The Metaphor That Came From Inside the Cell: A culture-centered reading of the Guardian's open letter to Iran's political prisoners
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The Metaphor That Came From Inside the Cell
Decolonisation as an act of listening, and where it meets anti-imperialism
Mohan J. Dutta The Margins Review August 2026
I. The bomb that fell on the prison
On 23 June 2025 an Israeli missile struck the Evin prison complex in Tehran. It took the hospital ward. It took the section where transgender prisoners were held. It took the visitor centre, which is the one room in any prison built for love rather than for control.
That building is where this argument begins and it is where the argument ends. Inside those walls the Iranian state was doing what it does to people who defy it. Above those walls a state armed and financed from Washington was dropping ordnance on the entire structure, guards and prisoners together, and calling it liberation. The people in the cells lived both of those things on a single afternoon. There is nowhere on earth to stand from which that afternoon looks simple, and any analysis arriving at simplicity has discarded something to get there.
The open letter published in the Guardian on 20 August 2026 begins from that building and from the impossible position of the people inside it. Twenty-three signatories, and they are not the bloc that the first wave of responses has made of them. Angela Davis, imprisoned by a state that told the world she was a terrorist. Mumia Abu-Jamal, writing from a Pennsylvania cell today. Ricardo Jiménez, who served years in American prisons for Puerto Rican independence. Hossam el-Hamalawy, jailed in Egypt. Yasin al-Haj Saleh, sixteen years in Syrian prisons. Rashid Khalidi, Sinan Antoon, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Robin Kelley, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Judith Butler, Michael Löwy, Alberto Toscano, Walden Bello.
The letter names the American and Israeli war. It names the killing of schoolgirls. It names the strike on Evin. It names administrative detention in Palestine, it names ICE, it names the long American campaign to bury Black and Indigenous and Puerto Rican organisers in prison for a generation. It ends by demanding that the United States and Israel stop their wars and lift their sanctions.
All of that belongs at the front of any honest reading, because the criticism gathering around the letter this week is in places attacking a document that does not exist, and an analysis starting from a caricature of its object earns nothing and deserves nothing. Whatever has gone wrong here sits underneath intention, underneath sincerity, underneath the political biographies of the people who signed. It will not be found by counting sentences.
II. The question of when
Vijay Prashad answered the letter on 22 August, and his answer is the ground this one is built on.
His case is made from political economy and from hierarchy. The United States and Israel began this war in February. For six months the bombs have fallen on hospitals and schools and power stations and neighbourhoods, and on 168 schoolgirls in Minab. The United States holds more than nine hundred military installations outside its own borders, and Iran holds none outside its region and has launched no war of conquest in the modern era. A moral frame that sets the aggressor and the attacked at equal distance from the reader has already performed the aggressor's central task, which is the dissolution of hierarchy into atmosphere.
He has been making this argument for thirty years, from Delhi and Beirut and Santiago, holding open a register of internationalism the Northern academy abandoned around the time it became expensive. The Tricontinental exists so that analysis of empire will issue from the South rather than being licensed by the North, which is the same project the culture-centered approach has pursued from a different angle for two decades. When he writes that the neutral space does not exist, he is saying in his vocabulary what mine has been saying in its own. There is no view from nowhere. Every account is spoken from somewhere, that somewhere is a position inside a structure of force, and the pretence of standing outside the structure is the oldest move in the colonial repertoire.
The most exacting thing in his letter is the question of when. Why now. Why this document, in this newspaper, in the seventh month of an American bombing campaign, at the moment when American and Israeli dominance is being disrupted rather than confirmed.
That question has been read as a rhetorical jab and it is a method, and it is the method a culture-centered reading exists to supply. A claim enters the world at an hour, into a field arranged in a particular way on that day, and what it means is constituted by what the field does with it. The same sentences about Iranian prisons, written in 2015 during negotiation, land in one field. Written now, into a metropolitan public being asked to believe that an air campaign is a liberation, they land in another. Nothing in the words has changed. Everything about their function has. A text that would have been an act of solidarity in one month becomes a supplement to a war in another, and the difference is not in the text and cannot be found by reading it more carefully.
Asking when also rearranges what the reader is looking at. Once the utterance has been located in time, the bombing stops being the backdrop against which Iranian repression is assessed and becomes the event in the foreground, the thing actually happening while the sentences are being composed. From there the picture reorganises itself around a proposition that Northern human rights discourse is structurally incapable of stating, which is that imperial violence is the most fundamental of human rights abuses. Not the largest in some tally of the dead, although it is that as well. Fundamental in the sense of foundational. It is the violence that manufactures the conditions in which the other violences become possible, that installs the monarchs and trains the secret police and finances the wars and empties the pharmacies, and that then supplies the vocabulary in which the wreckage it produced is described as the character of the people living in it.
