Diaspora is an old concept and is derived from the ancient Greek word for “dispersion.” Originally, the concept referred only to the historic displacement of Jews and Armenians who were dispersed from a “center” to at least two “peripheries.”Footnote ¹ It is in these peripheries that a collective memory about an idealized homeland and the myth of return to it is constructed and maintained. The aspiration of return to homeland in turn fosters the experience of a community in exile among diaspora members. Safran believes that in addition to dispersion and myth of return to the ideal motherland, diasporic groups believe that they will always remain “partially alienated and insulated” and will never be fully accepted by their new host societies.Footnote ² This troubled relationship with their new host societies is rooted in their belief that they should remain committed to the restoration of the homeland and maintain strong uninterrupted ethno-communal ties with it. Cohen adds that diasporic groups also maintain a sense of empathy and solidarity with co-ethnics in other host societies.Footnote ³

Since the 1990s, the concept of diaspora has undergone dramatic change in definition and meaning. Unlike the older notion of diaspora which was limited to religious minorities who were involuntarily dispersed throughout the world with ties to an idealized homeland, the newer concept refers to any form of dispersal, and it includes groups such as refugees, overseas communities, exiles, expatriates, immigrants, displaced or stateless individuals, traders, and labor migrants.Footnote ⁴ Carment and Bercuson add that any group whose members can live in two places and play a simultaneous role in two communities is considered as diaspora.Footnote ⁵

Scholars of transnational perspective contend that transnationalism and diaspora are two key concepts in global theories of migration that are conceptually connected and used interchangeably. As described by Levitt, transnational communities function as building blocks of diasporas.Footnote ⁶ Diasporas are formed out of transnational communities, and transnational communities are formed by individuals who have been displaced, voluntarily or involuntarily, by a variety of economic, political, and social forces and are scattered throughout the world.Footnote ⁷ Regardless of the reasons for their displacement, immigrants and their descendants remain strongly connected to their home societies and establish and maintain cultural, social, economic, and political ties that link their country of origin and their country of settlement. Moreover, the simultaneous participation of immigrants in multiple (home–host) settings or social fields enables them to continuously convert the economic and social status gained in one society into political, social, and economic gains in another.Footnote ⁸

It is estimated that between five and seven million Iranians live in diaspora. The formation of Iranian diaspora has largely been a cumulative upshot of distinctive political forces before and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. Much like other diasporic groups, Iranians have continuously been engaged in transnational social, political, economic, and cultural fields in the past three decades. The most recent example of simultaneous transnational participation of diaspora Iranians in home–host political fields is the Woman Life Freedom (WLF) movement and the unprecedented global visibility of diaspora Iranians in solidarity with this movement. Never before in the migration history of Iranians were so many first- and second-generation Iranian men and women mobilized to concurrently orchestrate massive inspiring protests in major cities across the world in solidarity with the demonstrators inside Iran. Likewise, never before were diaspora Iranians so invigorated and unified, bringing eighty thousand individuals from diverse political orientations across Europe together for a demonstration in Berlin (see Talebi in this collection), and launching a major global political campaign against the Iranian regime and in support of the Iranian protestors who were killed, injured, or detained. The essays in this collection focus on the 2022 Iranian Woman Life Freedom movement. Together, they assert that the joint ceaseless participation of thousands of Iranian immigrants in multiple countries, in solidarity with the WLF protestors inside Iran, indicate the existence of strong reciprocal, cultural, economic, and sociopolitical linkages between diaspora Iranians and their compatriots in Iran. These essays also suggest that although political activities in Iran and in the diaspora are played out in completely different sociopolitical spheres with significantly unequal political resources and human costs, they are nevertheless strongly interconnected, have the same political roots, and are oriented to capture different dimensions of the same political process. Whereas Iran is the core political space where revolutionary movements and struggles for freedom and justice originate and flourish, the diaspora is the periphery political space where the sociopolitical struggles of Iranian activists inside Iran are expanded and rendered more pluralistic. They also are extended and merged with other transnational liberation movements advocating physical and moral integrity and autonomy of individuals regardless of ethnicity, gender orientation, or belief (see Moradian, Mahdavi, and Talebi in this volume). Moreover, whereas Iran has a vibrant “lifeworld” in which protestors are inspired to draw on Iranian culture’s “native stock-in-trade” to defy the state’s traumatic intrusion and coercion, the diaspora is the site where the cultural carrier groups launch a “cultural trauma drama,” in which the factual struggles and collective sufferings of the activists are reenacted and made more meaningful to a global audience (see Sadri in this volume). Finally, whereas Iran is where a novel feminist revolution has succeeded, the diaspora is where the preexisting intergenerational Iranian feminist groups unite to form the politics of new transnational feminist organizations (see Moradian). In short, this special edition provides the first interdisciplinary collection of articles that examine the symbiotic, dialectical interconnections between diaspora and home politics as well as the active role Iranian immigrants, particularly in Europe and North America, have played in constructing, narrating, and explicating the WLF movement.

