The most recent state crackdown on Iranian protesters stands among the most violent suppressions of public dissent in Iran’s modern history. Protesters have been killed, blinded, and mass-arrested. As the state imposed a sweeping information blackout and advanced claims blaming foreign agents for the violence, this brutality has nonetheless been met with a striking absence of sustained outrage in spaces that otherwise position themselves as opponents of state violence. Among Western progressives, the response has largely been silence. Among commentators shaped by post-9/11 anti-war politics, often operating within the same progressive milieu, the response has frequently taken the form of deflection. And among regional media aligned with the “Axis of Resistance,” coverage has echoed the Iranian state’s own framing rather than expressing solidarity with those targeted by its security forces.
This absence of solidarity is especially jarring given how quickly outrage emerges in other contexts. When, for instance, Israel attacked Iran in 2025, condemnation was immediate and widespread across many of the same spaces. As the Iranian state escalated its internal violence beginning in late December, attention largely dissipated. In many cases, this refusal to recognize Iranian protest does not stem from indifference, but from ethical commitments, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and regional political allegiance, that shape how different audiences interpret state violence and resistance. Rather than amplifying the voices of those facing extreme repression, these commitments cast doubt on their political judgment, producing a refusal to accept recent Iranian protests as a legitimate political struggle at all. How did a set of ethical commitments meant to oppose domination come to foreclose recognition of a popular struggle against one of the most ruthless, crisis-driven governing regimes in the world?
To understand why Iranian protest is so often rendered illegible, it helps to begin with a simple comparison. Imagine two protest movements in non-Western states. In the first, the movement is led by an Islamist organization and framed as resistance to the United States or Israel. In the second, the movement is directed against a domestic Islamist authoritarian regime and advances demands for rule of law, civil liberties, gender justice, and secular governance. For many Western progressives, the first movement is immediately legible as “authentic resistance.” The second is far more likely to be met with silence or suspicion.
This disparity cannot be explained by geopolitics alone. It reflects a deeper framework of political recognition shaping which demands are seen as legitimate and which are treated as derivative or externally imposed. In principle, claims to legal equality, bodily autonomy, and political freedom are understood as universal. In practice, however, these claims are often treated as Western in origin and ownership, and therefore suspect when articulated outside Europe or North America, especially when they challenge a state already positioned as anti-Western or anti-imperialist.
Under these conditions, non-Western movements gain recognition most readily when they emphasize cultural or religious particularity or define themselves explicitly against U.S. or Israeli power. Movements that speak instead in the language of law, rights, or secular politics, especially when directed against an anti-Western state, are far more likely to be questioned. What emerges is a logic I call repressive authenticity: political legitimacy is granted only when distance from the West is visibly performed. Difference becomes the price of recognition. Within this framework, anti-Western states themselves are read as authentic embodiments of tradition and resistance, while those who oppose them are cast as inauthentic or foreign.
This reflex draws on a real historical experience. The language of universal values has often been used to legitimize colonial domination and imperial intervention, and skepticism toward that language is warranted. Postcolonial critique emerged to expose how European claims to universality were historically entangled with empire, not to reject universal ideals as such, but to show how they were selectively enforced and weaponized against non-Western societies. The problem arises when this historical insight hardens into a rule of recognition. Once universality itself is treated as inherently Western, any non-Western appeal to universal principles is read in advance as imitation or coercion. What began as a critique of domination is transformed into a filter that determines which struggles can be recognized as political at all.
This logic breaks down most clearly in the case of Iran. When Iranians demand a secular state or bodily autonomy, they are not borrowing a Western blueprint. They are responding to their own political history, shaped by the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911), the Islamic Revolution (1979), and lived experience under Islamic authoritarian rule. Similar political demands can emerge in different societies without producing the same outcomes; they are taken up, reshaped, and contested through distinct histories and struggles. At the same time, treating the Iranian state as the authentic expression of Iranian society reduces Iranian political culture to Islamist authoritarianism. In this frame, the state appears as the “real” Iran (anti-Western, Islamist, and undemocratic) while protesters are cast as alien to their own society, their dissent treated as suspect or illegitimate. What disappears is the recognition that critique, dissent, and demands for change have long been part of Iranian social and political life.
