Arts Speaker Series 2026-2027: Iran War and Fascism

Arts Speaker Series 2026-2027: Iran War and Fascism

Sara Naderi, Sociology

Moderator: Zahia

This talk examines the Iranian far-right movement and the model of political subjectivity it produces and prescribes for Global South subjects in relation to domestic and global political orders. Emerging inside Iran and across its diaspora, the movement gained momentum during the 2026 protest movement and the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, when opposition to domestic dictatorship became entangled with the neocolonial fantasy of liberation through—or rescue by—the Western war apparatus. I argue that this discourse fosters a self-infantilized political subjectivity: one that imagines Western military power as an external savior while diminishing Iranians’ capacity to act as agents of their own liberation. After outlining the movement’s context and principal actors, I develop working definitions of the far right, fascism, and fascistic subjectivity. I then compare the Iranian case with twentieth-century fascism and the contemporary North American far right. Finally, I examine how Iran’s semi-colonial history and dominant self-Orientalist discourse shape the movement’s distinctive features and its discursive and political convergences with, and divergences from, its North American counterparts.