Iranian diaspora and its evolution, composition, and peculiar characteristics have been the subject of numerous scholarly publications, academic books, doctoral dissertations, and national and international conferences in recent years. This pioneering edited volume is the first publication that presents a collection of original essays about the dialectical connections between the Iranian “global diaspora” and the 2022 Woman Life Freedom movement in Iran. Considering the inseparable dialectical nature of diaspora–home connections facilitated by telecommunication advances inherent in the modern global age, these themes are obverse sides of the same coin and are best understood with a transnational lens.

In writing these essays and putting this roundtable together our primary aim was: (1) to understand and describe the dialectical relationship between the Iranian Woman, Life, Freedom movement and Iranians in diaspora; and (2) to explore the specific ways that the WLF movement impacted the political landscape of Iranian diaspora and was in turn intensified by political actions of Iranian activists in diaspora. To address these goals it is crucial to address three much larger interrelated questions regarding the triadic relationship between the Woman Life Freedom movement, the Iranian diaspora, and the Iranian government. First and foremost, compared to other postrevolutionary social movements in Iran, what was unique about the WLF movement that had such a powerful transnational impact on Iranian diaspora? Second, what has been the nature of the relationship between the Iranian diaspora and Iran, particularly the Iranian government, and how has this relationship shaped political activities of Iranians in diaspora? Finally, what political roles has the Iranian diaspora played and how has it influenced domestic policies and Iran’s international political posture?

The essays in this collection provide brief answers to each of these questions. This roundtable explores the multifaceted experience of the Iranian diaspora during and after the WLF movement in Iran. It particularly examines the political activities and transformation of Iranians in the United States, Canada, and Germany with specific emphasis on the strong diaspora–Iran political interconnections. Therefore, this project does not claim to be a comprehensive survey of political activities of all Iranian communities in diaspora during the WLF movement. Given the vast geographic dispersion of diaspora Iranians since the 1979 Iranian revolution, no single study can claim to be exhaustive. This edited volume is also limited to: (a) countries that witnessed the largest and most inclusive unprecedented demonstrations in the history of Iranian immigration in support of WLF, and (b) countries where ample research related to the themes of this special edition was conducted.

In addition to the geographic focus of this project, this edited roundtable is organized with a multidisciplinary and comparative approach. The contributors to this volume have extensive research experience with Iran, political events and dynamics in Iran, and Iranian immigrants; are trained in numerous academic disciplines in social sciences and the humanities; and utilize different methodological styles and theoretical perspectives in their research. The multidisciplinary nature of this volume not only provides a better and more comprehensive way to address the link between the Iranian diaspora and the WLF movement but also provides an opportunity for a wider discourse across disciplines with interest in the Iranian diaspora.

The single most important and recurring theme that unifies this collection is the political activism of diaspora Iranians. My goal was to include other essays in this collection that would capture the impact of WLF on other domains of Iranian diaspora, such as art, media, gender relations, and community life. However, given the long-term and gradual manifestation of changes in the cultural domain, the impact of the WLF movement and its link to cultural values and practices of diaspora Iranians have yet to be unfold and become palpable. Moreover, although the sociocultural practices and the political activism of diaspora Iranians have always been tightly interwoven (see Sadri and Benjamin and Shirazi in this roundtable), diaspora Iranians have historically been more sensitive to home politics and have engaged primarily in various organized and unorganized political activities to support political movements in Iran. That is why the political activism of diaspora Iranians in particular unfolded concurrent with the WLF movement in Iran.

Sadri and Benjamin’s innovative theoretical argument best captures the strong interconnection between the cultural and the political domains. They brilliantly demonstrate how a home “cultural trauma” or a rapture in the Iranian culture is politically reconstructed and narrated transnationally through political praxes of the Iranian diaspora. In their essay “Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising in Iran and Abroad: A Political or a Culture Revolution?” Sadri and Benjamin first coin and introduce the concept of “culture revolution” as opposed to “cultural revolution” for explaining the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi uprising in Iran and then explain the role of diaspora Iranians in supporting this culture revolution. The WLF movement, Sadri and Benjamin maintain, was neither a political revolution in which a state is overthrown, nor a cultural revolution in which the revolutionary state intrudes into the cultural subsystems of society to crush the resistance. This movement was rather a culture revolution in which protestors in Iran with the support of the Iranian diaspora engaged in an enduring lifestyle and civil rights protest movement that permanently changed the Iranian public and cultural spheres. Unlike cultural revolution, which involves the revolutionary government’s use of propaganda, penalties, and punishment for promotion of its master ideology and for suppression of the resistance, culture revolution restores the actors’ autonomy and inspires protestors to draw on culture’s native stock-in-trade to defy the state’s intrusion and coercion. Moreover, whereas cultural revolution is an antimodern repressive attempt at functional dedifferentiation and is rooted in the past, culture revolution is a hallmark of modernity and aims to proactively restore and revive functional differentiation that guarantees the autonomy of the lifeworld. Borrowing from Jeffery Alexander’s concepts of cultural trauma, Sadri and Benjamin explain how the Iranian domestic and transnational virtual communities joined together to launch a “cultural trauma process” through which publicly performed actions or “trauma dramas” of the protestors in Iran, such as burning their scarves in piles, were broadcast and extended to wider global audiences.