A distinct response emerges from a strand of commentary forged in the shadow of the post-9/11 “War on Terror.” Its hesitation to confront the Iranian state has a specific genealogy, rooted in the convergence of two historical currents: the external threat posed by the Bush administration’s “Axis of Evil” rhetoric and the internal promise of reform associated with the Khatami presidency (1997–2005) and sustained through the Obama era’s emphasis on engagement. Across these moments, a common framework took hold: a strategic wager that meaningful change in Iran would come through the gradual empowerment of reformist factions against hardliners, insulated from the destabilization of war. Within this framework, the primary threats to political freedom were identified not as the authoritarian state itself, but as external sanctions and the prospect of military intervention. Criticism of the state’s internal repression was therefore often treated as politically dangerous, liable to undermine diplomacy or provide rhetorical ammunition for advocates of regime change.
Even as the possibility of internal reform has largely collapsed, this reflex persists. When protests erupt, the violence is not denied, but quickly displaced by geopolitical explanation. Attention shifts to the harms of sanctions and the history of Western imperialism and manipulation, at the expense of sustained engagement with the immediate, state-inflicted violence unfolding on the ground. This is not to deny the destructive effects of sanctions, which the Iranian state has repeatedly instrumentalized to deepen crisis and consolidate control. But when every domestic uprising is interpreted primarily through the lens of external intervention, Iranian capacity for political action is rendered suspect.
This suspicion is reinforced through a striking double standard in evidentiary practice. In these US-centric commentaries, references to the CIA or Mossad, sources that are typically treated with skepticism in other political contexts, are invoked as credible indicators that Iranian protests are externally instigated or manipulated. Claims attributed to these agencies are used to cast doubt on protesters’ political independence in ways that would be dismissed outright in other protest contexts. What is at stake is not the empirical question of foreign interest or interference, but the selective elevation of intelligence narratives to delegitimize domestic dissent. Iranian protest is thus treated as guilty by association, its legitimacy eroded through sources that elsewhere would be considered epistemically suspect.
Framed as anti-racist or anti-war advocacy, this mode of interpretation produces a broader abstraction that flattens the specificity of Iran’s political and economic crises. Comparisons to police violence elsewhere or invocations of imperial crimes are often deployed to challenge American exceptionalist portrayals of Iran’s state as uniquely violent. Yet this rhetorical move recasts repression as a universal condition rather than a concrete political emergency, redirecting attention away from the specificity of Iranians’ lived experience. The effect is an implicit demand that Iranian society absorb the violence of its own government in the name of a broader struggle against global imperialism, because such violence is supposedly no different from what exists elsewhere. In this frame, protest ceases to register as a struggle against authoritarian rule. It is reclassified as a geopolitical risk, something to be managed rather than supported, reducing Iranian protesters to variables in a strategic calculation rather than recognizing them as political actors in their own right.
A related but distinct logic operates within media and intellectual spheres aligned with the “Axis of Resistance,” where hesitation to confront the Islamic Republic’s violence stems from regional geopolitical loyalty. Within the framework of the so-called “Axis of Resistance,” Iran is understood as the backbone of regional struggles against Israel and Western power. Solidarity is therefore structured as a zero-sum calculation: to legitimize an uprising against the Iranian state is to weaken the infrastructure of resistance itself. Within this framework, Iranian protests must be denied political legitimacy. Uprisings are reframed as US-Israeli conspiracies designed to undermine the Resistance from within. Iranian society appears not as a political actor with its own history and grievances, but as a terrain on which larger geopolitical battles are fought. Iranian lives are subordinated to regional strategy, and solidarity with the oppressed is blocked by allegiance to a patron state.
The question, then, is not why people disagree about Iran, but why Iranian protests so often fail to register as protest at all. Across different political contexts, the same outcome emerges through different logics: universal demands are treated as foreign, state violence is abstracted into general conditions, and popular resistance is subordinated to geopolitical calculation. What these responses share is a refusal to recognize Iranian protesters as political actors engaged in a struggle of their own. Recognition does not require agreement. It requires acknowledging that Iranian protests are real, legitimate, and rooted in a history of repression that cannot be dismissed as imitation, error, or strategy.