When Iran dominates the news cycle, the world is inevitably plunged into a familiar and often toxic debate: who has the right to resist, and what kind of resistance is considered “acceptable”?

We are currently witnessing a jarring spectacle. Segments of the wealthy Iranian diaspora – some of whom remained silent during the bombardment of Gaza – now openly call for Western intervention. Meanwhile, sections of the Western Left, rightly opposed to US imperialism, find themselves defensively aligning with a theocratic state.

This polarisation is not accidental. It is the product of a false binary that demands we choose between two forms of domination: Western-backed regime change or clerical authoritarianism. To move beyond this trap, we must ground ourselves in the material reality of the Iranian people – not in the geopolitical abstractions of cable news panels or ideological camps.

Image credit: mdreza jalali

The Dual Reality of the Islamic Republic

The internal reality of the Islamic Republic is stark. It governs through gender apartheid, political imprisonment, censorship, and the violent suppression of dissent. For women, students, workers, ethnic minorities, and queer communities, resistance is not a rhetorical posture – it is a daily struggle for survival against an entrenched state apparatus.

At the same time, the Islamic Republic plays a significant regional role. It provides funding, weapons, and logistical support to movements in Lebanon and Palestine that resist Israeli domination. Without this material support, the military capacity of these groups would be considerably diminished.

Yet this support is not rooted in a principled commitment to human liberation. The Iranian state advances its own geopolitical interests, leveraging Palestinian resistance as part of its strategic rivalry with Israel and the United States. Recognising this complexity does not require dismissing anti-colonial struggle. It requires refusing to romanticise the state that bankrolls it.

 

The Liberal Trap: Restoration Disguised as “Liberation”

Western liberal discourse frequently amplifies Iranian voices calling for immediate regime change – often with tacit or explicit Western backing. This narrative aligns closely with a particular strand of the diaspora: elite families who left after the 1979 revolution and who frame the pre-revolutionary monarchy as a lost golden age.

Image credit: Albert Stoynov

This helps explain the imagery at some protests abroad: the pre-1979 Lion and Sun flag flown alongside Israeli flags, sometimes accompanied by portraits of Reza Pahlavi – the son of the last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Reza Pahlavi presents himself as a democratic alternative and symbolic heir to the monarchy, and has received considerable Western media exposure as a potential transitional figure.

For liberal interventionists, the formula is simple: remove the clerics, empower a Western-aligned leadership, and call it democracy. But history makes clear that the United States and Israel are not invested in participatory democracy in the region; they are invested in stability and alignment. Replacing clerical authoritarianism with a restored monarchy or technocratic client regime is not liberation. It is a rebranding of dependency.

The Leftist Trap: Campism and the “Axis of Resistance”

On the other side, parts of the Western Left fall into what is often called “campism” – the belief that any state opposed to US imperialism must therefore be defended. Within this logic, Iran is treated as a pillar of the so-called “Axis of Resistance,” a loose regional alignment including Iran, Hezbollah, and other actors opposed to US and Israeli dominance.

But this framing collapses the Iranian people into mere instruments of geopolitics. Defending the Iranian state uncritically in the name of anti-imperialism risks silencing the very workers, feminists, and students who resist it internally. It suggests – even if unintentionally – that Iranian women should endure state violence for the “greater good” of weakening American hegemony.

This is not internationalism. It is abstraction. Just as Palestine exposes the contradictions of liberal human rights discourse, Iran exposes the contradictions of an anti-imperialism that forgets the people living under the regimes it defends.

Woman, Life, Freedom: The Third Horizon

The 2022 uprising following the killing of Jina (Mahsa) Amini by Iran’s morality police crystallised an alternative. The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” (Jin, Jiyan, Azadî) – rooted in Kurdish feminist struggle – became the rallying cry of a nationwide revolt.

What began as protests against compulsory hijab laws rapidly evolved into a broader challenge to the entire political order. Students organised campus strikes. Oil and industrial workers joined labour actions. Neighbourhoods formed local networks of resistance. Women publicly removed their hijabs in acts of collective defiance. The uprising was decentralised, cross-class, multi-ethnic, and explicitly feminist.

Image credit: Neil Webb

The Woman, Life, Freedom movement demonstrated something crucial: Iranians are not waiting to be “saved” by foreign powers, nor are they fighting to restore monarchy. They are articulating a vision rooted in social justice, gender liberation, and democratic participation.

This movement rejects both poles of the imposed binary. It understands that opposing clerical rule does not require embracing Western military intervention or nostalgic restorationism. It gestures toward a different horizon: grassroots democracy, labour organising, and feminist transformation.

No Kings. No Clerics. No Western Intervention.

The choice presented to the world is deceptively simple: imperial regime change or clerical continuity. But this binary is artificial.

In plain terms, the trap works like this:

  • If you oppose the Islamic Republic, you are expected to support Western intervention.
  • If you oppose Western intervention, you are expected to tolerate the Islamic Republic.

Both positions erase the agency of ordinary Iranians.

The messy reality of revolution will always include contradictions, risks, and opportunists. But the existence of bad actors is not a reason to abandon solidarity with the people themselves.

True solidarity means supporting the Iranian people’s right to self-determination – against theocratic repression and against foreign domination.

Call to Action

Activists Without Borders (AWB) argues that the “choice” between the crown and the cleric is no choice at all. It is a political trap that keeps ordinary people – the dispossessed, the marginalised – locked in cycles of dependency. To refuse this binary is not indecision. It is clarity.

AWB urges:

Support for Iranian self-determination
Stand with the Iranian people’s struggle against theocratic repression without demanding they subordinate their domestic liberation to any geopolitical “axis.”4

Human rights and feminist collectives
Recognise the Woman, Life, Freedom movement as a transformative struggle for structural change – not a symbolic moment to be appropriated into liberal narratives of empowerment.

Diaspora communities
Reject restorationist nostalgia. A return to Pahlavi-era autocracy is not progress. Democratic futures cannot be built on authoritarian pasts.

Students and academics
Engage with Iranian grassroots movements on their own terms. Centre workers, feminists, ethnic minorities, and local organising rather than reproducing state-centric narratives.

The colonial and imperial machine thrives on simplification. It reduces complex struggles to digestible binaries. But Iranian resistance – like Palestinian resistance – refuses to fit neatly into those frames.

The binary was built to contain political imagination. It tells us we must choose a master.

The real question is not which ruler we prefer.

The real question is whether we are willing to imagine – and materially support – a future without them.