A bomb just exploded at a local mall in the Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil, where I live and work. I was there when it happened, with my 3-year-old son holding my hand. Picture a grotesque and gory scene: dismembered body parts, blood, screams, smoke, and the smell of dynamite powder. Now, this did not happen to me, really. Well, it happened for a second in my mind, and was very much real at such level: what some mental health professionals would call an “intrusive image”.

I am a psychologist myself, trained in clinical, social and critical perspectives. I am aware that such intrusive images are socially determined by the rise of violence linked to drug trafficking in Ecuador, and the government´s lack of ability or will to stop it. My intrusive image also reminded me of what we have lived through in Guayaquil during the worst part of the covid-19 pandemic – three years ago – as the government abandoned thousands of mostly poor, non-white citizens, and left them to die. Sometimes living in Ecuador feels like a permanent death threat.

Mental health in death-worlds needs a different approach.

What does “mental health” even mean when we live in these death-worlds?

Intrusive images of death are not isolated intrapsychic representations, but are conditioned by the very material bombs, bullets and dead bodies that have been piling up in Ecuador in recent years. Not to mention the (mostly poor, black, and indigenous) bodies that have piled up in these lands since the almost three hundred years of Spanish colonialism, and the modernist modes of governance that followed[i]. In 2020, a neoliberal and inefficient management of the pandemic left corpses lying in the streets of Guayaquil, as well in hospital wards and inside our homes[ii]. Most of these deaths were preventable, yet the ideological official discourse at the time – amplified by local mainstream media – blamed them on the virus and the alleged indiscipline of individuals and communities, not on structural inequality and poor governance[iii].

As for violence linked to drug trafficking, it is difficult to identify exactly when it began to rise in Ecuador; probably, many decades ago, mostly out of public sight (at least for most of us), with some sporadic cases of deadly violence covered by the media or witnessed by citizens. Yet, it was since 2019 that such  death-worlds left a taller pile of more noticeable dead bodies; in the style of the mythical “narco” histories of countries such as Mexico and Colombia, fueled by USA´s drug consumption and failed “war on drugs”[iv]. A neoliberal government has been unable to “control” prison riots in Ecuador, leaving more than 600 human beings to be killed in horrible, gory ways (both convicted and not-yet-convicted inmates, imprisoned for very diverse criminal accusations). “Narco” violence – and a neoliberal government responsible for it by either omission or commission –  have led to a dramatic rise in murder rates – including cases of innocent bystanders and neighbors being killed – transforming Guayaquil into one of the most violent cities in the world. Ecuador is, beyond superficial and functionalist discourses of “corruption”, operating today as a true “Narco-State” that threatens the life of so many of its own citizens.

In death-worlds such as contemporary Ecuador – where potential and factual killings are part of everyday life – mental health cannot be approached from the usual and mainstream biomedical gaze. Well, we could approach it this way, but we would probably be – mistakenly – transforming the economic, political and ideological problem of violence into an individual problem of chemical imbalances, illogical thinking and uncontrolled emotions.

Millions around the world may agree: death-worlds exist in many territories, and have been documented in different moments throughout history. In fact, violence and peace, death and life, suffering and well-being, involve a dialectic that lies at the core of what makes us human. I would not dare to victimize myself through overdramatic complains about Ecuador´s violence when conversing, for example, with those affected by violent colonial occupations, different forms of cruel warfare, or forced migration leading to death in borders and oceans, among so many other atrocities.

Yet, what we could do together is share histories and experiences from our respective contexts, and learn from each other. These are very different histories and experiences, but all of them involve struggles for survival and relative well-being in the midst of particular configurations of death-worlds. We all have to deal with our respective piles of dead bodies, and to make sense of them while opening space for life, peace and collective health to thrive. Even in cases where people deal not only with “intrusive images”, but with the painful and avoidable real killing of their loved ones.

Re-imagining collective health strategies

So, how do we manage to live in death-worlds and to – somehow – protect our mental health?

Many people around the world have provided answers to this question, emerging from the legitimacy of their diverse wisdoms and forms of resistance. In my experience rooted in Ecuador, it feels like a dilemma that does not require a biomedical approach, but critical, transdisciplinary, dialectical, intercultural and radically context-aware gazes. For example, that of collective mental health[v]; liberation psychology[vi] and a serious examination of past and present necropolitics[vii]: the sovereign power that determines who lives and – especially – who is left to die in any given society. From this critical perspective, it is crucial to hold accountable those powerful economic and ideological groups who benefit from death, including specific legal and illegal entrepreneurs, businessmen, and their accomplices in government.

