Pagina dettaglio corso numero uno

by Chiara Chisari, Research Fellow at the University of Milan

Following Khamenei’s death on 28 February, people took to the streets in several Iranian cities. Videos circulating on social media showed honking horns, fireworks, toppled statues, and slogans against the government. To many, his death appeared to be the breach through which one might imagine the end of the repressive regime: in keeping with the liberation narrative adopted by the United States and Israel, the violence was read as an opportunity, as the threshold of something new.

That reading was radically contradicted by events within the space of just a few days. In March 2026, as the United States and Israel were conducting airstrikes on Iranian territory, the authorities of the Islamic Republic launched a new wave of executions of political prisoners (see, for instance, here). Cut off from any possibility of communicating with the outside world, the very population that had celebrated found itself – and continues to find itself – subjected to a twofold violence: that of a regime which has never ceased to operate, and that of a conflict which goes on promising emancipation without delivering it. “We want change but not like this,” declared several Iranians interviewed by The Guardian – a statement that signals the betrayal of a genuine desire for change in favor of interventionist posturing.

What, then, is the relationship between violence and freedom? Can violence truly emancipate?

The promise of emancipation through violence is hardly a novelty in recent political history. Just as the liberation of the Iranian people has been incorporated into current Western geopolitical discourse, the military operation in Afghanistan launched after 11 September 2001 was accompanied by a rhetoric of emancipation from oppression in which war took on the character of a democratization mission. In its early stages, the American occupation did produce improvements in Afghan daily life; yet the country’s fate followed a trajectory entirely independent of the official justifications and, above all, of the aspirations of a significant portion of the population. As Spivak observed in Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988), in her analysis of the dynamics of British colonialism, representing oppressed subjects as in need of protection strips them of agency, incorporating them into a narrative that precedes and exceeds them – one that proves, in practice, to be nothing other than an act of domination.

From a different perspective, one cannot overlook the fact that violent revolutions have produced real transformations; the very liberation from fascism in Europe passed through armed struggle. Engaging with violence as an act of self-emancipation, Fanon, in Les Damnés de la Terre (1961), elaborated this intuition in its most radical form: violence is not merely an instrument of liberation but performs a constitutive function. It is through violence that the colonized subject reclaims their subjectivity and repossesses themselves. From this standpoint, the euphoria of those who celebrated in the streets of Tehran was not irrational; rather, it expressed the hope that the fall of an oppressive power – even if brought about from the outside – might represent the occasion to reclaim one’s voice.

This constitutive function, although it plays a role in the dynamics of decolonization, does not appear to guarantee the possibility of founding a political order. As Arendt clarified in On Violence (1970), a victory achieved through violence may destroy a power but cannot replace it. The vacuum that opens with the fall of an oppressive power is not yet freedom but an unstable transition of power relations: it is the terrain on which new forms of domination compete, while the conditions produced by war – militarization, the suspension of rights, intensified social control – risk becoming entrenched long after the conflict that generated them has ended.

Whatever comes to pass in Iran, emancipation from oppression and the attainment of freedom will require processes of a fundamentally different nature from violence: relationships to be rebuilt, institutions to be reinvented, languages to be rediscovered – processes that demand time, space, and above all the active participation of those who live that reality. There is no liberation that can simply and violently be delivered from the outside. And every narrative that promises otherwise deserves, even before a moral judgement, a careful analysis of how it actually functions.