The register has to change, and changing it is the burden of everything that follows. The language of rights and the language of authoritarianism are at present doing work for authoritarianism at both ends of a single circuit. In the metropole they license the war, because a bombing campaign arriving in the grammar of liberation needs credible people to certify that the country beneath it is unfree. In Tehran they license the cell, because a state under attack converts every dissident into the enemy's hand and every foreign criticism into the proof. Each terminal draws its legitimacy from the other's brutality, and the circuit has been running for four decades. A decolonising register is the refusal to supply either terminal, and holding to the question of when is how the refusal is executed, because when is the question neither the empire nor the security state can afford to have asked.
Prashad's argument runs to the object, to which state has earned the criticism, in what proportion, measured against what history. One step past the object lies the subject, which is who is speaking, from what position, through whose machinery, and answerable to whom. Left unasked, the first argument can be conducted indefinitely by people who are neither being bombed nor being hanged, in English, in the metropolitan press, with great feeling and rising eloquence, and at the end of it the Iranian remains the object of the sentence and never becomes its author.
Anti-imperialism names the structure. Decolonisation names the register in which the structure is spoken about. A politics holding the first without the second becomes geopolitics conducted between elites, correct about the hierarchy of states and indifferent to the hierarchy of voices inside them. A politics holding the second without the first becomes a seminar on positionality with the bombers left out of the frame, which is the condition of most of what passes for decolonial theory in the Northern university today. Neither half survives alone, and this essay is about the seam where they join.
III. What Iran is demonstrating
Something is happening in this war that is larger than this war, and the letter cannot see it because the letter's architecture has nowhere to put it.
For six months the most heavily armed alliance in human history has bombed a country of ninety million people with the announced expectation that the state would fracture, that the population would rise on cue, that the strikes would deliver the collapse four decades of sanctions had failed to deliver. It did not happen on schedule. It has not happened yet. Whatever else is true of the Islamic Republic, and I will come to what I think is true of it, the empire's writ did not run. A country encircled, embargoed, sabotaged, infiltrated and threatened without interruption since 1953 declined to break in the manner and on the timetable that Washington had written for it.
The rest of the world is watching that and drawing conclusions, and the conclusions are the most consequential thing these six months have produced.
This is what an opening looks like. Not victory, which is a word for something else, and not a redemption of the state doing the resisting, which is a separate question. An opening is a moment when an arrangement that had seemed like the shape of the world reveals itself as a set of decisions that can be refused. Algeria was that. Vietnam was that, and the reason Vietnam mattered from Detroit to Dar es Salaam was never that its government was admirable. It mattered because a peasant army demonstrated that the strongest military on earth could be made to leave, and that demonstration travelled, and the travelling changed what people in fifty other countries believed was available to them. Cuba was that. Bandung was that for a while, and the New International Economic Order was an attempt to convert an opening into architecture before the debt crisis shut it.
Openings perish. They last as long as somebody is organised enough to build structures out of them, and when nobody is, they close and the old arrangement returns with the added authority of having survived a challenge. What is at stake this month is whether the peoples of the South convert this moment into something durable or watch it pass into a footnote.
And here is why a letter matters more than a letter should. An opening is military and economic and it is also communicative. What makes an opening travel is a story about what happened, stories are made in particular places by particular institutions, and the metropolitan press is the most powerful story-making machine ever assembled. Into this moment, when the question in Jakarta and Johannesburg and Caracas and Delhi is what the world has just learned about the limits of American power, the Guardian published a document in which the most credible anti-racist and abolitionist voices in the English-speaking world describe the bombed country as one blade of a scissors. That is an intervention in what the moment will be remembered as having meant. The war is being fought over territory and it is also being fought over the meaning of the territory, and the second war is the one empire has always won after losing the first.
None of which the signatories intended. The intention is beside the point, which the culture-centered approach has to keep repeating because the Northern academy cannot stop asking about it. Meaning is produced by structures, and structures are indifferent to the wishes of the people inside them.
IV. The metaphor came from inside the cell
Prashad calls the scissors evocative and erroneous, and handles it as though the signatories had built it. They did not, and the correction runs in a direction more damaging than the one he took.
The letter says exactly where the figure comes from. The prisoners said it. They spoke of being caught between two blades, the regime that tortures them and a foreign force dropping bombs on their heads in the name of freedom, and the letter is quoting them.
Spoken in the cell that sentence is unanswerable. It makes no claim about the moral equivalence of two states and advances no theory of Iranian politics. It is a person describing the room they are standing in. Somebody in Evin during an airstrike on Evin knows something in the body that nobody in London or Berkeley knows in any register whatsoever, and the figure they reached for is the figure of a person being cut from two directions at once. That is what testimony is. It is true at the site, it claims nothing beyond the site, and its authority comes from the position of the one who speaks and cannot be transferred to anybody else.
Then it travels. Lifted out of the cell, set into a letter drafted in the metropole, taken by a comment desk in London, placed inside quotation marks, made the headline, run in the long-form format the paper keeps for its moral occasions. The words do not change at any stage of that journey. The function changes at every stage. In the cell the sentence described a position. On the comment page it explains a conflict, and it is offered to a British and American readership as the lens through which to understand a war their own governments are waging. The prisoner never made the second claim and cannot be reached to be asked whether they would make it. The attribution is precisely what makes the operation safe, because they said it, we only listened, and nobody is going to argue with the people in the cell.
