Amidst the intellectual and political tumult surrounding the genocide of the Palestinian people, this essay seeks to foreground and amplify a marginalised voice. We aim to intervene in ongoing debates within academia and the wider public in the Global North, which often fail to grasp the lived realities of the people in the Middle East, shaped for over half a century by twin forces of neocolonial warfare and despotism. We articulate a distinctly Middle Eastern perspective that is anchored in a legacy of resistance against both Western neocolonial imperialism and ethno-religious despotism. From the outset, and in keeping with the ethical and political legacy of our revolutionary predecessors, we express our principled recognition of diverse and vital traditions of resistance across the Middle East and throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. Our intention is not to disavow other liberatory intellectual and political currents, but rather to amplify an overlooked voice from the Iranian Independent Left, which has withstood and opposed genocidal violence and oppression.
As we argue, the ongoing genocide in Palestine can only be fully understood when placed within the broader historical continuum of neocolonial mass violence and indigenous resistance across the Middle East over the past half-century. From this vantage point, we structure our discussion around three key lessons: First, the hegemonic conceptual framings of genocidal violence produce and perpetuate idealised images of victims and saviours. Second, these frameworks obscure the entanglement between neocolonial interventions and the root causes of genocidal warfare in the Middle East. Third, a critical step toward dismantling these hegemonic structures of violence lies in foregrounding the ethics and politics of indigenous liberatory movements throughout the region.
Lesson one: Idealised victim and saviour
The first key lesson we can derive from a Middle Eastern standpoint is that the hegemonic conceptions of genocide are epistemo-politically premised on idealised images of victims and saviours. The Middle East has endured relentless genocidal violence and oppression for decades. From Palestine and Lebanon to Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, generations of people have lived through unending suffering and bloodshed. Yet this extreme violence is consistently excluded from the prevailing discourse on genocide.[1] To understand the rationale behind this exclusion, we must first interrogate the epistemological underpinnings of the idealised victims and saviours of genocidal violence, as constructed through colonial juridico-political knowledge systems.
According to hegemonic legalistic conceptions, genocide is an exceptional humanitarian problem resulting from extraordinary acts of violence against protected groups, as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention.[2] Genocide is often regarded as the ‘crime of crimes’, occurring under exceptional circumstances and within specifically defined geographical contexts and timeframes.[3] This exceptionalist, humanitarian framework is premised on a triadic relation that establishes a nexus between the ‘exceptional crime’, ‘individual perpetrators’, and ‘ideal victims’ of genocide.[4] To be recognised as victims of genocide, oppressed people are expected to conform to a twisted narrative which demands not only that they suffer, but that their suffering must be legible and acceptable to Western eyes. They must appear starving, broken, dependent and utterly helpless.[5] Such a portrayal inevitably demands and legitimises the intervention of self-anointed saviours. These saviours are the Western states, humanitarian NGOs and global media empires who will be present to rehearse the language of human rights. In our analysis, this vision builds upon and sustains a specific epistemological and political framing of the ‘victim’, which is deeply ingrained in colonial and interventionist humanitarian imaginaries. Drawing on critical genocide scholarship, we argue that this framing constitutes the formation of an idealised image of the victim.[6] It is crucial to critically interrogate how this imperial narrative is being told and what roles it imposes upon both victims and those who claim to save them.
To be precise, the idealised victims of genocidal violence are both helpless and innocent. While they are dependent on the charity of the saviours, they are not to be blamed for their suffering. This figure is often represented by familiar, emotive imageries such as starving children, grieving women, torn-apart bodies or the Arabic-speaking men and women who swear before God that they have committed no crime. They plead with the global conscience, the United Nations and human rights messiahs. Undoubtedly, this is the image of the Middle East that Western media circulates prolifically and appears obsessed with. However, on a foundational level, this portrayal is rooted in an epistemic and political framework that has long been instrumentalised by self-righteous humanitarians and which renders human beings visible only through their suffering, silence and submission. This framework operates within a twofold political mechanism.