My intrusive image of death at the mall was not the product of faulty neurons or isolated cognitive processing, nor was I experiencing any individual “trauma”. The intrusive image was an understandable psychological response to a sociopolitical catastrophe in my country. When facing such realities, I feel the need to be reflexive about my own social position; and the diverse strategies that can help me and many others in Ecuador – including a majority population with less relative privileges than myself – to make sense of death-worlds while cultivating hope.

As I write these final words, news from the past few days haunt me. Yet another murdered political leader, leaving a wife and two small orphans behind; a friend who survived a recent murder attempt is leaving the country; new prison riots, with gory images of dismembered bodies; the kidnapping of a professor who works at the same University as me; and other violent events. In the current necropolitical landscape, we have a few broad, non-exclusive alternatives: to scape, to mourn, or to rebel (with a particular form of relative martyrdom implied in some of them: to willingly assume the risk of getting killed, especially if we challenge legal and illegal economic power). These alternatives involve situated meaning-making processes shaped by power relationships and the complex dialectics of life and death. Ecuador is a beautiful country, full of life, and rich in cultural diversity. As it happens in other beautiful territories and cultures around the world, a current necropolitical landscape urges us to reimagine our strategies to construct collective mental health and live meaningful lives. We will. Somehow, we will.

[i] Capella M, Jadhav S, Moncrieff J. Violence, history and collective memory: Implications for mental health in Ecuador. Transcult Psychiatry 2020; 57:32–43.

[ii] Capella M. Corpses in the street, psychologist on the phone: Telepsychology, neoliberalism and Covid-19 in Ecuador. Somatosphere 2020.

[iii] Capella M. The ethical–political dimension of social and community praxis: The case of Ecuador’s early response to COVID-19. J Community Appl Soc Psychol 2022;32:573– 585.

[iv] Nuñez J. Territories of Extreme Violence in Ecuador’s War on Drugs. NACLA 2022.

[v] Capella M. Salud Mental Colectiva y Determinación Social : Posibilidades Paradigmáticas [Collective Mental Health and Social Determination: Paradigmatic Possibilities ]. Quad Psicol 2023;25:1–23

[vi] Martin-Baró I. Writings for a Liberation Psychology. Cambridge, MA USA: Harvard University Press, 1994

[vii] Mbembe A. Necropolitics. Public Cult 2003;15:11–40.

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While living in a world based on behavioural dissonance, I have always found it refreshing and re-energizing to read Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, especially at the beginning of the academic year: new cohorts of students coming in, hopes for change are high, and my anger around an unlikely change of academia goes temporarily forgotten. In this short article, I would specifically like to focus on Freire’s Pedagogy of Indignation, which was published with Routledge after his death by his wife Ana Maria Araujo Freire (2004). The text does not intend to appear as exclusively – or markedly – academic. Reading it may make you furious about the politics of the system in which we, as educators, work: not because of what the book spells out, but rather because of what it does not say. It is indeed your own conscience, stirred by Freire’s words, which should let you furious.

The Pedagogy of Indignation works as an important reminder, which looks trivial when written on a virtual page: we can choose. And, thus far, we have tragically chosen for the worse. The future does not make us: we can be subject to multiple structures of power, but we remain the ones who need to decide what our intervention in this world will be. And we need to take responsibility for what we decide because there is always a possibility. While we academics hide behind fatalistic determination that underlies the (intentionally) abstract idea of a “neoliberal academia” – as though “neoliberal academia” could ever be a given formula, a given reality – “neoliberal academia” is about nothing but people’s attitudes, personal decisions and deeds. In such a fatalistic determination, the possibility for change is never truly contemplated, but, importantly, it is continuously paraded. Parading a radical approach to research and to academic politics while acting inconsistently (e.g., speaking about empowering research subjects while doing power games with subordinates, or advocating against plagiarism while plagiarizing others) is a key component of academics’ behavioural dissonance, and it is successful in working against what Freire calls a “radical pedagogy”. Indeed, when too many people benefit from the status quo, radical changes become challenging, or even impossible.

The future does not make us: we can be subject to multiple structures of power, but we remain the ones who need to decide what our intervention in this world will be.

