The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September sparked mass protests in Iran. Since, the women-led protest spread and intensified under the slogan ‘Women, life, freedom’. This expert panel of Peyman Jafari, Leila Faghouri Azar, and Shahin Nasiri will shed light on current events as well as place the developments in a historical context of repression and resistance in Iran. In addition to the expert contribution, there will be ample opportunity for a debate moderated by professor Annelies Moors. This panel discussion will be the last event of the Fall Lecture Series on Current Affairs.

About the speakers

Peyman Jafari is a research fellow at the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) and Assistant Professor of History and International Relations at the College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, Virginia). His research concerns the history of modern Iran with a focus on labor and social movements, and the relationship between empires, labor, and ecology in the global history of oil. He is the author of Het Andere Iran: van de revolutie tot vandaag (Ambo/Anthos, 2009), and a co-editor of Iran in the Middle East: Transnational Encounters and Social History (IB Tauris, 2015) and Worlds of Labor Turned Upside Down: Labor Relations and Revolutions in Global Perspective (Brill, 2021). Jafari is currently writing a monograph titled Oil and Labor in the Iranian Revolution: A Social History of Uneven and Combined Development.  

Leila Faghfouri Azar is a lecturer in law and politics at the PPLE College and a researcher in legal theory at the Paul Scholten Center for Jurisprudence, University of Amsterdam. Her main areas of research and interest include critical legal theory, law and violence, law and inequality, and law and political theology. As part of her work on Iran, she co-authored The Repressed Voices of the Iranian Revolution (Sweden, 2020) and an article on the 1981 Massacre of Political Dissidents in Iran, published in the Journal of Genocide Research (2022). 

Shahin Nasiri is a lecturer in applied ethics and philosophy of science at the Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and a researcher in political philosophy at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). His areas of interest include political theory, theories of freedom, phenomenology, critical theory, genealogy of resistance movements, migration and citizenship. He is the co-author of The Repressed Voices of the Iranian Revolution (Sweden, 2020).  Since 2020, he also acts as the principal investigator of Rastyad Collective. This research collective documents the scope of the 1981 Massacre in Iran and studies its legal-philosophical nature, based on first-hand empirical evidence. The first results of this research project were recently published in the Journal of Genocide Research (2022).