In short, Sadri and Benjamin believe the movement in Iran prompted the Iranian diaspora community to act as a “cultural carrier group;” to echo the collective trauma and sufferings (including arrests, injuries, and deaths) of the protestors transnationally; and to persuade Western governments to condemn the Iranian regime and take diplomatic measures against it. Moreover, the dialectical communicative interaction and virtual feedback loop between demonstrators in Iran and abroad not only urged diaspora Iranians to create a global visual language for mirroring the brutal treatment and sufferings of the protestors in Iran through numerous art performances, it also facilitated transnational emulation of slogans in Iran and brought the fractured Iranian diaspora together. This transient solidarity in turn intensified the movement in Iran and made the struggles and sufferings of the protestors in Iran more meaningful, triggering “vicarious traumatization.”

Like Sadri and Benjamin, Rozbeh Shirazi in his article “Revolution as Restoration: Woman, Life Freedom in the Diasporic Imaginary” argues that Iranians in diaspora narrated and amplified the voice of the protestors inside Iran. However, narrating from afar and calling the movement in Iran a revolution by opponents of the Islamic Republic is a misrepresentation of the WLF movement. This deliberate political practice by pro-Pahlavi diaspora activists provided an opportunity for pro-monarchy antigovernment diaspora activists to proffer their political imagination about a paradise during the Pahlavi-era that was lost after the revolution rather than narrating the political goals of WLF movement. By showing still images and video footage depicting prerevolutionary Iran as an era of personal freedom, gender equality, and professional opportunity in diasporic media, pro-Pahlavi political activists promoted a diasporic binary of a good prerevolutionary Iran and a bad postrevolutionary Iran in popular discourse. Moreover, depicting these visual representations in diasporic media was a “well-rehearsed” disingenuous political practice that idealized prerevolutionary Iran as a modern, energetic, and free society, particularly for women; and depicted postrevolutionary Iran as a tragic social formation with a strict religious code, systematic subjugation of women, and brutal suppression of all political oppositions—therefore the need for a new “revolution” to restore and reclaim the prerevolutionary paradise.

The romanticization of the Pahlavi era was not limited to Iranian political activists in the United States. Similar to Shirazi’s analysis of diaspora opposition, Mahdavi in “Woman Life Freedom Movement and a Pathology of the Diaspora Opposition: Retrotopia, Co-optation, and Misrepresentation” suggests that despite their support for democratic change Iranian opposition in Canada also is disconnected from Iran’s sociopolitical realities and suffers from a lack of understanding of the WLF movement and its context. Moreover, contrary to their claim for advancing grassroot movements, the Iranian activists in diaspora have turned their opposition into an “identity, lifestyle, and survival strategy” to sustain themselves in exile and arrogate to themselves the leadership of the next regime in Iran. In their discourse and rhetoric, they either glorify the imagined romanticized nationalism of the Pahlavi era—which never truly existed—or reinvent and essentialize ethnic identities within Iran. Both approaches reflect opportunism, and weaken the WLF movement’s impact in the diaspora. Despite the movement’s initial inclusive pluralistic nature and unifying democratic ethos based on gender equality, justice, civil rights, and bodily autonomy, driven by personal and political gain, certain diaspora factions have replaced the movement’s core values with Western-centric, ethnic separatist, and antileftist narratives.

For Mahdavi, the WLF movement is far more than a revolt against the authoritarian Iranian regime. WLF, he maintains, is an inclusive pluralistic woman-centered, “glocal” phenomenon, composed of local sociocultural realities with global ideals of bodily autonomy, love, gender equality, justice, and human rights, which challenges both religious orthodoxy and the Orientalist representation of the Middle East as well as Western-centric universalism and postmodern cultural relativism that denies the universality of gender justice. The WLF movement represents a post-Islamist paradigmatic shift from the “matrix of domination” to a “matrix of emancipation,” symbolizing the struggle against patriarchy, state-imposed Islamism, and authoritarianism in Iranian society.

