Description
The (re)activation of socio-political conflicts in the home country evokes particular sentiments within diasporic communities that influence their identity construction and their transnational politics. This paper argues that an intersectional outlook on the role played by affects and emotions would benefit the IR diaspora political mobilisation scholarship. The Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) uprising (2022-2023), a civil resistance struggle of unprecedented weight in Iran, represented a key moment for Iranian diaspora human rights activism. Within an important section of the Iranian community abroad, sentiments such as nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary years of the Pahlavi monarchy and discordant party politics involving old foes started resurfacing with more intensity due to WLF. By relying on the analysis of both oral and textual sources, this paper shows that those (re)activated affects and emotions favoured the human rights activism of first and second-generation Iranian women located in Spain, as made visible through their increasing presence in contentious and institutional public spaces and discourses in the country of settlement.
