Iran vs. Us

The expression “participatory conservation” seems, at first glance, to belong to the vocabulary of heritage studies and environmental politics. Communities are invited to participate in the effort to conserve what is deemed worth preserving: spaces, traditions, memories, and fragile infrastructures of shared life. At its root, it splices two distinct impulses: the democratic desire to be an agent rather than a subject, and the conservative impulse to hold something in place against erosion, violence, or oblivion. Participation promises voice and action, while conservation promises continuity and shelter. In principle, participatory conservation is meant to reconcile these. A people safeguard what matters to them by virtue of their own active will, not at the command of a distant state or an abstract ideology.

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, however, decades of systematic repression have produced a different, almost perverse normality: the normalization of suppression itself. The everyday grammar of life has been saturated by the expectation of being silenced, surveilled, dispersed, and punished. This is not merely a political condition. It has seeped into the intimate temporality of the ordinary day, into what one dares to say in a taxi, what one wears on the street, how loudly one laughs in public, and whether one joins a protest or looks away. Iranian society has repeatedly tried to rupture this imposed normality and to assert a different horizon of life, but each time has been pushed back, often violently and bloodily, into a familiar choreography of batons, arrests, and funerals. A history of uprisings and crackdowns has sedimented into a collective memory in which aspiration and fear are inextricably entangled.

When external intrusion into Iran took place, whether through direct attacks, proxy conflicts, or broader geopolitical pressures, the society’s relationship to “participatory conservation” fractured in a new and painful way. A segment of the population sought, in a fragile and ambivalent manner, to protect what they could still recognize as their own. This was not necessarily the regime, but the texture of their daily lives, the safety of their loved ones, and the already weakened infrastructure upon which those lives depend. Their participation in conservation was not the defense of a theocratic state. It was the defense of a brittle normalcy: schools, hospitals, electricity, water, and a modicum of stability in a landscape already scarred.

Another part of society, long suffocated by the regime and exhausted by endless cycles of failed reform and crushed revolts, chose a radically different stance. For them, the same condition of intrusion became an occasion to invert participatory conservation into what we might call participatory destruction. If life under the current order has become structurally unlivable, then destruction itself may appear as a paradoxical form of care, a way to make space for another life and another normality that has not yet been born. Here, one may hear a distant echo of Tzvetan Todorov’s reflections on violence and meaning. Destruction, he suggests in various contexts, can sometimes be understood as an attempt to undo a distorted order so that understanding, ethics, and a truly human world might be reconstructed. Violence, in this view, is not mere blind aggression. It is a desperate and flawed instrument of deconstruction, an effort to tear down what has made genuine life impossible. This logic resonates with broader currents in contemporary thought. Jean-Luc Nancy has written of “unworking” (désoeuvrement), the idea that communities are sometimes constituted not by the perfect closure of a stable order but by the exposure of that order to its own fragility and interruption. Giorgio Agamben describes the modern subject as caught in “bare life”, reduced to a body that can be killed but not sacrificed, and thus tempted to see in the breakdown of the legal and political order a harsh doorway to another possibility. Judith Butler has emphasized how people, when rendered radically precarious, may turn that very precariousness into a site of political contestation, transforming suffering into a principle of critique. In each case, destruction is not celebrated, but it is recognized as an ambiguous gesture that tears apart the world as given in the name of a world otherwise.

Yet in Iran, the tragic irony is that both orientations, participatory conservation and participatory destruction, are now largely suspended in a shared state of passivity. Those who wish to preserve their fragile daily lives, and those who are willing to watch the present order burn so that something else might rise from the ashes, find themselves converging in one bleak commonality. Their main mode of “participation” has become a kind of objectified patience. They wait, under bombs or sanctions, under threats and slogans, for external powers to decide whether to halt the attacks or to intensify them in the name of overturning the regime. Participation is thus reduced to endurance, while politics is displaced into the opaque calculus of elsewhere.

This is the deepest wound: the very notion of participation is expropriated from the Iranian people. Whether imagined as conservation or as deconstruction, participation now takes place over them rather than through them. They are the terrain, not the agents, the scene upon which events unfold rather than the authors of those events. The people are turned into objects in the duel between the regime and external forces. They are positioned as collateral beneficiaries or collateral damage, but almost never as genuine interlocutors. The participatory dimension is displaced upward and outward, into the strategies of states and militaries, while those whose lives are at stake are kept at the level of mere endurance.

To say this is not to romanticize a pure and unconditioned agency. No people is ever totally sovereign, and no politics is free of constraint. There is, however, a difference between limited agency and the systematic deprivation of the very experience of acting together. In that deprivation, the concept of participatory conservation collapses. One cannot conserve, in any meaningful sense, what one is not allowed to shape. Likewise, participatory destruction loses its emancipatory promise when destruction is directed and orchestrated from elsewhere. In such a situation, the aspiration to deconstruct an oppressive normality becomes yet another episode of being acted upon.

What emerges is a haunting paradox. A society that has repeatedly risked its blood in the streets is now compelled to participate only by suffering. The Iranian people are forced into a form of mute participation, a participation by exposure rather than by decision. They become bodies exposed to repression, to bombs, to poverty, and to uncertainty. The task, then, is not merely to choose between conservation and destruction. The deeper task is to reclaim participation itself and to insist that no new normality, however radiant in its promises, can be legitimate if it is born from a history in which the people have been nothing more than the objects of someone else’s designs.

In that sense, the true horizon of participatory conservation in Iran would be neither the preservation of a broken present nor the blind demolition of what exists. It would be the slow, difficult, and profoundly human work of relearning how to decide together. Only then can a people conserve what deserves to live, dismantle what must end, and do so not as spectators of fate but as co-authors of a shared future.