This is the oldest procedure in the colonial archive of representation and it has never required a colonial administrator to run it. Speech is harvested at the margin, carried through machinery the speaker does not own, and set down at the centre to perform work the speaker never authorised. The extraction launders itself by naming its source. Ethnography did this for a century. Development communication did it. The humanitarian appeal does it every night on television, where the child's face is real, the hunger is real, the consent is absent, and the framing belongs entirely to the broadcaster.
The false symmetry was never in the metaphor. The metaphor belongs to people who have paid for it in a currency none of us have spent. The symmetry enters in the carrying.
V. The North gets a biography, the South gets a diagnosis
The letter's entire account of the Islamic Republic runs to a single sentence, and that sentence is the most consequential thing in the document. The Republic, it says, from its inception enforced absolute control on the basis of an exclusionary ideology.
From its inception. Nothing before 1979 appears anywhere in the text. Mosaddegh is absent. The 1953 coup is absent. SAVAK is absent, along with the American and Israeli hands that built and trained it. The Iraqi invasion the West encouraged and armed is absent. Four decades of embargo, sabotage and assassination are absent, and sanctions surface exactly once, in the final line, as a harm to be halted and never as a force that has produced anything. The Iranian state walks into this text fully formed, carrying its cruelty the way a person carries a temperament.
Two paragraphs later the same letter turns to the United States and does something entirely different. There the prison is traced to a political agenda of racist exclusion. There the jailing of Black and Indigenous and Puerto Rican organisers is traced to the crushing of national liberation movements. There the analysis names a specific institution, USP Marion, and follows its design outward into the world.
The two passages differ in the kind of knowledge each offers. For the United States the letter writes a biography, a story of interests and decisions and a state building instruments to accomplish something it wanted. For Iran it writes a diagnosis, a condition present at birth. The North is explained by its history. The South is explained by its nature. Colonial knowledge has policed that border for three centuries, and it is being policed here, in this document, by the very scholars who taught the rest of us how to see it.
When Gilmore reads a Californian prison she reads surplus land and surplus labour and surplus capital and a state with capacity it needs to spend. When this letter reads Evin it reads an ideology, enforced from the beginning. The abolitionist method is switched off at exactly the frontier where switching it on would have cost something, because switching it on would have required a sentence saying that the Iranian security apparatus was forged in a furnace the United States has kept burning since 1953. That sentence would have made the rest of the letter impossible to write.
Nobody decided this. A structure of knowledge does its finest work when nobody in the room can feel it operating, and a decolonial reading is only the technique for making it visible in documents produced by people who would repudiate it on sight.
The same flattening governs the letter's method throughout. It lays carceral systems side by side and finds the logic they share, Evin beside administrative detention beside ICE beside COINTELPRO beside the prisons built to the Marion pattern, and it reads like a museum case. Each system mounted, labelled, set at an even distance from its neighbour, and the visitor walks the length of the display and sees the family resemblance, and the resemblance is real. What the case cannot show is the wiring. Two things can look alike because one built the other, or because a third built them both, or because they arrived at the same shape along separate roads, and a row of specimens behind glass will never tell you which. The eye supplies a descent the evidence has not established, and a shared logic can arrive from separate origins.
The letter gestures at the wiring once, when it says Marion became a blueprint for prisons built in Iran and Israel in the 1960s. Techniques travel, expertise is sold, intelligence is traded, and all of that is true. Blueprint is a very small word for what passed between these states. Britain and the United States destroyed Iran's constitutional government, installed a monarch, built and trained his secret police, and then spent forty years ensuring by war and embargo and assassination that whatever succeeded him would have to be a garrison. What passed between them was one country holding another under water for two generations and then remarking on the shape it came up in.
The flattening carries its cost precisely now. If carcerality is a weather system covering the whole earth, then the specific fact of August 2026, that one of these states is at this moment bombing the other's territory, dissolves into the general climate. Everyone is implicated, the logic is planetary, and the hierarchy of force has nowhere left to stand. The letter names the war in its first paragraph. Its architecture leaves the war no room to mean anything.
VI. Who is handed a verb
The asymmetry surviving every correction I have had to make sits in the letter's grammar of action, and it is the cleanest evidence in the document.
Global civil society and anti-imperialist organisations are asked to do four things. Extend unconditional support to incarcerated kin. Build relationships with Iranian political prisoners. Uplift their voices. Put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative. Four verbs, addressed to an actor that exists, every one of them actionable tomorrow morning, every one of them pointed at Tehran.
Then come the closing demands. The Iranian authorities must stop. The United States and Israel must end their wars and sanctions. Two declaratives addressed to states, and neither hands anybody anything to do. No campaign, no mechanism, no instruction, nothing a reader in Chicago or Manchester could act on before lunch. The war is opposed in the grammar of a wish. Tehran is opposed in the grammar of a programme.