Let’s face it. A truly radical pedagogy would make many uncomfortable: you obviously need to stir discomfort among colleagues and inside yourself, as well as identify and dismantle privileges. Reproducing the power game of our own patrons is way easier, while thriving on a politics of behavioural dissonance between who we actually are and what we teach, write, and we say we are. Although often advocated through teaching (and even striking) practices, a truly “radical” pedagogy would be frowned upon and eventually undermined by most teachers, because it would help the servants identify who will not serve either them or others. In other words, practicing a radical pedagogy rather than parading it would finally break the privilege-from-enslavement chain, which rewards staunch, faithful servants with the “privilege” of enslaving or disrespecting others when their turn comes.

Practicing a radical pedagogy rather than parading it would finally break the privilege-from-enslavement chain, which rewards staunch, faithful servants with the “privilege” of enslaving or disrespecting others when their turn comes.

As I wrote some time ago, personalizing bad and positive human practices – something that UK academia particularly struggles with – means identifying the people who adopt conservative and unjust behaviours, rather than blaming an abstract system of power and control. It means opening up some space for a radical pedagogy that is able to undermine such abstractness of injustice and enslavement. My personal view is that Freire’s radical pedagogy is actually the only possible, real pedagogy that I know of. As Freire phrased it, discarding the idea of a radical pedagogy implies dropping education for technical training, which helps us preserve the world’s inequalities: “Those who deny me my pedagogicalness, drowned and nullified, according to them, in the political, are just as political as I am. Except that, obviously, they take a different position from mine” (Freire, 2004: 71). Simply put, the pragmatic act of teaching (bereft of political messages) does not exist. Indeed, what could misleadingly be viewed as apolitical teaching rather becomes a deliberate omission of a political message, which is a political act per se. In this vein, “pragmatic” instructors cannot be but conservative teachers, rather than educators stricto sensu.

While in academic literature we see different levels of indignation, the latter, in most cases, does not reflect the way we live, pointing to a lack of “existential consistency” as Freire argued. In this sense, teaching indignation is not the same as teaching with indignation. Indignation is likely to be paraded intellectually, for example by including feminist, critical race literature and alike in your teaching material. Or it rather turns into a narcissism of indignation, namely building your own image as a “radical academic” without doing anything “radical”, or even engaging with anti-radical practices. By this token, indignation becomes a mere academic performance to gain the favour of a certain public. To Freire, finding “existential consistency” means reflecting indignation into the intimate dimension of living, in the way we denounce the politics around us, and in the relational economy that we actively build on a daily basis. As Freire put it, we are beings of responsibility, and we cannot escape that. If we have been able to change the physical world – and likely into the worse – we are surely able to work on changing culture, history, and politics: “If it is possible to reach water by digging up the ground, if it is possible to decorate a house, if it is possible to believe this or that truth, if it is possible to find shelter from cold and heat, if it is possible to alter the course of rivers and to build dams, if it is possible to change the world we have not created, that of nature, why not change the world of our own creation, that of culture, of history, of politics?” (Freire, 2004: 81).

Omar Aziz, a Syrian intellectual and activist who died in Syrian president Bashar al-Asad’s prisons in 2013, theorized that we, human beings, have a “time for the revolution” (in Arabic zaman ath-thawra) and a “time for power” (zaman as-sulta). Freire’s radical pedagogy works towards dismantling this binary and enabling the “time of the revolution” to merge into the “time for power”, where individuals are constrained by the social and political way in which their lives are organized. In the academic world, this would mean coordinating our alleged pedagogic acts with our own deeds. However, Aziz’s theory reminds us that the perfect synergy between intellectual and practical activism is unlikely to happen, because of the spatial and temporal restrictions in our daily life. For example, if most of my life revolves around teaching, assessing, and managing students of forced migration, in that exact timeframe, I am also the one who is less likely to physically go to London Gatwick Airport to stop refugees’ deportations. Likewise, if I am teaching how crises are turned into sources of profit, I am unlikely to be the one who actively leads the rebellion against the politics in place.

Aziz’s theory reminds us that the perfect synergy between intellectual and practical activism is unlikely to happen, because of the spatial and temporal restrictions in our daily life.

In a nutshell, while, through the act of teaching indignation, students are taught that the future is a possibility they can work on, educators tacitly give up the dichotomy between the politically active and the pedagogical. However, as Freire warned us all, there is no system which has forced us to experience it as a dichotomy, but it is rather us, academic educators, who have abdicated change though behavioural dissonance.

