Podcast Source: PBS NewsHour / Reuters An Assessment of Strategic Contradictions and Diplomatic Opportunities The Dual-Role Paradox Pakistan’s deployment of 13,000 troops and fighter jets to Saudi Arabia on April 11, 2026—executed under the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement (SMDA) signed in September 2025—has thrust Islamabad into the centre of the Iran conflict with a fundamental […]

Podcast Members of the Iranian diaspora in Perth, Australia, holding a solidarity rally on 10 January 2026 against the Islamic Republic | Source: Wikimedia Commons | Credit: Gnangarra Listen to this essay: I have watched the Iranian diaspora move deeper into an information war that rewards certainty over truth. In that war, social media does […]

Podcast Photographer: Parastoo Maleki – Unsplash A narrative essay drawn from a dialogue between Hossein Hamdieh and Daryoush Mohammad Poor The Polarised Mirror In the spring of 2026, Iran and the United States were engaged in careful, tentative diplomatic contacts—first talks in Islamabad, Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir travelling to Tehran, a fragile ceasefire still […]

Podcast On Crossing Borders, Hearing Bombs, and the Stubborn Normality of a Nation at War Based on a first-hand wartime account from Iran by Kazeroun (@mkazeroun) on X “The evidence for a nation’s endurance is not found in its monuments but in the behaviour of its people when the monuments are burning.” The Decision to […]

Podcast Introduction In my previous assessments of Reza Pahlavi’s political project, published on this blog during the 2026 US–Iran conflict, I employed polemical and emotionally charged language—characterizing Pahlavi as driven by a personal “vendetta with a flag” and deploying the postcolonial epithet “comprador intellectual” to describe his supporters. An independent methodological review of my work […]

Podcast On Dutch Collaboration, Iranian Compradors, and the Price of Borrowed Salvation Still from Black Book (Zwartboek, 2006), dir. Paul Verhoeven. Rachel Stein, a Jewish resistance operative, navigates a world where collaborators and liberators wear indistinguishable faces. Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book (2006) opens a wound the Dutch spent sixty years bandaging. Set in the Nazi-occupied […]

Podcast Photographer/Creator: Levi Meir Clancy / Source: Unsplash The loudest war drums in the diaspora are often beaten by people with no skin in the game at all. No mother in Tehran waiting through blackouts. No brother in Isfahan tracking sirens. No daughter in Shiraz sleeping under glass that could shatter at dawn. Yet they […]

Podcast Credit: © ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Live News On the Comprador Character in the Iranian Diaspora and the Collapse of Borrowed Salvation A Character Type, Not a Person Every imperial project produces its own native chorus—voices from the colonised world who sing the coloniser’s hymn in an accent the metropole finds authentic and […]

Podcast Alain ROLLAND © European Union 2023, Licensed under CC BY 4.0 Reza Pahlavi wants his throne back, and he is willing to see Iran broken to get it. For more than four decades, from the safety of American exile, the last scion of the Pahlavi dynasty has waged a campaign of dynastic restoration disguised […]

Podcast Hamid Dabashi on Sovereignty, Selfhood, and the End of Western Validation Based on a conversation between Hossein Hamdieh and Hamid Dabashi The Day After the Ceasefire On the Wednesday after the ceasefire was announced, Hossein Hamdieh sat in a repurposed factory near Azadi Square in Tehran—a building that had once housed industrial machinery and […]