The signatories live inside the states dropping the bombs. Their leverage over the Islamic Republic is zero and no letter will alter that by a gram. Their leverage over their own governments is modest and real, and it is the only leverage any of them holds. The document spends its entire capacity for action on the target where it can accomplish nothing and offers nothing at all at the target where it might, which is a statement about the room the letter was built to be read in.
The phrase that gives the whole thing away is the letter's rejection of what it calls the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism. That adjective is aimed at the movements of the Global South and their allies who have declined to condemn Iran while Iran is under attack. The Islamic Republic does not consult the Guardian's comment pages before setting policy, and the prisoners stand charged with nothing. It gathers those movements into a category of political error and hands them a corrected position, issued from the metropole, printed in the aggressor's press.
I have written before about the civility gate, the mechanism by which a liberal centre sets the height of the bar that anti-colonial politics must clear before admission to the conversation, and quietly reserves the right to raise the bar whenever the politics get close. Hollow anti-imperialism is a civility gate. It tells the movements of the South that their opposition to empire will count as serious once it has been washed through a condemnation of the country empire is currently bombing. The traffic runs one way and only one way. The South shows its papers at the gate. Northern humanitarianism is waved straight through, because in the Northern voice it arrives already dressed as universal. The civilising mission never once asked the coloniser to prove his innocence. It asked the colonised to prove his readiness.
VII. The paper
Twenty-three signatures are the smallest part of what happened here. The letter was fed into a machine with a two-hundred-year history, and that history shaped what came out the other end.
The Guardian is treated across the Anglophone world as the left's newspaper of record, and that reputation is the most valuable asset in British publishing. The asset has a function. A newspaper that performs the left is more useful to capital, to settler colonialism, to racism and to empire than any newspaper that opposes the left, because opposition can be discounted by the people it targets and a friendly voice cannot. A liberal press in an imperial society holds the licence for issuing critique. It sets what a permissible critique sounds like, and it ensures that whatever is said arrives already shaped so that acting on it falls to somebody else.
The paper's origin is the clearest available statement of this. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 by John Edward Taylor, a cotton merchant, in the aftermath of Peterloo, as an organ of reform. Research commissioned by the paper's own owner and published in 2023 found that Taylor's firms imported raw cotton grown by enslaved people in the Americas, and that nine of his eleven backers had ties to slavery through the textile trade. During the American Civil War the paper took the side of the Confederacy. Reform journalism financed by the wealth of the plantation, published by men whose looms ran on stolen labour and whose politics were sincerely liberal, is the paper's formal structure, and it has been reproduced continuously for two centuries.
Settler colonialism runs through the same seam. C. P. Scott edited the paper for fifty-seven years and remains the most venerated figure in British liberal journalism. He was a founding member of the British Palestine Committee. He introduced Chaim Weizmann to Lloyd George, to Herbert Samuel and to Balfour, he passed Weizmann intelligence on the secret Sykes-Picot carve-up, and he turned his editorial page into an instrument of the Zionist project. His leader on the day the Balfour Declaration was published dismissed the people already living in Palestine as small in number and, in his words, at a low stage of civilisation. The most revered editor in the history of the British liberal press was a working agent of a settler-colonial undertaking, and the paper was one of the instruments through which the undertaking was secured.
The paper has confessed all of this, and the confession is where the analysis gets interesting. In 2021, for its bicentenary, it published an editorial listing its worst errors of judgment across two centuries, naming its early opposition to universal suffrage, its support for imperialism, its backing of the Confederacy, and its role in facilitating Balfour. In 2023 the Scott Trust apologised for the founders' links to transatlantic slavery and committed ten million pounds to a decade-long restorative justice programme. All of it may well be sincere. Sincerity explains none of it.
Confession is a renewable resource for an institution of this kind. Each admission converts a structural continuity into a discrete historical error, dated, regretted and closed. Once closed, it credentials the present. The paper that has apologised for Balfour is thereby licensed to arbitrate Palestine today. The paper that has apologised for cotton is licensed to arbitrate race today. The admission of past complicity is the mechanism by which present complicity becomes invisible, and the more thorough the admission, the more complete the invisibility. Hypocrisy would be easier to dislodge. What runs here is a working technology for the reproduction of authority, and every institution I have spent my career inside runs a version of it, my own university included.
The economics complete the picture. The paper has no proprietor, which it presents as its independence, and it is financed by voluntary contributions from more than a million readers spread across the liberal professional classes of a hundred countries. That model requires something specific from every article. It requires that the reader's sense of their own decency come out of the encounter renewed. The product is the reader's self-understanding as an informed and humane person, and the transaction completes each month by direct debit. A newspaper on that model can publish suffering in enormous quantity, and it does, some of it courageously. What it cannot do is publish the obligation that would follow from taking the suffering seriously, because the obligation would fall on the reader's pension fund, the reader's government, the reader's university, the reader's city. Nobody forbids it. The business model metabolises it out.
The paper does real work, and the real work is what makes the rest of it function. It broke Windrush. It ran the Snowden files, until the state applied pressure and its editors let officials watch hard drives being destroyed in a basement in London. It did the Panama Papers. A pure organ of propaganda would persuade nobody and would be worth nothing to anyone. The credibility is the asset, the asset is real, it was earned, and it is spent.
