Post-apocalyptic Time
"Iranians have been denied [...] the ability to inhabit a thinkable history". Anthropologist Shahram Khosravi on Iranian life under constant rupture.
I.
“How did we end up in this hell?” is the question every Iranian I know asks. As I write these words, on the fifth day of the U.S.–Israel invasion of Iran, I am no longer certain what remains of the country in which I grew up.
Weeks earlier, when I spoke with friends and relatives inside Iran, I was stunned to hear some expressed a desire for war, as the only way left to change the regime. It was especially shocking to hear this from a couple of friends in my own village, people who struggle to put food on the table, whose children sit in unheated classrooms, who must drive twenty kilometers simply to see a nurse. When Hamid, a childhood friend who, when he was a young soldier lost his foot in the Iran–Iraq war, told me he wanted to be rid of the Islamic Republic no matter the cost, even if it meant another war, I felt a deeper fear.
More than the threat of an approaching war, I was frightened by the emptiness I felt. I was shaken by a protracteddeprivation and an organized abandonment had pushed people to a point where war could begin to resemble deliverance.
Hamid knows exactly what war is. He has lived through it. That he no longer care whether another one begins reveals how far people have been driven into a post-apocalyptic condition, where even bombs no longer feels as violence.
The word many people in Iran use to describe this condition is estisal, a state of helplessness, desperation, of being trapped in a problem with no imaginable solution.
The Islamic Republic has ruled Iran for forty-seven years. Nearly half a century of sustained political repression has not only disfigured public life; it has eroded the very capacity for political action grounded in vision and world-building. Across these decades, every attempt at reform or opening has failed. Repeated defeat has produced a thinner mode of political behavior—reactive rather than generative, fragmented rather than collective, driven more by exhaustion than by strategy.
When hope in political transformation recedes, other forces rush in to fill the void. Gods, ideologies, and fantasies of salvation replace political thinking and action.
When the present feels absent and the future appears stolen, political engagement withdraws from the public sphere and turns inward. It erupts as private outrage, as the discharge of anger, as the articulation of hatred. Such expressions may provide emotional release, but they do not build a common world.
Fragmentation and conflict have also reshaped diasporic networks and political practices. Friendships have dissolved. Families are strained by tensions that cut across generations and political allegiances. Instead of forming durable alliances, oppositional energies have splintered into rival factions, each claiming moral or strategic superiority.
This absence of coordinated political organization has created space for the reappearance of monarchy as a plausible alternative.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx argues that Louis Bonaparte’s authoritarian seizure of power in the 1851 coup was made possible not by his strength, but by the fragmentation, rivalry, and political immaturity of the republican forces. Their divisions cleared the path for a figure who could present himself as a unifying savior and the only alternative.
The historical parallel is unsettling. The self-proclaimed Shah who has Israel’s support, like Louis Bonaparte, is not elevated by extraordinary capacity but by circumstance. Marx described Bonaparte as a mediocrity and a caricature lifted into power by the failures of his opponents. The danger today lies less in the restoration of monarchy than in the vacuum produced by fragmentation, a vacuum in which even derivative figures, such as “the son of the Shah” (recalling Marx’s description of Louis Bonaparte as merely “the nephew” of Napoleon), can present themselves as destiny.
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II.
During my fieldwork in Iran a decade ago, I frequently heard a joke: “After the Revolution, Persian now has four tenses: past, present, future, and the Shah’s time.”
“The Shah’s time” refers to a nostalgic, imagined era before the Revolution —particularly the late 1960s and 1970s, a period associated with financial security, globalization, and a seemingly promising future. For many young people, it appears as a time of joy, when life is imagined real.
The resurgence of monarchist sentiment among some Iranians emerges from this condition of temporal dislocation—this sense of having been cast out of history. When the present feels void and the future foreclosed, the past becomes politically available in new ways. Monarchy appears not simply as a political alternative, but as a temporal refuge: a promise of restored continuity, of reentry into a historical trajectory perceived as interrupted.
The only imaginable life seems to exist outside ordinary temporality—either in a redeemed future brought about by rupture, or in an idealized past recovered through restoration. Caught between hope for rescue in some distant tomorrow and pleasure in a reconstructed yesterday, many young people lose their grasp on the present as a site of agency.
Political repression alone does not account for this post-apocalyptic condition. Harsh and far-reaching U.S.-led sanctions have also played a decisive role. Sanctions have not only devastated material life; they have reshaped temporal experience. The lived reality of sanctions is one of suspension and erasure—where past achievements fade from global recognition and future possibilities are systematically obstructed.