 If a future for a radical pedagogy is ever there, we do not merely need to read, intellectualize, or lecture about indignation. This aborts the possibility for a radical pedagogy and merely parades indignation through behavioural dissonance. Instead, we need to develop a self-radical pedagogy, which can show us whom we really are, how to make ourselves uncomfortable, and how to teach with indignation towards those (like ourselves) who keep serving the servants.

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For the past four years, Lebanon’s economy has been locked in a prolonged crisis that has seen the currency lose 98 per cent of its value and inflation rocket to 200 per cent.  The World Bank has described this brutal contraction as one normally associated with ‘conflicts or wars’.  While the official exchange rate had for decades the Lebanese lira pegged at 1,507.50 to the US dollar, the exchange rate on the black market has reached a high of 140,000. Account holders have been denied access to their own bank accounts owing to the liquidity problems of Lebanese banks.  Some desperate citizens in urgent need of hard currency for their families have taken to ‘robbing’ banks, not to steal the bank’s money but to access the funds in their own accounts.  

The devaluation of the currency and ‘lirafication’ of the economy starved of hard currency has meant spiralling prices for food and energy, a severe drop in disposable income and an increase in unemployment to nearly 30 percent in 2022.  As a consequence, multidimensional poverty in Lebanon almost doubled from 42 percent in 2019 to 82 percent in 2021, signalling a society collapsing in key services such as health, education, utilities and housing.

In October 2019, a wave of anti-austerity protests in part in response to new tax measures planned by the government, including a tariff on WhatsApp, the free messaging service widely used in the country, sparked a popular movement against the entrenched corruption that caused the severe crisis in the first place. In March 2020, this political and economic crisis triggered a default on a $1.2 billion Eurobond repayment owing to unavailable foreign reserves as Lebanon’s debt burden reached 170 percent of GDP.

The economic crisis deepened further when Beirut was rocked by ‘one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history’ at its port when 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, recklessly stored in a warehouse, ignited on 4 August 2020 and killed 217 people and injured 7,000. The blast left 300,000 people homeless and the estimated cost to the economy is between $10-15 billion. It has also compounded the hardship experienced by Lebanese citizens with nearly half the population unable to afford essentials like ‘lentils, cooking oil, diapers, sanitary pads and fuel’. With Amnesty International reporting that Lebanese authorities have been ‘shamelessly obstructing victims’ quest for truth and justice’ into the circumstances surrounding the blast, the explosion seemed to reflect the negligence, corruption and unaccountability of Lebanon’s political system.

A crisis for Palestinians

There are 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and each has its own history, character, composition of nationalities and geographical layout.  El Buss camp in Tyre, about 100 km south of Beirut, is a comparatively small camp of 11,000 registered refugees originally from Acre in Galilee who took occupancy in the 1950s in a camp originally established by the French government for Armenian refugees in 1937.  The camp is integrated into the wider community in Tyre and most employment is in seasonal agricultural work.  

The lightly populated, wide streets of El Buss contrast sharply with the constant bustle in the narrow alleyways of Burj Barajneh camp in Beirut which has an estimated population of 50,000.   There is a palpable tension in Burj Barajneh with the streets constantly full of motorcycles and the smell of petrol with pedestrians uneasily navigating a challenging physical environment of low-hanging electricity wires criss-crossing with water pipes which carry the threat of electrocution.   

Burj Barajneh, like the other two Palestinian camps in Beirut, Mar Elias and Shatila, are located in isolated southern suburbs that provide limited opportunities for employment and a decent life of dignity consistent with fundamental human rights.  The camp population has expanded rapidly from the initial 3,500 in 1949 but the area of one square kilometre remains the same.  So the rickety and often unsafe upward progression of buildings to accommodate new residents means many in the camp are permanently obscured from sunlight by overhanging buildings and suffer from vitamin deficiency and anaemia. 

Discrimination in labour law

Most Palestinian refugees work in the informal economy as they have never been naturalised and, until recently, denied access to 39 professional occupations such as medicine, law and engineering and refused the right to own property.  In December 2021, Lebanese Labor Minister, Mustafa Bayram, announced a relaxation of the labour laws to allow Palestinians the right to work in managerial, business, tourism, industrial, information, health, education and service sectors, if they were born in Lebanese territories, born to a Lebanese mother or married to a Lebanese citizen.  Palestinians continue to be denied entry to professions that require membership of a syndicate or trade union.  

