Shahin Nasiri

Since the adoption of the 1951 Refugee Convention and its relating legal instruments, refugees are depicted as victims who are subjected to persecution by state or state-like actors in their homeland. The concept of persecution serves as a formal criterion to conceptualise refugees’ unfreedom and formal legal status. This chapter aims to problematise the Conventional concept of persecution based on epistemic resources and lived experiences of refugees in the European border zones. Specifically, I argue that the Conventional framework is too narrow and too reductionistic to adequately account for the interrelation of (un)freedom and refugeehood. Following this critical analysis, I develop the notion of ‘abandonment’ to interpret the spatio-temporal and juridico-political conditions that characterise refugees’ unfreedom. By discussing experiential accounts of refugees, abandonment is defined as the condition in which one is exposed to rejection and neglect and is prevented from attaining a consistent and equal place in the world.

In post–World War II normative discussions, the notion of freedom has prominently been conceptualized and formalized within the context of state–citizen relationships. In these discussions, which are predominantly influenced by liberal and neorepublican interpretations, freedom is viewed as a guarantee, negative right, or status belonging to citizens of liberal-democratic nation-states. Freedom designates citizens’ formal rights that protect them against the state’s coercion, arbitrary interference, and domination. These state-oriented and citizen-centric interpretations of freedom overlook the perspective of refugees (and other people on the move), whose practices and experiences of freedom take shape outside of the boundaries of the state–citizen relationship. Similarly, they fail to account for the dynamic relationship of refugeehood and (un)freedom, which is manifested in the act of flight, liberatory migratory movements, and creative resistance against exclusion and bordering practices. This entry examines the dynamic relationship between freedom and unfreedom in three different phases of refugeehood, focusing on refugees’ preflight, flight, and postflight conditions.

During the 1980s, tens of thousands of ideological dissidents from the Islamic Republic of Iran were exposed to religiously motivated exclusionary practices, mass killings, extermination campaigns, and systematic torture. In this article, I examine the genocidal characteristics of these mass atrocities. To this end, I adopt a genealogical approach and shed light on the social-historical process through which genocidal violence emerged and evolved throughout the 1980s in Iran. Specifically, I focus on four historical episodes that each embody an essential dimension of this process. To develop my analysis, I draw on primary theoretical and archival sources, prison memoirs, and survivors’ narratives published over the last three decades. This analysis is methodologically situated in critical discussions in political theory and builds on insights from critical genocide scholarship. As will be shown, genocidal violence unfolds in a conflictual process through which the Islamic Republic defined and classified its leftist opponents as absolute religious others. These religious others were created based on theological signifiers, doctrines, and justifications. In the first phase, the Islamic rulers defined their religious outcasts as apostates, atheists, and religious hypocrites. The second phase of the genocide represents the law-constituting process through which religious outcasts became religious outlaws who were subjected to genocidal extermination. The third phase is characterized by non-lethal techniques and practices of genocidal torture that were devised to enforce religious repentance and conversion to Islam. The final stage is marked by massacres that were kept secret, denied, and disavowed. As a result of this multi-faceted process, religious others of the Islamic Republic were gradually subjected to practices and arrangements that resulted in their physical and symbolic annihilation within Iranian society.

This essay argues that the ongoing genocide in Palestine must be understood as part of a broader historical continuum of neocolonial violence and indigenous resistance across the Middle East. It challenges hegemonic conceptual framings of genocidal violence that dominate academic and public discourse in the Global North by discussing how they obscure the structural entanglement between genocidal violence and neocolonial interventions in the region. Grounding its analysis in a perspective from the Iranian Independent Left, the essay highlights a longstanding tradition of resistance that has confronted not only imperialist and neocolonial powers but also regional ethno-religious despotisms. The essay advances three central claims. First, hegemonic frameworks of genocide rely on idealized binaries of victims and saviours, erasing the political agency of the oppressed. Second, these frameworks conceal the role of neocolonial interventions in producing and sustaining genocidal warfare. Third, dismantling these structures requires centring the ethics and politics of indigenous liberation movements across the region. The essay, rather than offering abstract solidarity, amplifies a critical voice grounded in the region’s enduring struggles and calls for a radical rethinking of how genocide, resistance, and liberation are theorized and confronted.