First, helpless victims are cast as epistemically incapacitated and politically naïve. They are assumed to be unaware of their condition, ignorant of the real causes of their suffering and, more importantly, disconnected from their history and dynamics of power. Based on this view, victims are not simply uninformed but rather are inherently incapable of political thought, agency or even the ability to articulate their suffering. Unsurprisingly, they are seen as unable to imagine, think or even desire an alternative way of life, a different political order or a new vision of morality and justice. Moreover, helpless victims are portrayed as embodying a childlike innocence. They are imagined to be so pure that they are incapable of committing a sin or crime. Any deviation from this image of innocence, expressed via political speech, mobilisation or any form of resistance, renders them monstrous suspects. More crucially, this ideal blocks recognition of the victim as a political agent. It strips them of their potential political subjectivity, imposing a depoliticised identity that can be easily reduced to numbers and statistics to be cited by human rights heroes, the moral face of the civilised West, who perform their sorrow with furrowed brows before the media.
Second, helpless victims are depicted as structurally dependent on Western aid, interventions and moral recognition. They are framed as besieged by death, pain and hunger, as though the entire horizon of their worldliness is defined by need and suffering. In this framing, victims are not just in need but are intrinsically inferior as they are incapable of sustaining a livelihood and rescuing themselves. Their bodies, emotions and lived experiences are reified and reduced to objects in need of rescue by morally, politically and economically superior saviours. As well as creating and reinforcing the image of the inferior victim, this portrayal serves two further politico-economic purposes. It satisfies the Western saviour complex, which is rooted in religious and secular discourses of colonialism dating back to the fourteenth century.[7]Furthermore, it caters to the neocolonial humanitarian industry, which depends on the continual (re)production and consumption of suffering, helplessness and passive endurance.[8] The convergence of these two elements is evidenced by how victims of the Holocaust, which is recognised as the primary instance of genocide in the collective imagination of the Western world, are depicted. This recognition builds on a sense of helplessness and innocence that is internalised even by Hannah Arendt. In her essay We Refugees, she stated that, unlike those who ‘seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held’, most Jewish refugees surviving genocide had ‘committed no acts’ and had ‘never dreamt of having any radical opinion.’[9] Indeed, to be recognised as a victim of genocide, one must be devoid of political agency and opinion and remain dependent, awaiting the merciful intervention of superior saviours.
The lived realities of Palestinians over the past decades serve as compelling testimony. The decades-long genocidal destruction of Palestinian livelihood, culture and environmental infrastructure has remained largely excluded from the domain of legal recognition.[10] The slow genocide against Palestinians manifests in restricted water access, targeted destruction of agriculture and educational facilities, state-sponsored terrorism and assassinations, the systemic confinement of millions in Gaza’s open-air prison, and totalitarian surveillance.[11] Nonetheless, their suffering is rendered visible to humanitarian response only when it aligns with the archetypical tropes of victimhood. To humanitarians, they are worthy of empathy and protection only when they appear as starved, defenceless, powerless, and dehumanised bodies. Here, our Middle Eastern perspective unravels a radically different vantage point. Within the highly politicised context of conflicts in our region, the idealised image of the victim has been strategically instrumentalised by Western powers to serve a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it is instrumentalised to obscure the neocolonial root causes of the genocidal violence inflicted upon our people. On the other hand, it is enforced to delegitimise and undermine indigenous liberatory movements that our real heroes envision and pursue.
The instrumentalisation of this image relies on a superficial dichotomy between innocent, dependent victims versus so-called uncivilised savages, terrorists, antisemites, or beasts, who threaten their own people as well as Western civilization. Based on this dichotomy, individuals and communities who deviate from the idealised and, in fact, depoliticised image of the victim (e.g., by expressing political opinions or engaging in political action) violate the conditions of innocence and passive subjugation. Consequently, they are recast as terrorists and extremists and then framed as a threat to both idealised victims and the so-called civilised world. If they are not converted by humanitarian interventions to the religions of capitalism and neocolonialism, these people become enemies who must be defeated. The construction of this figure sends a clear message to those subjected to violence. To resist, act politically or defy the passivity prescribed by the idealised victimhood narrative is to be evil. This reductionist dichotomy erases the truth of the position and struggle of political agents who pursue liberation while enduring genocidal violence. The political apparatus that sustains this dichotomy relies on the reduction of any resistance in the Middle East to savagery and terrorism, since such liberatory resistance movements threaten to expose and challenge the presumed moral and political superiority this apparatus upholds.