But despite these being modest changes to the labour laws they have been strongly criticised by the Kataeb Party and Free Patriotic Movement, representing Christian factions in Lebanon, as part of what they consider to be a slippery slope toward the naturalisation of Palestinians and displacement of Lebanese workers from their occupations.  

However, UNRWA’s socio-economic survey suggests that little has changed in the employment conditions of Palestinians with only 12 percent of those surveyed having a written contract with their employer.  As the International Labour Organisation found, the majority of Palestinian workers are ‘engaged in low-status jobs that are poorly paid, insecure and lack adequate social protection’.  

This leaves Palestinians open to exploitation in the workplace and vulnerable to dismissal or temporary layoff without pay in an economic downturn or crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic.  

A crisis of education 

On a visit to six Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in September and December 2022, I learned about some of the key challenges caused by the economic crisis.  For parents and teachers, a major concern is the cost of transport for students and teaching staff which has increased by over 500 percent and is not included in UNRWA’s education budget.  For many refugee families, bearing the cost of sending their children to school is beyond them and may result in student withdrawals. There are 37,586 Palestinian students attending 45 UNRWA schools in Lebanon which makes huge demands on teachers, many of whom are also Palestinian refugees. 

Depending on the number of schools available to each camp, class sizes can exceed forty with student numbers having been swollen by the arrival of 29,000 Palestinian Refugees from Syria (PRS) since the start of the Syrian war in 2011.  Moreover, many Palestinian children who were enrolled in private schools in Lebanon are being transferred to UNRWA schools because their parents can no longer afford the fees.  

In terms of teaching practice, 2022-23 is the first academic year since the 2020 pandemic that teaching will resume face-to-face on a full-time basis with many young people experiencing significant educational deficits having struggled with home schooling during COVID-19 lockdowns owing to a lack of electronic devices in Palestinian households.  This problem has been compounded by teachers strikes and chronic electricity outages across Lebanon which were worsened by the spike in energy costs which impacts the water supply dependent on the fuelling of pumping stations. 

The cost of healthcare

There are 452,669 registered Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, 50 percent of whom live in the 12 UNRWA refugee camps. As they are not naturalised, Palestinians are unable to access Lebanon’s social services, including healthcare, which means either using private health providers which are prohibitively expensive or accessing one of UNRWA’s health care facilities. Fifty-five percent of Palestinian refugees access UNRWA health services that include: outpatient consultations, health screening, ante- and post-natal care, dental treatment and specialist consultations.  

The most common health conditions among Palestinian refugees are chronic diseases including hypertension, chronic pulmonary diseases (including asthma), diabetes and cardiovascular disease.  UNRWA subsidises treatment for more serious conditions such as cancer or heart surgery requiring hospitalisation but this will also require a contribution from the family of the refugee.  The social and economic determinants of these health problems include high unemployment, food poverty, the stressful physical environment of the camps and unhygienic and poorly maintained homes. The staff in a health clinic in Ein el-Hilweh, Lebanon’s largest Palestinian camp, told me they saw 600-800 patients per day accessing a range of primary health services.

Forgotten victims

What unites all of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon is their displacement (or that of their ancestors) from their homeland during the Nakba in 1948 when 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed and forced into the life of a refugee.  They also share an undimmed and still cherished right to return to their homes and villages, a right internationally sanctioned in United Nations General Assembly resolution 194.  Today there are 5.9 million Palestinian refugees eligible for UNRWA services living in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They are subjected to the political, social and economic laws of the land in which they took shelter with the privations of life as a refugee passed from one generation to the next.  For those among them who are living in Lebanon, the impact of the economic crisis has been acute, with UNRWA finding that it is putting ‘the health, safety and education of the whole population at risk’.  But as Palestinian refugees suffer the brunt of Lebanon’s economic crisis, they are mostly forgotten by local and international media.

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Calls you in your first name: Freedom

Say it loud and loud, 

To all those silenced their grudge in throat 

They are no longer alone*

A couple of weeks after the 1979 revolution, rumors of imposing compulsory hijab caused the first demonstration against the post-revolutionary Islamic state. In the past four decades, millions of women in Iran have been approached, arrested or harassed by hijab police and resisted it on a daily basis. Thus, resistance to the mandatory hijab, both individually and collectively, is not new in Iran. Nevertheless, this resistance exploded into a revolution 43 years later, on the 16th of September 2022, when Jina (Mahsa) Amini, a young Kurdish woman visiting Tehran, was arrested by the Iranian hijab police for not properly wearing the Islamic hijab in public. 

