Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Roundtable on War, Repression, Iran and International Solidarity
Date: Thursday,12 March 2026
Time: 15.00-16.30 (UK Time)
Venue: Online
After the massacre of thousands of protesters in Iran by the regime, military intervention by the US and Israel and war, we want to make space for a democratic and frank discussion about international solidarity. In the current context of heightened division and increasing verbal and physical violence among different factions of the diaspora, we suggest that nuanced conversations about “difficult topics” are of crucial importance to strengthen the demands for justice that come from Iran. We invite academic and activist speakers to offer their reflections. Based on their expertise and analysis of the current conjuncture, they share their perspective on what international solidarity looks like today.
Speakers
Maziar Samiee is research associate at the Centre for Global Political Economy, University of Sussex. He works on the history of European integration, capitalist futurity, and political ecology in the Middle East.
Mehrdad Emami holds a PhD in Sociology from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Türkiye. His dissertation, “The Formation of the Subaltern and the Counter-Hegemony in the 2017–2022 Uprisings in Iran,” examines the 2017–2022 uprisings through a Gramscian lens, focusing on subaltern formation and counter-hegemony. He has translated works on social movements, Marxism, ideology, and Turkish politics into Farsi and has led workshops in Turkish on Iranian social movements. His edited and co-translated volume with Saeid Mozafari, Tracing the Protests in Iran: Popular Uprisings from 2017 to 2022 [İran’da Protestoların İzinde: 2017’den 2022’ye Halk Ayaklanmaları], will be published in Turkish in 2026 by Ayrıntı Publications.
Suzan Karimi is an Iranian feminist writer and activist currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Gender Studies at Central European University. Her research interests include sexual politics, anti-fascist feminism, and feminist literary and cultural studies, with a particular focus on contemporary Iran.
Nastaran Saremy is an interdisciplinary researcher, art critic, instructor and environmentalist, specializing in cultural and social analysis, aesthetics, and media studies. With a background in Philosophy and Aesthetics, she is currently a PhD candidate in Media and Communication Studies at Simon Fraser University (Canada). Her research explores mass politics, social change, and the cultural-aesthetic composition of social praxis. In her doctoral work, she investigates memory regimes and mnemonic projects as methodological frameworks for studying ongoing social transformations in contemporary Iran- particularly from marginalized perspectives.
Chairs
Paola Rivetti is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University. She is author of Political Participation in Iran from Khatami to the Green Movement (2020) and Storia dell'Iran. Rivoluzione, guerra e resistenza (2026), which she presented in numerous universities across Europe, North America and the Middle East; and editor or co-editor of six journal special issues and four volumes: Islamists and the Politics of the Arab Uprisings: Governance, Pluralisation and Contention (2018), We've Come A Long Way. Reproductive Rights of Migrants and Ethnic Minorities in Ireland (2018), Continuity and Change Before and After the Arab Uprisings. Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt (2015) and Effetto società civile. Pratiche e retoriche in Iran, Libano, Egitto e Marocco (2010). She leads the DCU-based unit of the Horizon Europe project INTERFACED: Interfaces for Democratic Participation, working on Tunisia. Dr Rivetti is the vice-director of the Institute for Research in Genders and Sexuality, established at DCU.
Firoozeh Farvardin is the university assistant in the area of Gender and Politics at the University of Vienna, where she teaches and conducts research on feminist and gender counter-strategies against authoritarianism in the Global South. She is also an associate fellow at the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC), hosted by Potsdam University and supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Germany.
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