Lesson two: Nexus of genocide, neocolonialism and despotism
The second key lesson we can derive from a Middle Eastern standpoint is that the true genealogy of genocide cannot be unfolded without examining the entanglement of neocolonial interventions and the root causes of mass violence. Historical facts and statistics concerning the ‘Costs of War’ are revealing.[12] Since the ratification of the 1948 Genocide Convention and other human rights treaties, the Middle East has become a spatial zone of relentless neocolonial military interventions, culminating in the wars of aggression in Palestine, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Ironically, these military interventions were justified in the name of democratic values and human rights, under the guise of Wars on Terror. In the past decades, aggression has been deliberately committed by the US, the EU, NATO and Israel, normalising genocidal warfare.[13] These wars of aggression lie at the root of genocidal extermination, cultural destruction, infrastructure collapse, environmental devastation and starvation of Middle Eastern people.
During these Wars on Terror and humanitarian rescue operations, the Middle East was transformed into a laboratory for testing destructive weapons and totalitarian surveillance technologies, as well as dehumanising military strategies and tactics. Western democracies experimented with cluster bombs, indiscriminate bombing in urban areas, depleted uranium (DU) munitions, white phosphorus, bunker busters, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB, or “Mother of All Bombs”) and other cutting-edge weapons of mass destruction with complete impunity.[14] In these experiments, millions of human beings were reified and treated as laboratory animals. They were portrayed as the ‘collateral damage’ of hybrid warfare, pre-emptive strikes and humanitarian rescue operations.
Consequently, since 2001, more than four million civilians, including millions of children, were slaughtered and disposed of as human waste. Millions of others continue to suffer from incurable cancer, birth defects, permanent disabilities, severe traumas, internalised violence, cultural genocide and placelessness. Moreover, these ‘humanitarian’ Wars on Terror resulted in the forced displacement of approximately fifty million people, constituting the largest wave of mass displacement since the Second World War.[15] These placeless refugees were abandoned to their fate for decades. They were deprived of their fundamental rights to seek a place of refuge, precisely by those who regard themselves as champions of human rights. Due to the European bordering regime, tens of thousands of these refugees were dumped in the Mediterranean Sea, which is now the largest maritime mass grave of refugees in the world.[16]
According to Achille Mbembe, these phenomena characterise the necropolitical nature of the current world order.[17]This world order does not simply represent a legal or political structure. It constitutes a hyperreality encapsulating colonial imaginaries, mythologies, historical hierarchies, conceptual demarcations, and racial friend-enemy antinomies.[18] In this hyperreality, the world is divided into more-than-humans and lesser-humans, into the self-righteous ‘us’ and the demonised ‘other’, into the cradle of democracy and barbarian colonies. In this hyperreality, international human rights and humanitarian law do not apply to lesser-humans. In this hyperreality, the lives of lesser-humans are not worthy of being grieved; they only deserve to be archived as statistics in the mass media and military reports. In this hyperreality, the suffering of millions of people across the globe is disavowed and obscured by hypocritical commemorations of war and genocide, hyperbolic and empty humanitarian slogans and the spectacle of high-profile security summits. In this hyperreality, human rights instruments are not meant to defend human beings against genocidal violence. Rather, they are instrumentalised as weapons to settle geopolitical disputes.
To understand the nature of genocide and extreme violence, we must recognise that neocolonialism and reactionary authoritarianisms are mirror images of the same hyperreality. Both forces have played a fundamental role in the structural oppression of liberatory movements in the Middle East and other parts of the colonised world. At least since the nineteenth century, there has been an (un)written pact between colonisers and reactionary despotic regimes.[19] As in Latin America and Africa, most pro-Western despotic regimes in the Middle East came to power through neocolonial military coups, the suppression of indigenous anti-colonial movements, state-sponsored terrorism, and the targeted assassination of revolutionary leaders.[20] More importantly, in the past four decades, the US and the EU served as key allies of dictatorships and genocidal regimes in the region. The strategic economic and military alliances between Western superpowers, the despotic kingdom in Saudi Arabia, authoritarian rule in Turkey and the apartheid regime in Israel are manifestations of this hyperreal pact.