The letter met that machinery, and its authors were never consulted about the shape of the vessel. The frame around the published piece supplies the history the signatories did not. The 1953 coup appears in the standfirst, written by the comment desk, alongside the anniversary of the 1988 executions. It is not in the letter at all. History arrives in the form of an anniversary, which is history at its most ornamental, a date on a calendar with no force in the world, and it is set down at the threshold because nothing in the letter's argument depends on it. The most anti-imperial sentence in the entire package was written by the newspaper, and it was written in the one position where it could do no work.
And so a readership that is not going to stop this war was handed permission to feel appropriately troubled by it, and the permission carries Angela Davis's signature. Moral authority accumulated across generations of struggle against the American carceral state is a form of capital. It can be spent, and an institution that has been converting exactly this kind of capital since 1821 understands better than anyone how to arrange the conditions under which it will be spent to the empire's advantage. Corrupting anybody is unnecessary. Publishing is sufficient.
VIII. Decolonisation as an act of listening
Diagnosis on its own is a dead genre. What the analysis requires is one thing, simple to state and very hard to do.
Listening.
The word carries a structural meaning here, and the distinction carries its entire weight. In the Northern professional vocabulary listening has been reduced to a quality of attention, a warmth, a therapeutic posture that can be brought to a meeting and praised afterward. Consultations are held. Stakeholders are engaged. Voices are heard, and the passive construction is doing enormous work in that sentence, because a voice that is heard is a voice received into a frame somebody else built, interpreted through somebody else's terms, and available to be set aside by somebody else's judgement about what it really meant. That is a procedure for converting speech into raw material.
Listening in the sense argued for here is a transfer of power over the terms, and it attends to three things the humanitarian ear is trained to miss.
It attends to erasure. Argument usually stops at what a text contains. Erasure lives in the shape of what is absent and in the regularity of the absences. A single omission is an oversight. A pattern of omissions is a structure, and the pattern in this letter is exact. Everything preceding 1979 is gone. Every mechanism by which the Iranian security state was produced is gone. The genealogy granted to the American prison in full is withheld from the Iranian prison entirely. Listening for erasure means reading silence as evidence, and noticing who benefits from each particular thing that has gone missing.
It attends to violence, and to where the violence actually is. Human rights discourse in its Northern form has a talent for locating violence in the acts of states it does not fund and losing it entirely in the acts of states it does. Sanctions do not appear as violence, they appear as pressure. A blockade that empties a pharmacy does not appear as violence, it appears as policy. An air campaign appears as an intervention, and intervention is a word built to be unable to bleed. Listening means restoring violence to the places the vocabulary has removed it from, and the largest of those places is the imperial relation itself, which is the fundamental human rights abuse in this story because it produces the conditions in which every other abuse in the story became possible.
And it attends to timing.
Timing is the heart of it, and it is where the other two become visible at once. Prashad's why now opens the whole apparatus, because a text that seems balanced on the page is never encountered on the page alone. It is encountered on a particular day, in a public whose attention has been arranged by other means, in a war whose managers have specific needs that week. Asking when a statement enters the world is how you find out what it is being used for, and the answer very often has nothing to do with what it says. The letter appears in the seventh month of a bombing campaign that has not produced what was promised, addressed to a public increasingly uncertain about the promise, published by an institution that needs the uncertainty to stay aesthetic and never turn political. Nothing in the letter's sentences accounts for that. Everything about the letter's effect does.
Timing is also where the decolonising register stops criticising and starts working. The circuit in which rights language serves authoritarianism at both ends is powered by the assumption that a claim can be assessed on its content alone. Break that assumption and the circuit fails. A certification of unfreedom offered to an air campaign is no longer a neutral observation once you have asked what hour it arrived in. A security state's charge that its dissidents are the enemy's hand is no longer plausible once you have asked why the enemy is overhead in the first place. When puts the war back in the foreground where it belongs, and it puts the prisoner back in the position of the one who speaks.
Listening in this sense is an anti-imperial act. The softness is in the word alone.
Empire has always been a system for organising who gets to speak about whom. The gunboat and the ledger and the cartographer's survey and the anthropologist's monograph were a single apparatus, and the monograph was never the decoration on the gunboat. It was how territory was made knowable, and therefore governable, and therefore takeable. The colonised were rendered as populations to be described, classified, explained, spoken for and improved. People were robbed and killed, and beyond the robbery and the killing they were removed from the position of the one who narrates the world, installed as the thing narrated, and told that this was the natural order of knowledge. Fanon understood the recovery of the speaker's position as liberation's content.
When a Northern institution takes speech produced in an Iranian cell and converts it into a frame for a Northern readership, no lapse of etiquette has occurred. The apparatus is operating as designed, and it has been operating since 1821. Refusing the conversion, insisting that the sentence stays attached to the position that produced it, removes a component from a machine that runs on precisely this, which places listening squarely inside anti-imperialism.