According to eyewitnesses, during her arrest, which lasted a couple of hours, Amini was subject to insults and severe physical violence by the police. Later she was taken to the hospital unconscious and died there after being in a coma for four days. 

“Dear Jina! You will not die. Your name will turn into a symbol”, Jina’s family wrote on her tombstone. Her name was then repeated all around the world in streets and cyberspace to encapsulate the density of the revolution: its magical moment. 

The magic of revolution: More than processes 

“Don’t leave us alone”, Jina’s family asked people who attended her funeral. The call was answered in the largest demonstrations in the history of Iran; demonstrations which have spread to every corner of the country and succeeded in reconnecting the diaspora with their homeland. 

The call first echoed in Saqiz, Jina’s hometown in Kurdistan, where women collectively unveiled in public shouting “Jin, Jian, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom), a slogan rooted in the transnational struggle of the Kurdish people, particularly in Rojava. 

In reaction to the oppression of Kurdish people in Saqiz, other parts of Kurdistan took to the streets: “Saqiz is not alone; Sanandaj is supporting it”. And the rest of Iran, from Tabriz to Tehran to Zahedan, came to the streets with solidarity actions in support of others who suffer from the Islamic regime for similar or different reasons. The wave of solidarity since then has crossed boundaries and borders, whether geographical or political. A revolutionary energy is released from the fusion of pains. 

To make sense of any revolution and its novelties, we need to go beyond a procedural analysis, which tends to emphasize historical processes leading to a revolution. This does not mean rejecting the importance of such processes and of the history of discontent and resistance in Iran. But we also need to demarcate what we call the magic of a revolutionary moment. To play with what Edward Said famously wrote on exile, the magical moment of revolution is strangely magnificent to experience but extremely hard to describe. It is what makes the present so inflated that it marginalizes the past and future. Similar to messianism, but not to be mistaken with it: as if the whole past was there to reach this moment and the whole future would be its residue. This is how a revolutionary moment transforms the boundaries of imagination on a collective level.

From fear to anger

Finally, we have crossed barriers of fear

Finally, we have found our way to the alley

The wind was kissed by your hair

Revived city of death seekers and despair

Before the Jina Revolution, fear was the hallmark of politics in Iran, like many other places around the world. Fear that things can get worse, and therefore, it is preferable to vote for reformists. Fear of a war with the USA or Israel. More importantly, fear of becoming the new Syria, which fell into a civil war despite all the sacrifices. Fear of happiness. Fear as the only small distorted window we see the world through. 

The regime has sponsored an overarching horrific image of future without the Islamic Republic through its complex apparatus of fear production and distribution. Syria and, in particular, what the Iranian regime did to the people there in support of the Syrian regime, became the token of fear of a failed revolution. Fear of a civil war with no monopoly on and no boundary for violence. The long-lasting fear of a civil war brings about a discursive constellation around “national security” that overrides all ethical considerations and justifies the harshest measures of suppression. 

Apart from the Syrian case, for many it was the uncertainty of the post-Islamic Republic era that played a major role in their reluctance to participate in the demonstrations. The fear of being a minority and alone in facing a frightening tomorrow.

Perhaps the magnificence of the current revolutionary moment is that fear is no more the main frame for understanding today and possible tomorrows. The current moment is perceived so inflated as it makes tomorrow less important for consideration: There is no greater fear than the defeat of the ongoing revolution. 

In the revolutionary moment, fear, as the dominant political frame of the past, is transformed into anger. It is hard to find anyone in Iran who is not angry with the state, but perhaps it is equally difficult to find a single overarching reason for these various angers in view of their particular histories. A person does not need to be part of an opposition or actively engage with Islam or politics to be angry. To live in Iran is enough. The rise in poverty has coincided with shameless corruption manifested in multiple and well-known cases that now barely make the headlines because of their growing number. 

Corruption is a daily experience in Iran. The 1979 Revolution was a call for justice, but now almost nothing remains from that claim. Unless you belong to the connected elite, you most probably have dramatically suffered from inflation and cuts. A gender apartheid regime which has forced mandatory hijab and segregation has most probably influenced you or someone close to you. Even if you were a religious person, you would have many reasons to consider the current regime as a humiliation of what you believe. 