In the same period, reactionary movements and religious dictatorships mushroomed as a (re)action to neocolonial power, almost resembling Newton’s third law of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The rise of the Islamic Republic in Iran, the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Hamas in Palestine or ISIS in Iraq and Syria are paradigmatic cases, epitomising this causal relationship. All these reactionary players operate within the logic of genocidal annihilation and destruction and fulfil their roles as ideal villains. In this way, the trinity of villain, victim and saviour remains intact and is reinforced. On the one hand, the existence of these evil forces justifies interventions of colonisers who present themselves as saviours of humanity. On the other hand, passive victims are waiting for their humanitarian saviours who always arrive too late at the scene of the crime. To use Michel Agier’s metaphor, humanitarian and military interventions operate as two arms of a destructive machine; one arm inflicts harm and the other pretends to heal.[21]
Lesson three: Ethics and politics of liberation
Given this prevailing matrix of violence, a vital question persists: can the concept of ‘genocide’ still function as a meaningful signifier concept in a liberatory political and legal discourse? Our answer is straightforward: to unsettle extreme violence at its core, we must first liberate our political concepts from their oppressive legacy and domineering determinations. To create a non-violent society, we must liberate human rights and freedom from deep-rooted hierarchies between the coloniser and the colonised, the saviour and the victim, the emancipator and the emancipated. As the Iranian thinker and revolutionary Shokrollah Paknejad reminded us, our theory and praxis should be built upon political and moral virtues that arise from the lived experiences of the most oppressed in our shared world. Paknejad was among the key founders of the Iranian New Left in the 1970s, and his legacy continues to inspire liberation movements across the Middle East. Speaking before the military court of the US-backed monarchy in 1970, he powerfully articulated this vision:
‘The ethical and economic values of capitalism have entrenched unnatural and inhumane social relationships. We inhabit a place called “homeland” in which contradictions exist side by side: abundance beside starvation, freedom beside domination, the oppressor beside the oppressed, the tyrant beside the ruled, extreme wealth beside deprivation. In our era, we can smell the rot of these values lingering the air, poisoning every breath we take. Today, humanity understands this profound truth: so long as one human being remains imprisoned, starved, oppressed, or uneducated, freedom is nothing more than an empty, meaningless word.’[22]
For Paknejad, liberatory political concepts are not empty signifiers. They signify ‘unforgettable, beautiful, and deeply lovable’ principles. They act as ‘guardians’ that shield human beings against oppression and violence.[23] Viewed from this perspective, every human being should perceive themselves as part of the problem of genocide and so expose violence at its moral and political core. By recognizing our participation in the problem of genocide, the trinity of villain-victim-saviour is unsettled and contradicted. A freedom fighter does not perceive themselves as morally superior. Nor do they pursue freedom and rights only for those who are already recognised as fully human. On the contrary, they articulate and enact rights and freedoms based on the embodied knowledge of those who are abandoned and dispossessed.
On a moral level, this struggle should be premised on liberatory moral virtues, such as courage, compassion, selflessness [az-khod-gozashtegi], honesty [sedaghat], friendship and self-renouncing tenacity [fada-kari]. These virtues enable us to liberate ourselves from the oppressive social conditions that underlie violence. These violent social conditions stem from capitalist ethics that are legitimized under the banner of promoting self-interest, self-enrichment, self-preservation and progress. To create a non-violent society, we should radically negate this capitalist logic in all aspects of our lives. In Paknejad’s revolutionary vision, freedom, equality and rights serve as unconditional guardians of ethnic minorities, women, religious outcasts, racialised Others, people in poverty, indigenous communities and refugees.[24]
This moral and political vision may seem utopian and unrealistic. Yet, this is, above all, the most important lesson we can learn from Paknejad whose words echo the true voices of liberation in the Middle East. As the genealogy of mass violence makes clear, countless women and men inspired by this vision were subjected to genocidal violence because of their dedication to these political and moral virtues. After the Iranian Revolution, Paknejad emerged as one of the leading opponents of the newly established Islamic Republic, which he characterized as a medieval system that was fundamentally at odds with the libaratory and democratic aspirations of the revolution. Like thousands of other leftist dissidents, the clerics classified him a religious outlaw and persecuted him on charges of ‘apostasy’ and ‘waging war against Allah and the clerical order.’ [25] In the 1980s, Paknejad and his comrades were exterminated because they refused to accept the order-making reality of neocolonialism and religious fascism.[26] These resistance fighters were determined to give shape to a new human horizon, free from exploitation, gender inequality, genocide, racism, religious fanaticism and torture.