The seam where the two traditions meet is here, and each repairs a specific failure in the other. Anti-imperialism without listening becomes a politics of states. It gets the hierarchy right, which is the hardest and most important thing, and then conducts the entire argument between capitals while the people inside those capitals become the population on whose behalf the argument is being had. That road ends where campism ends, with a left that can name every American base and not one Iranian trade unionist, and that left has nothing to offer the people in Evin, and knows it, and covers the knowledge with volume. Listening without anti-imperialism becomes a politics of etiquette. It gets the register right and loses the structure, and it produces the vast decolonial literature of the Northern academy in which power is everywhere in general and nowhere in particular, where the bomber never appears because the bomber is not a discourse, and where the whole performance of critique can be staged inside an institution funded by the war without a tremor. I have sat in those rooms for twenty years. They are very comfortable and nothing has ever been dislodged from one.
Held together, the two produce a discipline. Name the structure and locate yourself inside it.
What the prisoners actually said, as against what a comment desk needed them to have said, is that they are being cut from two directions. They did not say the blades are equivalent. They did not authorise a frame for a British readership and were not asked. Listening to them means holding the sentence at the site that produced it and asking what obligation it lays on somebody standing where I am standing, which is inside a country whose institutions are woven into the alliance doing the bombing, a long way from any cell and any bomb.
And the field of the erased runs wider than the letter's addressees. The 168 families in Minab were not asked what this war means. The engineers keeping a bombed grid alive in Ahvaz were not asked. The Afghan migrants being scapegoated in Iranian cities are spoken about in the letter and never with. The women who broke open the streets in 2022 hold a politics of their own that suits nobody's foreign policy, the Kurdish and Baloch organisers hold theirs, and the Iranian socialist left has been making both arguments simultaneously for forty years at a cost none of the signatories has paid. Beyond all of them, the two thirds of humanity now watching this war and drawing conclusions about the limits of American power were never consulted about what the moment means and are being told, by a newspaper in London, what its meaning is.
Listening to that entire field is the analysis itself. It is also the only method that would have produced a document adequate to the moment.
IX. What listening builds
Posture on its own changes nothing. Structurally, listening changes four things.
It changes where you aim. The target is the structure you are standing inside, the one acting in your name, spending your taxes, issuing your passport, paying your salary and signing off your promotion. That is the only place your speech carries risk, and risk is the line between solidarity and commentary. Speech produced at the core about the periphery has a long documented habit of arriving at its destination as targeting data whatever its author meant by it. Twenty-three people living inside the states dropping the bombs wrote to the people underneath them. Prashad's question stands and it is the entire question. These are not cowards, so cowardice explains nothing. In the political culture of the Northern academy a letter to Iranian prisoners reads as sophisticated and a letter to Washington demanding an unconditional halt reads as unsophisticated, and that hierarchy of taste is itself a piece of imperial infrastructure, arranging its intellectuals so that their finest instincts point outward.
It changes the timescale. A letter is an occasion. It appears, it is signed, it is shared, it is answered, and in ten days the timeline has moved on and nothing in Tehran or Washington has shifted by a millimetre. Infrastructure is a duration. It is the slow construction of arrangements through which people at the receiving end set the terms, control the timing, and hold a standing veto over what is said in their name. Named relationships, held over years. Iranian organisers, inside the country and in exile, with the power to say that a statement will get somebody killed and the power to be obeyed when they say it. The willingness to publish nothing for six months because the people whose lives are at stake have said not yet. The letter invites its readers to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners. Listening would have built them first and published second, and the distance between those two sequences is the whole content of the word solidarity.
It changes the direction of the current. Every verb in the letter flows outward from the metropole toward Iran, and the question is what flows back. Iranian socialists and Kurdish organisers and Baloch families are almost certainly not asking that we adjudicate their predicament for a foreign readership. They are almost certainly asking that we take our own state's hands off their country, because that is the one thing we are placed to attempt and the one thing they cannot do from where they are standing. Solidarity is a division of labour, and the labour assigned to those of us inside the imperial core is the labour nobody else on earth is positioned to perform.
And it collapses the two demands into one demand, which is the keystone the letter comes closest to and never reaches. The letter ends with two sentences set side by side like items on a list. Tehran must stop the executions. Washington and Tel Aviv must stop the war. They are not two items. The siege is the foundation the prison stands on. Sanctions strip the medicine out of the ward that the missile then flattens, and both of those things happened at Evin within a few years of each other. Encirclement is the argument every security state makes to its own population for why the cell is necessary, and every bomb that falls restocks that argument for another decade at no cost to the state making it. The people hanged in Iran this year will be hanged in a country under attack, by a government that will call them the enemy's hand, and it will call them that because there is an enemy and the enemy is real and is at this moment overhead. Lifting the siege is a prisoner-solidarity demand. It is the prisoner-solidarity demand that people in the United States and Britain can actually pursue, and no letter to Evin will ever be worth one month off the sanctions regime.
