suffering it claims to honor.
This does not excuse the Iranian case. It simply restores proportion. If the use of foreign-born or non-national fighters proves occupation, then one would have to describe a host of other states in the same way. Very few who use this slogan would accept that conclusion. The standard is therefore not analytical but polemical. It is applied selectively because it serves a psychological need: it allows one to imagine that the country was stolen only by foreigners, not also by one’s own institutions, factions and failures.
My third proposition is that even the language of “mercenary” is often too blunt for what is happening. Groups such as the Fatemiyoun Brigade or elements linked to Hashd al-Shaabi are not simply hired hands in the narrow sense. They are usually tied to the regime through ideology, patronage, training, strategic dependency and a shared language of resistance. This makes the matter more serious, not less serious. But accuracy still matters. What we are seeing is not a foreign nation ruling Iran; it is an Iranian regime projecting power through a transnational ideological ecology, and at times drawing reassurance, manpower or symbolism from it.
My fourth proposition is that the occupation myth rests on a poor form of nationalism. It assumes that the only “real” Iranians are those who think as we do, and that those who do not may be treated as alien bodies, imported agents or occupiers. Nothing could be further from the truth. A brutal judge, a corrupt cleric, a repressive officer or an opportunistic bureaucrat does not become non-Iranian merely because he is politically repugnant. The problem is not that such figures are foreign. The problem is that they are ours too: products of our own political history, institutions, fractures and unresolved struggles.
This is precisely why the slogan is so seductive. It relieves us of a harder reckoning. It is easier to say the homeland has been occupied than to admit that a domestic authoritarian order, with local roots and local recruits, has endured for decades while also building regional ties of coercion and influence. The first story offers emotional release. The second demands political maturity. Yet only the second story can help us think clearly about change.
There is, of course, a real experience underneath the exaggeration. People have heard non-Persian accents in moments of repression. They have seen the symbolism of foreign militias celebrated in Iranian political space. They know that the regime has invested heavily in organisations beyond Iran’s borders while large parts of Iranian society have been impoverished, silenced or brutalised. These observations should not be dismissed. But from a number of visible and painful instances one cannot infer a total condition of occupation. Good political judgement requires proportion, scale and evidence.
The broader literature in political science and international relations is useful here precisely because it cools the temperature. States do not survive by purity. They survive through combinations of coercion, legitimacy, patronage, ideology and external leverage. They borrow methods from one another. They justify their own violence in universal terms and denounce the same conduct in their rivals. That pattern can be observed in empires, republics, democracies and authoritarian states alike. Iran is not unique in this respect. Its configuration is particular, but the underlying logic is not.
My final proposition is practical. The occupation myth does political damage because it misdiagnoses the problem. If Iran is occupied, then the implied remedy is liberation by an external force. If, however, Iran is ruled by an entrenched domestic state that also works through regional clients and ideological allies, then the task is different. It is to weaken the machinery of coercion, split the ruling bloc, reduce the costs of collective action, build broader coalitions and think institutionally rather than mythically. That is a harder politics, but it is also a more honest one.
We should therefore hold two truths together. First, transnational militias and aligned formations have intensified repression, fear and regional entanglement, and references to groups such as Fatemiyoun or Hashd al-Shaabi are not invented out of thin air. Second, Iran is not an occupied country in the serious sense of the term. To confuse these truths is to hand propaganda a victory over judgement. Anger is understandable. Slogans are easy. But if we want a freer Iran, we need a language that names the regime’s violence without surrendering reason, proportion and intellectual self-respect.
Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Bayat, Asef, Revolution without Revolutionaries.
Keohane, Robert O., After Hegemony.
Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power.
Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies; Conjectures and Refutations.
Thomson, Janice E., Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns.
Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992.
Weber, Max, Politics as a Vocation.
Waltz, Kenneth N., Theory of International Politics.
