After Dey (Dey in the Iranian calendar roughly corresponds to late December through mid-January), the future in Iran no longer looks like “planning.” Nor does It look like classic hope, the kind that smiles from afar and promises that if you are patient, everything will work out. The future feels more like walking in a dark room: you know where the exit is, but you can’t find the door handle.

War has added a physical layer to that darkness, in the form of sirens and news of infrastructure being bombed. Dey was a border line for Iranian society.

The 8th and 9th of January 2026 were not just days of street killings. They marked the collapse of a shared ceiling: the illusion that state violence has limits.

After that, a simple but heavy sentence settled in many minds: you can’t go back to “before.” That sentence switched on the machine that produces the future. Iran: what happens when survival comes before politics But war has pushed that machine into a new phase.

Society has not yet emerged from Dey’s mourning and anger, and it is facing a state that, for years, has built a monopoly on “reality” through repression and lies, dividing people into insiders and outsiders. In this situation, the future is not a dream.

It becomes an emergency, a daily question of survival, and a constant struggle over agency: whether people can play a role, or whether they will be reduced to pieces on someone else’s chessboard. To understand this moment, two issues must be separated, and the act of separating them is itself political.

On one side is the question of freedom and human rights in Iran: society’s conflict with the Islamic Republic over safety, daily life, and the right to organise. On the other side is the nuclear and missile file, and the broader geopolitical confrontation that has, for years, been the main point of tension between Iran and the West.

Experience shows that as long as Iran is not situated within the West’s security camp, this file will remain on the agenda of powerful states. Failing to separate these two issues is precisely where collective Iranian trauma gets targeted: as if anyone against the Islamic Republic must also welcome war, and anyone against war must stand under the Islamic Republic’s flag.

This binary is a trap. Mourning, in this moment, may be the only shared point that can still keep people together and turn a crowd into a nation.

But today’s grief is layered. There is the grief of Dey.

There is the grief of homes, hospitals, and schools under bombardment. And there is anger at a government that pushed society to the brink, and at powers that treat human lives as a “necessary cost” in their security calculations.

This is where the dirty moral logic reveals itself. For years, the killing of protesters was hidden behind ready-made labels such as “conspiracy,” and instead of naming the murderer, the victim was blamed.

Now, when one figure of power burns in the fire of war, the same atmosphere suddenly speaks of “the Iranian people’s right to life.” As if the right to live were conditional: if you fit within the narrative of power, you count as human; if you don’t, you are either an agent or an unavoidable cost. War reinforces this classification because to advance its projects, it needs two kinds of victims: the “good victim” to justify intervention, and the “bad victim” to justify silence.

Meanwhile, debates about “international law” have become louder. But from the beginning, this law was written to manage competition between states, not to save people.

For the weak, it is a whip; for the powerful, a showcase. Without social force and a real balance of power, these words are mere decoration.

War advances with missiles, not with statements. These days, a nail-like question has lodged in many minds: what real agency do we have to halt this process?

Ready-made slogans and heated declarations may release anger for a few hours, but they don’t turn the planes back. When politics is separated from organisation and social power, it becomes a verbal ritual.

Wars end when the balance of power changes, and only organised people can change that balance. At the same time, war has exposed a new layer of class pressure.

Alongside daily complaints about rising food prices, a new item has suddenly appeared on people’s feeds: the “war emergency backpack”, water and food for a few days, a flashlight, a power bank, and medicine. This image is not just fear; it is a mirror of society.

On one side are those talking about bread, rice, and water—doing the math of survival under inflation. On the other side are those writing about internet shutdowns or outbound traffic from cities, drawing plans to leave.

If war continues, it will crush first—and hardest—the same people who are already living with the painful arithmetic of staying alive. This is where the collective imagination of the future shifts from a distant horizon into “after the border.” After Dey, many people felt the old rules no longer worked.

War intensifies that feeling: the future must either compensate, take revenge, or deliver immediate liberation. And it is there that the risk of sliding into hatred and blind polarisation grows.

Civil war does not necessarily begin with an official declaration. Sometimes it begins with broken bonds and the collapse of basic trust.