Genocidal campaigns were organised to prevent this liberatory vision from becoming reality. These campaigns did not target voiceless and passive victims. Notably, Paknejad’s oppressors gave him and his comrades the utilitarian option to repent in exchange for self-preservation. By submitting themselves to the legal and political determinations of fascism, they could survive and metamorphose into victimised repentants. However, they refused to accept this utilitarian bargain. Through their refusal, they rejected passivity, victimhood and domination. They courageously chose to resist fascist oppression and gave their lives for the liberation of others. For this reason, their oppressors categorised them as steadfastoutlaws, subjected them to genocidal torture and executed them en masse.[27]
The new horizon
As Walter Benjamin has pointed out, extreme violence is a ‘mythical force’ that aims to annihilate all physical and symbolic traces of resistance and liberation.[28] Despite genocidal annihilation, Paknejad’s liberatory horizon has been revitalised and resonates more than ever in the hearts and minds of our generation. The experience of Rojava is perhaps the best representative of this collective spirit, echoing the undeniable truth of this horizon. In their creative politics of radical democracy in the heart of the Middle East, thousands of women and men (Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians, Turks and others) have participated in creating a multi-ethnic society, grounded in gender equality and ecological justice. They are dedicated to breaking the cycle of violence, stemming from the domination of humans and nature. Many of these women and men became targets of extermination campaigns orchestrated by NATO members, ISIS and other regional reactionary powers. Yet, they steadfastly refused to capitulate to racist, religious and patriarchal conditions of subjugation.[29]
The struggle of these resistance fighters does not centre on territorial expansion or nation-state building. The women who courageously fought on the frontlines against ISIS do not pursue a patriarchal or chauvinistic project. In their struggle for ‘women, life, freedom’, they enacted a political vision in which domination, exploitation and violence could be undone. They drew inspiration from deep-rooted historical and etymological kinship between ‘women’, ‘life’ and ‘freedom’ (Jin, Jîyan, Azadî) that are expressions of one core liberatory principle.[30] Consistent with their self-renouncing tenacity, they gave birth to a horizon that was premised on the ethics and politics of liberation. This horizon has been materialized in the ‘Rojava Social Contract’ that rejects ‘all types of violence’, promotes ‘democratic autonomous communities’, ensures ‘justice and equality among all peoples’, preserves ‘all cultural, religious and ideological identities’, and ‘spreads a culture of diversity and tolerance’.[31] In this way, they reconstituted the meanings of subjectivity, emancipatory values and the ethical foundations of a free society.
For decades, the Turkish government and ISIS waged cultural and ideological genocide against these fighters because they embodied and exercised their radical political agency.[32] This agency is fundamentally at odds with neocolonial projects of physical destruction and epistemic dispossession. Their refusal to submit to the depoliticised image of idealised victim rendered them invisible within master narratives of suffering and humanitarianism. Unlike the image of victimhood that has been internalised by Arendt, the indigenous liberatory movements in our region faced extreme violence due to their resistance to its mythical foundations. Their sacrifice was for the sake of an alternative life in which all communities, genders and religions can coexist with dignity, equality and mutual respect. This culture of resistance reveals a truth that lies beyond the reach of capitalist and neocolonial mythologies of death and domination. Even in the face of extermination, selfless struggle for freedom and equality remains an inspiring heritage that leaves its traces in our hearts from generation to generation.
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to Omid Tofighian and the editors of Legal Form for their insightful feedback on an earlier draft of this essay. A Dutch translation of a previous version has been commissioned by Wijsgerig Perspectief and is scheduled for publication in September 2025.
Authors
Dr. Leila Faghfouri Azar is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Her research and teaching are situated within the field of critical legal theory, with a particular focus on the intersections of law and violence, law and exploitation, and legal-political trajectories to resistance for radical equality.
Email: l.faghfouriazar@uva.nl
Dr. Shahin Nasiri is a lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. His research spans several domains within political philosophy, including critical theories of freedom and democracy, migration and citizenship, critical race theory, critical genealogy of state violence, and decolonial approaches to political resistance.
Email: s.nasiri@uva.nl
Republished from Legal Form Blog.
[1] Amos Goldberg, ‘The Problematic Return of Intent’, Journal of Genocide Research (2024), 1–10, doi:10.1080/14623528.2024.2413175.
[2] UN General Assembly, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, United Nations, Treaty Series, December 9, 1948, vol. 78, 277 (entered into force 12 January 1951).
