Wounded but Alive: Civil Society, Political Debate, and Cultural Resistance Inside Iran After the January Crackdown
In the aftermath of the bloody January protests, Iran has entered a period defined by grief, repression, and deep political tension.
In the aftermath of the bloody January protests, Iran has entered a period defined by grief, repression, and deep political tension. The mass arrests, heavy prison sentences, expanded security presence, and efforts to impose a singular official narrative reflect a state determined to contain unrest. Yet at the same time, a parallel reality has emerged: despite repression, Iranian society remains politically engaged, intellectually active, and publicly vocal from within the country itself.
Across political forums, civil society statements, university campuses, teacher unions, cultural institutions, and even official spaces, evidence has mounted that Iranian society is neither silent nor politically paralyzed even as it is wounded and mourning. One of the most striking developments was the widely viewed roundtable discussion titled “Bloody Dey and the Future of Iran,” featuring Hesam Salamat, Sajjad Fattahi and Milad Dakhanchi on an independent Persian-language media platform named Azad. The significance of this discussion lay not only in its content but in its composition: it brought together sharply different ideological currents, including reformist voices, critical social analysts, and even perspectives associated with monarchist tendencies and arguments supportive of foreign intervention. The exchange was substantive, analytical, and deeply political, and it has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube alone.
According to many observers, the intellectual depth and analytical rigor of this discussion surpassed comparable diaspora debates, which are often shaped by polarization and rhetorical escalation. Instead of mutual delegitimization, the participants engaged in sustained argument about state violence, structural crisis, the dangers of civil conflict, the risks of foreign intervention, and possible pathways for political transition. The program received extraordinary public attention, signaling a strong demand inside Iran for pluralistic and serious political dialogue, even under conditions of pressure and censorship.
The conversation itself also revealed the breadth of political diagnosis and strategic disagreement inside Iran following the January killings. Hesam Salamat opened by offering condolences to the Iranian public and the families of those killed on January 8–9, describing the events as a horrific massacre for which society still lacks an adequate language. In his framing, mourning has become a rare shared condition binding people together, and the shock of January marks a rupture after which “something has changed permanently.”
Salamat argued that political debate must center on two questions: what the Islamic Republic becomes after Dey 1404 and what relationship it can claim to society, and conversely how Iranian society now understands itself amid accumulated anger, despair, and trauma. He warned that untreated resentment could undermine the very possibility of politics, pushing the country toward a dangerous internal-conflict paradigm, and insisted that any viable future must be built on republican coexistence, equal citizenship, and the protection of plural life without fear or discrimination. At the same time, he pointed to small but meaningful signs of mutual care and civic bonding. In his view, these fragile forms of solidarity must be expanded into stronger civil ties even among rivals.
Sajjad Fattahi, by contrast, treated Dey 1404 as the latest episode in a long cycle of state violence and governance failure. In his reading, this cycle stretches from the 1980s across major political crises in 1999, 2009, 2017–18, 2019, 2022, and 2025–26, with each wave exposing deeper layers of institutional darkness. Fattahi argued that the Islamic Republic’s core architecture is non-national in the sense that it does not prioritize Iran’s long-term national sustainability - economically, socially, or environmentally - making it fundamentally irreformable.
From this premise, Fattahi advocated a low-cost transition and claimed a growing societal convergence around moving beyond the current system. Central to his argument was the need for a single political focal point to coordinate a minimum coalition. He explicitly presented Reza Pahlavi as the most practical nucleus for such an alignment, while maintaining that Iran’s final political system should be determined through a referendum. Fattahi also took a sharper stance on external leverage: he criticized categorical rejection of sanctions and defended the idea that some sanctions could be designed to weaken the state’s coercive capacity and strengthen society. More controversially, he argued that, when judged against the risks of prolonged stagnation, external war, or even civil war, foreign intervention, including the possibility of military action, should not be ruled out as a tool to constrain the state’s repressive power, even if such scenarios remain costly and dangerous.
Milad Dakhanchi shifted the discussion toward moral agency and long historical structure. He argued that ritualized condolence can become a way of positioning oneself as an “outside observer,” and insisted that the more honest response is to confront the question of collective responsibility, rejecting what he called a societal “race for innocence,” in which individuals disclaim connection to the existing order by saying “it wasn’t me; it was the regime.” For Dakhanchi, the deeper issue is not only the Islamic Republic as a forty-year political arrangement, but a recurring Iranian pattern of authoritarian state formation rooted in older sovereign logics and the durable entanglement of political authority with religious legitimation.