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.

In mainstream political discourse, refugeehood is increasingly being associated with victimhood, powerlessness, abnormality, and political crises. On the one hand, refugees are, often, viewed as voiceless victims who should be offered protection and assistance on humanitarian grounds under exceptional circumstances. On the other hand, they are, increasingly, being portrayed as enemy-like strangers who pose a threat to the borders, stability of receiving states, and the well-being of their citizens. This prevailing framework fundamentally disregards refugees’ political subjectivity and ignores emancipatory phenomena and practices of freedom, which are embedded and expressed in refugees’ migratory movements. This philosophical investigation aims to contribute to our understanding of the dynamic relationship of freedom and unfreedom from the perspective of refugees. To examine this dynamic relationship, this study situates itself in the autonomy of migration approach and draws on narratives and lived experiences of refugees, which were collected during in-depth interviews with refugees (Greece). These experiential accounts have been analysed and theoretically discussed in accordance with the guidelines of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Through an interpretative process, this study critically contextualizes refugees’ perceptions and understandings of freedom in ongoing theoretical discussions concerning refugeehood and freedom. Based on these critical discussions, this study develops a theoretical examination of the dynamics of freedom and unfreedom in different spatio-temporal phases of refugeehood. In doing so, it explores the multifaceted act of flight, lived experiences of (un)freedom, socio-political structures of abandonment, and autonomous relations and arrangements by which refugees enact freedom in receiving states. Moreover, it challenges the prevalent conceptual distinctions between citizens versus non-citizens, hosts (nationals) versus guests (migrants), genuine refugees versus economic migrants, and the included (right-holders) versus the excluded (the rightless).

As with terms such as “human rights”, “democracy”, and “equality”, the notion of “freedom” has an emblematic character with highly normative overtones. After the declaration of universal human rights, one might argue that freedom is – at least formally – a universal entitlement belonging to every human being. However, this universalist structure is built upon a conflictual foundation, as the juridico-political meaning of freedom is determined by the boundaries of national citizenship, statehood, and territorial sovereignty. This chapter examines refugeehood as a normal by-product of the post-colonial world order, embodying the counter-history of nation-states whose internal borders, walls, and external fortifications are growingly being militarised and reinforced. Refugeehood represents an anomalous juridico-political condition that cannot be elucidated by colonial-racial binaries such as inclusion versus exclusion or rightlessness versus national citizenship. The central idea of this chapter is that, for refugees, the meaning of freedom and unfreedom are intertwined and should be approached as a dynamic relationship characterising the state of (non)-subjectivity. As political (non)-subjects, refugees call structural determinations of unfreedom into question. Refugees’ freedom is expressed in the act of flight and border crossing, irregular migratory movement, language games of resistance, and other emancipatory signifying practices by which they claim a place of refuge in the world.

The notion of 'freedom' has gained an emblematic character in contemporary political discourse. It is, commonly, viewed as the central value and political goal of modern societies. Similarly, human rights documents conceive of freedom as their founding principle with universal validity. In contradistinction to this prevalent approach to freedom, this paper aims to demonstrate that freedom is, primarily, a political signifier with social-historical variability. One cannot, therefore, simply and uncritically assume that freedom has (or should have) universal validity or transhistorical significance. In the first section of this paper, the structure of the contemporary liberal discourse on freedom is discussed and called into question. In light of Arendt's interpretation of freedom and through her analysis of the public domain, I reflect on the social-historical variability of the meaning of freedom and its inextricable nexus with a particular form of society. In the second section and drawing on Castoriadis, the notion of 'freedom' is approached in view of human signifying practices and imaginary dimension of society. This examination reveals in what way freedom––in the sense of a central social imaginary signification––contributes to the institution of an autonomous mode of society and determines the affective disposition and intentional vector of its inhabitants.