In mid-December 2024, Abbas Akhoundi, a professor of international relations at Tehran University, remarked, “Iran has fallen out of history.” He was referring to decades of international isolation produced by sanctions—an isolation that has severed the country from global geopolitical developments, economic initiatives, cultural exchanges, and academic networks. This disconnection is experienced across social strata and is visible in the texture of everyday life: in restricted travel, blocked financial transactions, inaccessible research collaborations, unavailable medicines, and stalled development.
To fall out of history is not merely to be excluded from events; it is to lose the sense that one’s actions can shape a shared future. In such a condition, politics contracts, nostalgia expands, and war itself begins to appear as a violent form of historical reentry.
III.
Hamid’s hopelessness is decades old, but it deepened during the brutal crackdown on the protests of January–February 2026. The demonstrations began in Tehran’s Bazaar, initially fueled by anger over the financial crisis, the collapse of the national currency, and soaring prices. What started as economically driven protests quickly expanded into a nationwide movement demanding the end of the Islamic Republic.
Hamid joined the protests. He was beaten by police. Holding his prosthetic foot in his hand, he was pushed into a police van and taken to a detention center, where he was held for several days. When he lifted the prosthesis and said, “I sacrificed for this Revolution,” a young officer, born after 1979, replied: “We do not care.”
Hamid once belonged to a generation celebrated as the moral backbone and future of the nation. Now he stands abandoned by the very state for which he sacrificed, a citizen without recognition and without a future.
One of the central promises of the 1979 Revolution was social justice for the poor. Official discourse exalted the mahroum (the disenfranchised) and the mostaz’af (the dispossessed): figures portrayed as having been marginalized by the Shah’s modernization project concentrated in major cities. They were imagined as unskilled workers, small farmers, nomads—the socially excluded who would now become the foundation of a just Islamic order.
This moral economy began to shift after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini and the end of the Iran–Iraq war. During Hashemi Rafsanjani’s presidency (1989–1997), ideological mobilization gave way to economic pragmatism. Under the banner of the “Reconstruction Era,” the state pursued privatization, deregulation, and subsidy reduction. Collective labor protections weakened. Job security eroded. Inflation and unemployment surged.
Gradually, the revolutionary welfare state of the 1980s was replaced by a postsocial state oriented more toward market logics than redistribution. Chronic unemployment and underemployment, coupled with the shrinking of social benefits, generated new forms of marginalization. International sanctions further deteriorated the domestic economy, intensifying precarity across social strata.
As in neoliberal transformations elsewhere, poverty in Iran has increasingly been individualized. Structural inequalities are reframed as personal failure. Citizens are expected to overcome systemic barriers through endurance, risk-taking, self-discipline, and entrepreneurial initiative. Out of this shift emerged a new ideal masculinity.
The heroic figure of the poor has been displaced by the entrepreneurial achiever. The glorified mostaz’af of the 1980s has given way to the celebrated moafaq—the “successful” individual. Where citizens were once expected to sacrifice their lives for the Revolution, they are now expected to demonstrate financial success. Official discourse valorizes the self-made, productive, upwardly mobile citizen as the normative ideal.
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Over the past two decades, luxury shopping malls have proliferated across Iranian cities, transforming the urban landscape. Consumerism has turned everyday life into a spectacle of inequality. Displays of wealth stand in stark contrast to widespread economic hardship.
Sanctions and political repression have not only weakened the economy; they have fostered institutionalized corruption and intensified class polarization. The promise of justice that once anchored the Revolution has given way to a system in which exclusion is normalized and inequality is publicly performed.
IV.
By the end of the fifth day of the war on Iran, the news depicted mass ruin: corpses upon corpses, shattered neighborhoods, the destruction of the country’s industrial infrastructure.
Yet a post-apocalyptic condition is not defined by material devastation alone. It is marked by existential rupture. For Hamid and many others like him, the world that once organized meaning has come undone. What gave coherence to sacrifice, endurance, and belonging has collapsed. When the present becomes unbearable and the future unimaginable, time no longer unfolds as possibility. It appears instead as repetition or catastrophe. In this sense, to be placed outside history is to inhabit a post-apocalyptic temporality.
Iranians have been denied, by the Islamic Republic as much as by U.S. sanctions, the ability to inhabit a thinkable history: the capacity to narrate their past and project their future on their own terms. Political repression constrains internal transformation; sanctions foreclose external integration. Together, they compress historical agency.
And yet a post-apocalyptic condition is not only an ending. It can also be a site of rupture in another sense: a flashpoint in which the continuity of domination falters. Critical moments emerge precisely in times of disaster; moments of opening and transformation. The Women, Life, Freedom movement of 2022, and the protests of marginalized communities in 2026, testify to this. Even in a post-apocalyptic condition, history is not over. Not yet.