It has been done properly before, and that is what keeps me from despair about any of it. The Palestinian movement formalised it. The call came from Palestinian civil society, the terms were set there, the timing was set there, and international participation was structured as response rather than as initiative. Nobody in London decided what Palestinians most needed and then invited them to be amplified. That is what listening looks like when an institution has been built to carry it, and it is why the movement has held for twenty years against everything thrown at it. The model has been sitting in plain view the entire time.
X. What this analysis does not say
The prisoners exist. The torture is real, the executions are real and climbing, the criminalisation of Kurds and Baloch and Arabs is real, the scapegoating of Afghan migrants is real, and the letter is right about every one of them. An analysis ending by making this suffering unspeakable would have failed in the exact manner the culture-centered approach exists to prevent, by subordinating the voices of the margins to a calculation made in some capital far away. That mirrors the letter's error and corrects nothing, and I have watched the Northern left make it for as long as I have watched the Northern left.
Nothing in section III is a defence of the Islamic Republic. What is anti-imperial about this moment is the refusal. The state currently sitting on top of the refusal is a separate matter. Openings are made by peoples. Ninety million people did not break, the sanctions did not turn them, the strikes did not produce the collapse that had been scheduled for them, and the credit belongs to a society. A security apparatus that has spent four decades jailing the very people whose endurance is now claimed on its behalf holds no share in it. This is precisely the manoeuvre every besieged state performs, converting the population's survival into the government's legitimacy and then presenting the bill to anyone who objects. The opening exists. Whether it becomes anything at all depends on whether the movements of the South, Iranian movements among them, including the ones inside Evin, are the ones who get to say what it meant. When states write that story instead, the opening closes into another arrangement of elites and the people who held the line receive nothing from it. That has happened before, more than once, on my own continent.
Two charges now circulating are unfair. The letter does not compare Iran to Israel in the sentence about a shared logic of domination. That sentence turns outward, running from Iran into Israeli administrative detention and then into ICE and then into COINTELPRO, and it opens the longest passage in the document, which is an indictment of American and Israeli carcerality. And the scissors belongs to the prisoners. Attack the letter on either ground and you will deserve the reply you get.
There is a serious objection to the argument made here. A politics postponing criticism of a Southern state until the imperial threat lifts postpones it forever, because the threat does not lift, and the bill for that postponement has always been paid by leftists and women and ethnic minorities inside those states. Iranian socialists have been making this argument for four decades and a great many of them made it from prison. It cannot be waved away and I will not pretend to have dissolved it. The answer is only that the question was never whether to criticise. It was who, from where, at what hour, through whose machinery, and answerable to whom. Iranian leftists writing in Farsi, in Iranian outlets, at their own risk, saying both things at once, are doing one thing. Twenty-three names in the Guardian in the seventh month of an American bombing campaign, saying nearly the same words, are doing something else entirely.
XI. From here
A settler colony that is also a node in an imperial network is one arrangement working at two scales. Aotearoa New Zealand takes land under a constitutional order it has never honoured, and it rents that land and its people and its geography to the alliance currently bombing Iran, and the same state signs both sets of papers. Decolonisation here and anti-imperialism abroad are one project with two faces, and Te Tiriti o Waitangi is the ground on which the refusal stands, because a Crown bound by Te Tiriti could not host the machinery of somebody else's war on land it holds in trust without the consent of the hapū whose land it is.
The node is documented and its parts are countable. Membership of the Five Eyes, running since 1956. The GCSB, which hosted foreign intelligence operations in Wellington for years without ministers being told. Four National Reconnaissance Office missions launched from the Māhia Peninsula. New Zealand Defence Force payloads named Tui and Korimako riding on NRO satellites in a project run by the United States Naval Postgraduate School, with the NZDF telling the public those payloads cannot support military operations and telling RNZ under the Official Information Act that the experiments will generate knowledge to drive future military space operations. A Defence Capability Plan implementing the substance of AUKUS Pillar Two while the government maintains that it is still assessing whether to join. Budget 2026 putting one and a half billion dollars into the same machinery, with hundreds of millions of it aimed at space.
All of it comes out of the account that funds the school and the ward. The satellite that photographs a target in West Asia goes up on a rocket that lifts from a peninsula in Te Tairāwhiti, under a permit signed in Wellington, paid for by people in Palmerston North and Ōtautahi who were never asked and whose consent is presumed. That is what it means to live at a node. The war has a supply chain, the supply chain has an address, and part of the address is here.
Which is why the sharpest act of solidarity with Iran carried out from this country this month happened in a courtroom rather than on a comment page. Three New Zealand citizens, Yasser Abdulaal, Maher Nazzal and Timoti Te Moke, filed in the High Court at Wellington seeking judicial review of the government's approval of Rocket Lab's BlackSky launches from Māhia, on the argument that the satellites risked supplying targeting data to Israel's military. The application connects a permit issued by a New Zealand minister to a decision made over Gaza, and it does so in a forum where a New Zealand minister has to answer. Nobody was amplified. A state was named, in its own courts, by people it governs, over a document it signed.
