The 1960s are rightly characterised as the ‘world historical’ age of national liberation movements in Asia and Africa as well as of movements against the capitalist world system in Latin American and Western states. These and other movements of the 1960s – women’s, civil rights, gay liberation, student and indigenous – also inform today's world (see Debray 1967; Katsiaficas 1987; Varon 2004), as the latter movements mark the birth of ‘new social movements’ and identity politics (Vahabzadeh 2003). In Fredric Jameson's cogent words, ‘for a time, everything was possible … this period … was a moment of universal liberation’ (1988: 207). The 1960s, in particular at its ‘hour’, 1968, brought to the view the ‘international connection between social movements’ (Katsiaficas 1987: 3). ‘It was not by chance alone that the Tet offensive in Vietnam occurred in the same year as the Prague Spring, the May events in France, the student rebellion in West Germany, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the takeover of Columbia University, riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the pre-Olympic massacre in Mexico City’, observes George Katsiaficas. ‘These events were related to one another, and a synchronic analysis of the global movement of 1968 validates Hegel's proposition that world history moves from east to west’ (1987: 4). Nineteen sixty-eight has been rightly characterised as the year of global revolution.

Historically, the idea of popular armed uprising rose in such turning-point events as the American War of Independence (1775–83) and the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), while conceptually the militant action of intellectuals who were intent upon instigating a popular uprising can be traced back to the nineteenth-century revolutionary violence of Russian Narodniks (see Hobsbawm 1963; Vahabzadeh 2019b: 100), which influenced Lenin and Mao (Laclau 2005: 9–10). However, I do not intend to pinpoint the historical and conceptual lineage of armed struggle in order to explain the PFGinstigated urban guerrilla warfare in Iran. The global events of the 1960s, in particular the rise of guerrilla movements in Latin America (Gott 2008), have been widely credited for the rise of Iranian militants (Vahabzadeh 2010: 14–15, 24), although I take the Latin American influence, while important, to be partial.