BRISTOL, UK:Â In moments of geopolitical escalation, nuance is often the first casualty. Nations harden into singular identities, conflicts collapse into binaries, and moral positions begin to align less with lived realities and more with strategic convenience.
Iran today sits at the centre of such a moment. The global discourse, particularly in the context of recent tensions involving the United States and Israel, has already settled into familiar lines: resistance versus aggression, sovereignty versus intervention, strength versus surrender. Much of this framing is driven by legitimate discomfort with the conduct of powerful states, particularly the rhetoric and posture associated with Donald Trump or the militarised responses of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Yet the dominant framing of this war exposes a deeper analytical failure. By reducing it to a binary, Israel versus Iran, or the United States versus Iran, the discourse displaces the very people most affected by it. Those who live within Iran, and who have long endured systems of coercion, surveillance, and repression, are rendered invisible in a conversation that speaks in the language of states, not lives.
When we critique the United States, we do not collapse America into its president. We do not assume that the actions of Donald Trump define all Americans. We instinctively separate the state from its people. That same analytical separation is often missing in how we speak about Iran. Iran is treated as a singular entity. The state, the regime, and its people are collapsed into one. The Ayatollah’s government becomes synonymous with the country itself. This is neither accurate nor benign. The people of Iran have long been engaged in a parallel struggle for freedom, and collapsing this distinction is deeply consequential. It erases those whose lives are most shaped by the regime.
Part of this problem lies in the convenience of simplified narratives, and in the limits of our own historical understanding. Complex societies are reduced to present conflicts, while longer histories of internal dissent and resistance are pushed to the margins. It becomes easier to take positions, but harder to ask the right questions. And the most important question here is this: whose Iran are we defending? Is it the Iran of the state, or the Iran of its people?
Iran is not just a political entity. It is a country with one of the world’s oldest civilisations, with a history of intellectual, artistic, and cultural richness that predates modern state formations. But the Iranian state, as it exists today, does not always reflect the aspirations of its people. Collapsing the two into one erases a distinction that is not only conceptually important, but lived every day by Iranians themselves. These experiences are not an abstract reflection. They reflect a broader pattern that has been consistently documented. Following the protests after Mahsa Amini’s death in 2022, hundreds were killed and thousands detained. United Nations findings have pointed to serious human rights violations, including unlawful killings, arbitrary detention, and systemic discrimination, particularly against women. The violence meted out against Iranians has increasingly come to reflect a structural response of the current Ayatollah led system.
The Iranian state operates through layered institutional power. Authority is not confined to visible leadership but diffused across enforcement mechanisms, ideological structures, and regulatory systems that shape everyday life. This makes simplistic narratives of regime change analytically inadequate. Removing leadership does not dismantle embedded systems of control. And yet, external discourse continues to privilege geopolitics over people. But it is the people who are most affected by all of this.
It is often suggested that those who oppose the regime represent only a small minority. This framing needs to be approached with caution. Repeated waves of protest, particularly since 2022, suggest not marginal dissent but widespread and cross-sectional resistance. What appears as limited public opposition is often a reflection of fear, surveillance, and systematic repression, rather than the absence of dissent. Even if one were to assume that dissent is limited in scale, the question remains: does the scale of dissent diminish its legitimacy? In any legal or moral framework grounded in justice, the answer must be no. Voices cannot be extinguished through coercion, suppression, or violence. Yet this is precisely what the current Ayatollah led system has done, through arbitrary detention, violent crackdowns, and sustained restrictions on speech and assembly. It is often argued that meaningful change must come from within, that it is for the people of Iran to transform their own political system. But such an expectation presupposes procedural fairness. Only where conditions of free participation, protected dissent, and credible institutional processes exist can change be expected to emerge from within. In a system where power is concentrated, opposition is criminalised, and electoral processes lack substantive credibility, it becomes difficult to expect transformation through conventional democratic means.
In today’s globalised world, Iran’s strategic location, its influence over critical energy routes, and its role in regional power balances ensure that it is viewed primarily through the lens of global strategy. Vast resources are mobilised in the name of security, deterrence, and control. In this framework, nations become strategic assets, and conflicts become calculations. But beneath this geopolitical architecture are individuals. And their realities do not always align with the narratives constructed around them. There exists within Iran a persistent, if often silenced, constituency that does not subscribe to the ideological foundations of the state. These are individuals advocating for civil liberties, gender equality, and democratic accountability.
The Iranian case forces us to confront what it means for the rule of law to exist not merely in form, but in substance, whether law functions as a constraint on power, or as an instrument of it. At the same time, the external dimension cannot be ignored. In positioning Iran primarily as a victim of external aggression, there is a risk of collapsing the distinction between state and society. In opposing external coercion, we may inadvertently legitimise internal repression.
Iran is a country of immense civilisational depth. One can hope that it finds stability. But more importantly, one must hope that its people are not lost in the process. Because the question is not whether Iran will prevail. It is whether the people of Iran will be heard.
* Dr Neeti Shikha is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. The views expressed are personal.