In contrast to this close emergency, there is another kind of imagination: endless darkness. Many people feel they are trapped in a cycle that has reproduced itself for decades, and each time it has shown a higher capacity for violence.

Two reactions emerge at the same time: a cold hopelessness, “in the end it’s always the same,” and a nervous radicalism, “then everything must be smashed at once.” These look like opposites, but they come from the same root: disbelief in middle paths. War deepens this condition and pushes politics away from building, toward waiting.

Inside this gap, the imagination of “the country’s endurance” has become stronger: the possibility of life continuing. Freedom and the form of government matter, but as means for society to function, so there is water, healthcare, education, and a way through collapse.

War hits exactly this point. Destroying infrastructure means cutting the threads of life.

That is why the future today feels like a short window: if it closes, society will become weaker, angrier, and more likely to explode. This is what some have called “Iran’s defeat.” On the first day of war, the death of the leader and a few other officials produced joy for some and mourning for others, drawing a new line across Iranian identity.

Joy at the death of someone who symbolised decades of repression and slaughter is understandable for millions, but that joy is not necessarily a promise of the future; it is a moment. The danger is this: if the cracking of the pillars of repression happens not through society’s action, but through external bombing, the result can be a collective defeat, a wounded country, broken infrastructure, and a memory contaminated by dependency and proxy politics.

In war, a country is defeated, not just a regime. Who were they?

Memory, labour, and the politics of erasure in Iran So what is the main issue? The point is not that people should become emotionally attached to structures of repression.

The point is that society, even during a transition, still needs a country. A military attack does not only hit a few commanders and war rooms; it hits hospitals, the electricity grid, water systems, and medicine warehouses too.

The cost of destruction is paid by society as a whole, not by a few criminals. What society truly wants is to change how these structures function—not to destroy the country.

Yes, the IRGC, as an arm of repression and a machine of looting, must be dismantled. But that is an internal demand, not a licence for bombing.

The alternative to an aggressive doctrine should be a defensive structure that guarantees people’s safety, not regional projects and eliminationist slogans. External war does the opposite: it damages defensive capacity, destabilises the country, and then, at best, delivers managers who are more obedient.

This situation pushes the imagination of the future towards two temptations: the saviour and the rule. A wounded society looks for a door handle.

Part of that doorknob is the fantasy of a saviour: one figure, one axis, someone who “wraps it all up.” War strengthens this desire because it raises urgency and lowers social patience. The second form is the fantasy of rule: that power must be restrained, not worshipped; that a mechanism is needed so power cannot again turn into a machine of elimination and repression.

This imagination is slower and harder, but it is the only way to build minimal trust. Rule without society is impossible.

In the end, the future comes down to one measure: agency. Here a simple everyday metaphor helps.

In Iranian culture, people say you have to “cut the watermelon”. No seller gives you a free slice before you buy, just so you can decide with ease.

Politics is like that. You cannot control the future from the outside and only then enter it.

Some things only become clear in the moment of action. That is why staying in the struggle and building real networks matters: networks of empathy, conversation, and organisation.

Without these networks, any change at the top can reproduce the same relations of domination in new clothing. One more illusion must be confronted: the idea that transition happens by itself and we are just spectators.

War feeds on this illusion. It tells society: stay at home, we will finish the job, then you can come.

But if collective action is removed, any outcome is defeated because people move from being political subjects to objects of management. And if society, under the pressure of war and repression, falls into a culture of insult and turns people into objects, then even the end of war could become the beginning of a new chaos.The relationship between the mourning of Dey and today’s war is the relationship between memory and survival.

If grief turns only into sadness, it exhausts you. If it turns into hatred, it burns.

But if it turns into memory and organisation, it can open a path. The future that comes out of this moment must be able to turn mourning into memory, anger into organisation, urgency into rules, and hatred into justice.

This cannot be built with slogans, and it cannot be built with bombing. It is built with society.

A society caught between two fires, if it cannot hold onto its own agency, may pass through one darkness only to open the door into another room, another darkness, in a new form. (Photo: @Vahid)