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Once the Islamic Republic’s most combative face on the world stage, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad built a political persona based on anti-Israel vitriol that deepened Iran’s isolation. Since Israel’s June 13 attacks on Iran, the former president has kept an uncharacteristic silence, coming on the heels of an enigmatic trip he made to Hungary six days before the war.

For many Iranians, the country’s often coarse and brutal judiciary has come to epitomize the establishment’s fundamental problems, and the arbitrary rulings and whimsical demeanor of the judges deciding political cases captures the breadth of this corruption.

Automatic assumptions about the aftermath of political change in Iran promise the vision of a country that’s modernized, reformed, industrialized and globally connected overnight. But the diasporic crusaders of forcible change haven’t clarified how this ideal will be fulfilled without any investment in civic education in a country long beset by isolation and sanctions.

In 12 days, 935 Iranians were killed, including scores of artists, athletes, writers, and students. When Benjamin Netanyahu pronounced the Persian words “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” in his video message to the “proud people of Iran” to invoke the popular motto of the 2022 uprising, his supporters hardly expected to see wanton violence unleashed in the name of Woman, Life, Freedom.

US President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration bonanza has not been devised to merely curtail undocumented immigration or reduce crime. University students, scholars and professors are also caught in the dragnet. Many, like Alireza Doroudi, hadn’t done anything wrong.

Iran is engaging in talks with the United States as it feels the weight of economic, diplomatic, and domestic crises. The outcome is not clear and democracy isn’t within reach, but its civil society hasn’t yet lost its resilience

In the face of rising international isolation and domestic asphyxiation, one fact about Iran has hardly ever been contested. A dynamic if ailing civil society, including a press that raises a voice of dissent whenever possible, prevents the country from becoming the North Korea of the Middle East.

As Tehran teeters without a vision to guide it, realism doesn’t appear to be trumping Washington’s idealism. The Iran-US understanding is long overdue, and still, the world will benefit from it whenever it happens.

Arash Azizi’s What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom is arguably the most solid work of non-fiction so far explaining the socio-political backdrop against which the first women-led democratic uprising in the Middle East emerged from Iran.

In Iran, bereavement is consciously instrumentalized by the state as a tool of social control that feeds off institutional grief and reproduces it in a symbiotic relationship driven by religion.