[3] For a detailed analysis, see William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 121–124.
[4] For a detailed discussion, see A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 477–511.
[5] Mohammed El-Kurd, Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2025), ch. 2.
[6] Nils Christie, ‘The Ideal Victim’, in From Crime Policy to Victim Policy: Reorienting the Justice System, ed. Ezzat A. Fattah. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986), 19; Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, 477–511; Andrew Woolford, ‘Decolonizing Genocide,’ in The Routledge International Handbook on Decolonizing Justice, ed. Chris Cunneen, Amanda Porter, Robert Webb, Antje Deckert and Juan Tauri (London: Routledge, 2023), 423–433.
[7] Costas Douzinas, ‘The Paradoxes of Human Rights’, Constellations 20:1 (2013), 51–67.
[8] Jessica Whyte, ‘Human Rights and Neoliberalism in a Time of Pandemic: A Reply,’ Legal Form, 10 April 2020,https://legalform.blog/2020/04/10/human-rights-and-neoliberalism-in-a-time-of-pandemic-a-reply-jessica-whyte/
[9] Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 264–74.
[10] Abdelwahab El-Affendi, ‘The Futility of Genocide Studies After Gaza’, Journal of Genocide Research (2024), 1–7.
[11] Mohammed Nijim, ‘Genocide in Palestine: Gaza as a Case Study,’ The International Journal of Human Rights 27:1 (2023), 165–200.
[12] Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, ‘Summary of Findings: Costs of War Project’, Brown University, accessed 13 May 2025, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/summary.
[13] Samuel Moyn, ‘From Aggression to Atrocity: Rethinking the History of International Criminal Law’, in The Oxford Handbook of Public International Law, ed. Kevin Jon Heller et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 341–360.
[14] Lynzy Billing, ‘How America’s War Devastated Afghanistan’s Environment,’ New Lines Magazine, 25 September 2023, https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/how-americas-war-devastated-afghanistans-environment/.
[15] Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, ‘Summary of Findings’.
[16] United Nations, ‘UN agencies urge Security Council to stop “mass graves for migrants”’, UN News, 30 September 2024, https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/09/1155176.
[17] Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans., Steve Corcoran (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), ch. 3.
[18] Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Psychical and Social Roots of Hate’, Free Associations 7:3 (1999), 402–415.
[19] For example, see Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 21–22.
[20] For example, see Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup : 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations (New York: The New Press, 2015), ch. 3&4.
[21] Michel Agier, ‘Humanity as an Identity and its Political Effects (A Note on Camps and Humanitarian Government)’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 1:1 (2010), 29–45. doi:10.1353/hum.2010.0005.
[22] Leila Faghfouri Azar and Shahin Nasiri, ‘Paknejad’s Trial: Fifty Years Later [Defaeeyat-e Paknejad: Panjah Sal Ba’ad]’, Pecritique 16 (2021), 941–976. https://shorturl.at/GF8gF.
[23] Faghfouri Azar and Nasiri, ‘Paknejad’s Trial’.
[24] Leila Faghfouri Azar and Shahin Nasiri, ‘Paknejad’s Political Theory and the National Democratic Front: Lessons for Today [Paknejad va Tajrobeye Jebhe-ye Democratic-e Melli]’, Pecritique 6 (2023), 47–59, https://shorturl.at/jshRw.
[25] Nasiri and Faghfouri Azar, ‘Investigating the 1981 Massacre in Iran’
[26] Shahin Nasiri and Leila Faghfouri Azar, ‘Investigating the 1981 Massacre in Iran: On the Law-Constituting Force of Violence’, Journal of Genocide Research 26:2 (2022), 164–187, doi:10.1080/14623528.2022.2105027.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Walter Benjamin, ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt,’ in Gesammelte Schriften II/l, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 179–204.
[29] Dilar Dirik, The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice (London: Pluto Press, 2022), ch. 12.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Rojava Information Center. “DAANES’ Social Contract, 2023 Edition.” Rojava Information Center, accessed 10 June 2025, https://rojavainformationcenter.org/2023/12/aanes-social-contract-2023-edition/.
[32]Dirik, The Kurdish Women’s Movement, 19.
What a beautiful piece, I hope at least one of you has given it as a speech. It is so powerful, even in writing, it would be wonderful to add the emotional timbre of speech.
Thank you for writing this.