Mahdavi’s matrix of emancipation as a symbol of gender equality and gender justice is echoed by Moradian in “Decolonial Diasporas: Iranian Feminist Solidarity in Global Context.” Nevertheless, for Moradian, the WLF movement is more than a demand for greater rights within the existing political and state structures and is linked to women of both the Third World (or Global South) and women of color in the Global North. The WLF movement, Moradian maintains, seeks a new political space and a feminist concept of revolution in Iran and the diaspora by understanding how gender and sexual oppression intersect with ethnic, religious, and class oppression, to promote and create a revolutionary movement at the level of the body and everyday sociocultural relations. Drawing on published statements, articles, webinars, and other public events, Moradian focuses on the politics of new transnational feminist organizations formed by the preexisting intergenerational Iranian feminist groups in solidarity with liberation movements in many different parts of the world. Although this new feminist concept of revolution emanated from Iran, it resonated and reinvigorated the views of Iranian feminists in diaspora. Moreover, the insights that emerged from WLF in Iran had salient affinities with other feminist revolutionary movements elsewhere. “Affects of solidarity” removed borders between Iran and the diaspora and created transnational solidarity between Iranians in diaspora and in Iran, and brought Iranian feminists in diaspora together to form new intersectional, transnational, and decolonial feminist collectivities among Iranian artists and political activists. As indicated by Moradian, Iranian activism abroad has always been an extension of the Iranian struggle for freedom and democracy. The blurred boundaries between diaspora and home due to the availability of shared social media technology not only enables Iranians in diaspora to develop solidarities with activities in Iran but also compels us to redefine and reconceptualize our understanding of the political space and how it is manifested in diaspora.

The resistance and reinvigoration of diaspora Iranian feminism discussed by Moradian is explored in a different context by Oghalai in “Willful Self-Exile As Feminist Resistance in the Iranian Diaspora.” Based on interviews with Iranian feminists who have continued their political activities after immigrating to Germany, Oghalai explains how self-exile becomes a form of feminist resistance. The disempowering nature of exile and physical separation from one country, she maintains, transforms and evolves into an empowering political resistance and bodily autonomy for Iranian feminist activists in diaspora. This empowering experience is a newfound freedom comprised of both a new political identity born out of refusal and repositioning and a conscious act of defiance against fear, bodily restraint, and other repressive conditions. Borrowing from Sara Ahmed’s concept of willfulness, Oghalai explains how the feminist Iranian activists in diaspora have willfully embraced socially visible emotional and political agency despite its detrimental political consequences and permanent exile. Unlike conventional forms of exile that are rooted in forced displacement, self-exile, according to Oghalai, is a distinct form of exile that emerges within the diaspora as a deliberate political decision at the cost of return to the homeland. This shift from forced exile with no return option to willful self-exile with conscious self-privation of return emerged in the diaspora during the WLF uprising in Iran. Although self-exile is not a new phenomenon and it had resurfaced with other major protests in Iran, the conscious and strategic navigation of visibility of feminist Iranian activists is distinct from other instances.

The last essay in this collection is Nader Talebi’s “Jina Diasporic Revolutionary Momentum in Berlin” in which he examines the diasporic aspects of Jina revolutionary momentum and political transformation of the Iranian diaspora in Germany. Through the application of an “affective politics” perspective Talebi explains how the historic event of the presence and political performances of close to eighty thousand Iranians with different political views from all over Europe and beyond transformed the narrative of Berlin, with its long political history of exiled Iranian political activism. The most important consequences of the WLF movement for the Iranian diaspora, Talebi believes, were reconfiguration of the political subjectivity of the Iranian diaspora; disintegration of the entrenched separation between “inside” and “outside” national borders and promotion of a shared revolutionary horizon among diaspora members; participation and engagement of previously politically inactive Iranian emigrants as well as women and young queer activists in political activities; and deconstruction of the narrative of “Kharej” (anything beyond Iran’s national borders) and “Kharejneshin” (an Iranian who lives abroad), which were constructed by the Iranian regime to control the visibility of opposition in diasporic space. The Kharej and Kharejneshin narrative was used by the Iranian regime to persuade Iranians who stay in Iran to “protect” the country against those who “do not care” and decide to move abroad for their individual interests. The primary political goal of this narrative was to exclude the Iranian diaspora because of relocation to Karej and diminish the impact of the opposition in diasporic space. The 2022 revolutionary momentum in Iran not only challenged and countered the dominant official narrative about the Iranian diaspora but also motivated exiled Iranians to organize global mass demonstrations and form new cyber networks and solidarities transcending political and geographic boundaries and altering the relationship between Iranians in and outside of Iran significantly.