That is the shape of the thing, and everything else follows the same logic. The register of research contracts, defence funding and dual-use partnerships held by every university in this country is obtainable, and obtaining it is the first act, because a critique of empire delivered from an institution whose engineering faculty is inside the supply chain has a hole in it that the institution will happily leave unfilled. KiwiSaver funds, university endowments and the Superannuation Fund hold positions in the firms that make the ordnance, and those positions have names and can be moved, and campaigns that moved them before are the ones that moved tobacco and moved apartheid. The payload permit regime under the Outer Space and High-altitude Activities Act is a domestic lever operated by a domestic minister, entirely within reach of domestic pressure. The Five Eyes relationship is a relationship a small state can condition or exit, and the proof sits in living memory, because between 1984 and 1987 this country refused a direct American demand, absorbed the retaliation, and did not fall over. Waterside workers who decline to load military cargo, academics who decline to write the grant, engineers who decline to take the contract, and unions that write the refusal into an agreement are the parts of this that actually bite, because they interrupt a physical process rather than a narrative.
None of it resolves in a news cycle. Sustained is the operative word, and sustained means a decade of committee meetings, Official Information Act requests, court filings, branch resolutions, occupations at gates, and the patient assembling of a public that understands what its own country is being used for. It costs promotions. It costs invitations. It costs the particular comfort of being the kind of scholar whose radicalism is legible to editors in London. Whatever it costs, it is paid here, by people who chose to pay it, in the one jurisdiction where our voices carry weight and our names carry consequences, and that is the difference between a politics and a performance.
Twenty-three people could have addressed Downing Street and the Congress. Anyone in Wellington or Auckland can address the minister who signs the payload permits, and can stand in the High Court, and can be at the gate at Māhia. The obligation runs to the state we inhabit, the state we fund, the state that acts in our names and takes its land under a Treaty it breaks daily. Dismantling that is the work, and there is no version of solidarity with the people in Evin that does not run through it.
XII. To decolonise
Decolonisation entered the Northern university and was made comfortable there. It arrived as a claim about land, extraction, indenture and debt, and it was converted into a vocabulary of representation, identity, positionality and voice, all of which matter and none of which threatens a balance sheet. The plantation went out of it. The mine went out of it. The shipping lane, the insurance market, the tariff schedule, the loan condition and the currency of settlement went out of it, and what remained could be taught in a business school without anybody losing a night's sleep. Every institution that has adopted the word has adopted it in that condition, mine included.
Anti-imperialism is what puts the missing content back. Colonialism was an accumulation project that produced a discourse to justify itself, in that order, and the discourse has outlived none of the accumulation. The land taken here is capital and is still held as capital. The cotton that paid for a liberal newspaper in Manchester was grown by people who were themselves capital. The oil under West Asia has organised a century of coups, mandates, base agreements and assassinations, and the arrangement holding it in place is not a set of attitudes about Arabs and Persians. It is a set of contracts backed by carriers.
The siege of Iran makes the point without needing any theory at all. Sanctions are the world market turned into ordnance. A country is denied the ability to clear a payment, insure a cargo, buy a spare part for a dialysis machine or sell the one commodity it has, and the denial is executed through banks and messaging systems and legal instruments rather than through an occupying army, and the effect on a body in a hospital in Ahvaz is indistinguishable from a blockade under sail. Empire in this century rarely needs to hold the ground. It needs to hold the clearing house, the insurer, the shipping registry and the terms of settlement, and it goes to war when a country demonstrates that those holds can be loosened. The bombs falling since February are the enforcement arm of a monetary order, and the prison in Tehran stands on the foundation that order laid.
Which settles what the words mean. To decolonise is to be anti-capitalist, because the thing under decolonisation is a property relation and not a sentiment about difference. To decolonise is to be anti-imperial, because the property relation is held in place by force, and the force is over Iranian cities this morning. A decolonial politics that leaves capital and the bomber outside the frame is decor, and the institutions that fund it know exactly what they are buying.
And that fixes the obligation at this hour. For people in the global north who intend to be decent, the solidarity that counts is solidarity with a besieged nation demonstrating what refusal costs and what refusal accomplishes. The nation, meaning the ninety million and not the ministry. Ninety million people who have absorbed four decades of siege and six months of bombardment and have not delivered the collapse that was scheduled for them, and who by not delivering it have shown everyone from Jakarta to Johannesburg that the writ of the strongest power on earth stops somewhere. That demonstration is a gift to every colonised people still working out what is possible, and it was paid for in Minab and Ahvaz and Tehran by people who did not volunteer.
Nothing offered from inside the bombing states is worth anything unless it takes the side of that refusal, at this hour, without conditions attached and without a supplementary paragraph purchasing the speaker's respectability. Everything else on offer from the metropole right now, however elegantly composed and however distinguished the signatures, is a way of appearing to be present at a moment while declining to be on a side.
The prisoners named the scissors from between the blades, which is the only place on earth from which that sentence can honestly be said. What was owed to them was the harder thing, which was to hold the sentence where it was spoken, to ask what it required of us here, and to accept that the answer was never ours to write.