Iran, “Reverse savages, victims, saviours” politics, and the human rights moral maze

Thursday 12 Mar 2026, 14:00 → 15:30 Europe/London

Zoom

In this seminar, Shadi Mokhtari presents select themes from her current book project examining the human rights politics surrounding Iran’s 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. To shed light on this politics, she employs two optics:  a Human Rights as Mockery of Morality, Manifesting Morality and Moral Maze Typology and the Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviors Metaphor of Human Rights (Reverse SVS). Her presentation will begin with a description of how Reverse SVS politics, spurred by the Iranian state’s anti-imperialist victim branding and uncritical international anti-imperialist solidarities, traditionally produced indifference to the Islamic Republic’s oppression and undermined local and diaspora struggles against it. She will then discuss how the initial “Women, Life, Freedom” mobilisations successfully transcended Reverse SVS politics, allowing for a moment of international moral clarity on the Islamic Republic’s subjugation of Iranians.  From there, the presentation provides an account of how right-wing diaspora actors tapped into Iranians’ frustrations with Reverse SVS politics as a key avenue for turning “Woman, Life, Freedom” into a diaspora-driven and state-sponsored, polarised moral maze terrain replete with exclusionary politics, digital outrage communication, human rights vigilantism, and depoliticised discourses on Islam. Incorporating examples of contention around Reverse SVS politics following the recent January 2026 protests and massacre, Mokhtari then lays out what she calls “the instrumentalisation of injustice trap” and argues for disentangling instrumentalisation from the injustice being instrumentalised as one key path out of the human rights moral maze she identifies.

 

 Shadi Mokhtari teaches in the Department of Peace, Human Rights, and Intercultural Relations at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC. Her work focuses on various intersections of global human rights politics, Middle East politics, and political Islam. She is the author of After Abu Ghraib: Exploring Human Rights in America and the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Registration will close two hourse before the event begins