From anger to care

“Fear not! Fear not! We are all together” was the most prominent slogan of the 2009 green movement in Iran. In the Jina Revolution, the protestors, in their slogans and performances, present the overcoming of this fear and add an appendix to it: “Fear us! Fear us! We are all together”.

However, this uniting anger goes beyond mere collective discontent. It is perhaps more about understanding the pains of others and their sufferings, to build up a feeling of solidarity across different types of anger. This solidarity with its angry tune is a distinguishing aspect of the current struggle. Barely anyone could imagine peripheries with different histories of conflict singing in solidarity together. As if a new sense of nationhood, a new imagination of togetherness is taking form. A new conceptualization of being Iranian with the potential for a more just and inclusive ‘We’.

All this testifies to the rise of a politics of care that puts solidarity at the heart of the revolutionary moment, articulating several histories of oppression/resistance together. It is a collective kashf (unveiling), or a sudden revelation of “being Iranian”: divided in pains, united in anger. This is the turning point from a politics of fear to a politics of care, and this is the hallmark of the Jina Revolution.

Thus neighborhoods, as spaces of care where life is reproduced and vital resources are distributed, have become the main sites of protests in Iran. In contrast to the Green Movement and its emphasis on the central cities and streets, in the Jina Revolution the peripheries are leading, and the center follows. 

This is not limited to the pioneering role of Kurdistan and Balochistan in the protests—both suffering from long-lasting ethnic/religious discrimination even before the Islamists. The revolution is a revolt against peripheralization itself. It celebrates multiplicity and unity in diversity. 

Perhaps it is its multiplicity that explains the revolution`s specific form of organization: the revolutionary strategies in practice are produced and dictated from below, while the usual leaders, at best, contribute only at a tactical level. For example, coordinating a single demonstration or logistic/guidelines for actions. Thus, it is a chaos that challenges state power and its manifestation. An ungovernable mass of forces overthrowing current and forthcoming efforts to homogenize it in an Islamist/nationalist coffin.  

A feminist revolution and beyond

Stay, with me on my way,

Sing along, sing along,

for this sudden song,

from one person to another person,

has reached every horizon,

with happiness,

with freedom,

woman life

woman life freedom

freedom

بمان و در کنار من
بخوان بخوان
که این سرود ناگهان
دهان دهان
رسیده تا به هرکرانه
با شادی
آزادی
زن زندگی
زن زندگی آزادی
آزادی

The compulsory hijab is the most important manifestation of state power in Iran. Hijab police, in its different names, has targeted millions of women in the past four decades. The compulsory hijab marks the territory of the Islamic Republic: a continuous territorialization based on fear. For the same reason, it has become the main expression of the revolt. To challenge it, to unveil, is performative in nature. 

“Woman, Life, Freedom”, in this context, brings together collective feelings of reciprocity and sharing of pains. To care for others and be cared for. The slogan, in this sense, appeared as the negation of the Islamic regime, which started with oppressing women, overlooked life in its otherworldly ideology and started a war on freedom from its first day in power. 

It is a feminist revolution in this sense. Neither because its pioneers are Kurdish feminist women, nor because of the importance of compulsory hijab in the revolutionary anger. More than all this, it is because the revolution is about the politics of care and solidarity. To care is a part of any revolution, perhaps. However, it features as the main theme in this case. 

To leave no one behind. In this sense, feminism is not just about gender equality, but a radical transformation of social relations. This is what makes the ongoing revolution in Iran also relevant beyond its national boundaries.

The wave of solidarity in the Jina Revolution has already shown its potential to go beyond the national borders of Iran, as it resonated with discontent in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Kurdistan and Lebanon, and other geographies. It has the potential to reimagine the whole region from below based on a shared destiny. A region which now shares war, environmental crisis, inequality and displacement, as well as neo-liberalization, corruption and censorship. A battleground for external wars and rivalries at the expense of ordinary people’s life and dignity. 

This re-imagination is not happening for the first time and its outcomes are not guaranteed, however, as there is no single railway for the train of history. What the Jina Revolution brings forward is the collective feeling of openness about the future. Not haunted by old curses or doomed to be the same as or worse than the present.    

* Parts of a new revolutionary song that became famous after being performed by music students in Tehran in 2022.

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