In Dakhanchi’s view, the key missing actor in today’s political equation is an organized, empowered society. Iran’s crisis is produced through the state–society dialectic, and without rebuilding the institutional and cultural capacity of society through solidarity practices, mutual recognition, and sustained plural dialogue, politics collapses into fantasies of sudden collapse or salvation from outside. He therefore treated the very act of conducting this debate inside Iran, under risk and censorship, as a form of civic construction—an attempt to rebuild a collective “we” through serious, intersubjective argument rather than exclusion and delegitimization.
Simultaneously, 416 political and civil activists - most residing inside Iran - issued a joint statement condemning the latest wave of arrests and endorsing Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s proposal to establish a “National Salvation Front.” The signatories described the detention of figures such as Vida Rabbani, Abdollah Momeni, Mehdi Mahmoudian, Ghorban Behzadian-Nejad, Azar Mansouri, Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, Mohsen Aminzadeh, Javad Emam, Ali Shakourirad, and Hossein Karroubi as part of a broader campaign to suppress dissent. They also pointed to the long prison sentences imposed on Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, the continued detention of Sepideh Gholian, and harsh rulings against sociologist Mostafa Mehrayin as evidence of retaliatory repression.
In their statement, the activists characterized the arrests as revenge against voices demanding accountability for the January killings, arguing that securitizing politics and ignoring public grievances have pushed the country toward deeper crisis. They warned that authoritarian governance and economic hardship have created conditions in which some citizens, out of desperation, may become receptive to foreign intervention or hardline opposition alternatives. In contrast, they presented the proposed National Salvation Front as a framework for broad-based national consensus intended to prevent civil war, foreign domination, and structural collapse by facilitating peaceful political transformation.
The statement emphasized that national cohesion and preservation of Iran’s unity require structural change, an end to political closure, and guarantees of fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, assembly, media, and access to information. As the fortieth day commemorations for those killed in January approach, the signatories called for the formation of an independent fact-finding committee, continued insistence on justice for victims, and rejection of the death penalty, urging citizens not to allow the official narrative to erase the reality of state violence.
Student activism has also remained visible. A group of students from Islamic Azad University, Tehran Central Branch, issued a formal statement condemning what they described as “systematic killing, repression, and widespread violations of the rights of the Iranian people.” They declared that silence in the face of such events would contradict public conscience and fundamental human rights principles, and directly attributed responsibility to decision-making and security structures within the governing system. Reaffirming commitments to freedom, human dignity, and the right to self-determination, the students signaled that university spaces—despite intensified oversight—remain sites of civic resistance.
Teachers’ organizations have raised parallel concerns. The Coordination Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations warned that the continued presence of security forces, Basij members, and religious propagandists inside schools represents a “final blow to the educational system.” Citing field reports from multiple provinces, the council stated that non-educational security actors have entered classrooms and that repression initially directed at street protests has now extended into educational spaces. Declaring unequivocally that “schools are not barracks,” the council demanded the immediate removal of all non-educational security personnel, framing the situation as a dangerous expansion of securitization into civil life.
Cultural resistance has been equally pronounced. The 44th Fajr Film Festival faced an unprecedented wave of boycotts and withdrawals by actors, filmmakers, and nominees who refused to participate in celebratory events while the country was mourning. Several award winners did not attend the closing ceremony; some nominees publicly announced they would not accept awards. The boycotts were explicitly linked to the violent suppression of the January protests, with participants stating that public celebration was incompatible with national grief.
Even within institutional spaces, subtle shifts have emerged. The head of the University of Tehran publicly stated that “most of those present were protesters, not terrorists,” acknowledging that the unrest reflected public grievances. While he also referenced external interference, his remarks represented a rare departure from uncompromising official rhetoric and suggested an awareness within parts of the establishment that public anger cannot be reduced to criminality alone.
Taken together, these developments reveal a complex and layered picture. Iran today is experiencing expanded arrests, heavy sentencing, political securitization, and intensified control over educational and cultural institutions. Yet it is simultaneously witnessing sustained political debate, collective civic action, student mobilization, teacher resistance, cultural boycotts, and calls for structural reform—all emerging from within the country itself.
The January crackdown did not extinguish public life. Instead, it appears to have intensified a national conversation about political transition, accountability, and the future of governance. Beneath the weight of repression, Iranian society continues to argue, organize, critique, and imagine alternatives.