Paying particular attention to the long Iranian Revolution - spanning 1979 to 1989 - this open access book shows that the Islamic Republic was built on state violence, erasure and denial. This approach rethinks the Iranian Revolution as a long and unfinished process that continues to shape the present.

The research is based on innovative sources now used by a new generation of scholars: digital fieldwork, online archival initiatives, court records and people's tribunals and testimony. In doing so, the authors uncover suppressed histories, disappeared bodies, silenced memories and censored images. The book also platforms the subaltern voices long excluded from official historiography: women resisting compulsory veiling; Kurdish and other minoritized groups confronting territorial and cultural domination; disfigured war veterans erased from martyrdom narratives; and young people challenging repression through street protest and digital media.

The collection challenges the dominance of state-centric narratives and advances an epistemological reorientation within Iranian studies, one that privileges counter-archives, embodied experience and the voices of those for whom history has often been denied.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.

Chowra Makaremi is a tenured anthropologist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France. She is also a film director and Principal Investigator of the ERC project, Off-Site. She published Woman! Life! Freedom! Echoes of a Revolutionary Uprising in Iran (2023) and was awarded the CNRS medal for her work as an anthropologist in 2021.

Pardis Shafafi is an applied anthropologist and associate researcher at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Politique (LAP-EHESS/CNRS) in Paris and with the ERC Off-Site project. Her work focuses on the Iranian experience of post-revolutionary violence and peoples' tribunals. She is the executive co-editor of the Anthropology in Action journal and holds a PhD from the University of St Andrews, UK.

Amir Kianpour is a political philosopher and associate researcher with the ERC Off-Site project. He specialises in the historical temporalities of capitalism, particularly through war and logistics; the intellectual and political history of the Left in the Middle East; and the 1979 Iranian Revolution. He has translated several works on critical theory and Marxism into Farsi and previously co-coordinated the Epistemology and Politics research project at Université Paris 8. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Université Paris 8, France.