Kamal Soleimani

Published online by TISHK Center for Kurdistan Studies: Bonn, Germany: 17 February 2026

A striking phenomenon has crystallized in recent years, with particular intensity over the past year: the re-emergence of what might be called neo-Pahlavism (pro-Persian monarchism), not as a coherent doctrine or viable political project, but as a mode of spectacular domination—an economy of violent visibility organized around hypermasculinity, vulgarity, and Persian racial spectacle. Its force lies not in justificatory legitimacy, institutional program, or substantive political vision; indeed, it openly disdains such grounds of politics. Neo-Pahlavism does not seek legitimacy through coherence. It performs legitimacy through a quasi-archaic posture of sovereign entitlement, as though power requires no argument because sovereignty requires no explanation. Deliberation is refused, substance is treated with contempt, and this very refusal is staged as authority. What emerges is not persuasion but an aesthetic regime of power: the hypervisibility of masculinist sovereignty sustained by aggression, media saturation, and fear as political atmosphere.

This is not merely a revival of monarchist nostalgia. It is a contemporary configuration of political visibility: an attempt to occupy the entire field through intimidation. Neo-Pahlavism does not present itself as one actor among others; it claims to be the measure of legitimate politics, seeking to impose itself as the sole possible form of sovereign presence, grounded in Persian-centeredness. What is at stake is not simply the exclusion of opponents, but the foreclosure of politics as such. Increasingly, any nonconforming articulation—Kurdish, Arab, Baluch, feminist, leftist, pluralist—is treated not as adversarial but as ontologically intolerable. Such politics is cast as illegitimate not because of what it argues, but because it appears at all. Its mere presence is framed as intrusion and contamination: a violation of the “natural” order of sovereignty.

In this configuration, plurality is not a condition of politics but a threat to politics-as-monopoly. Neo-Pahlavism does not bother to refute alternative visions; it treats legitimacy as a royal dispensation, casting dissent in advance as treason, discord, or betrayal, and refusing to recognize such positions as visions at all. They are apprehended instead as unnatural deviations—criminalizable, disposable, and ultimately destroyable without the need for argument. Exclusion here is immediate, pre-discursive, and sovereign: non-Pahlavist politics is not an adversary to be debated, but an impossibility to be erased.

To grasp this adequately requires a vocabulary beyond surface description. The framework of in/visibility is especially illuminating. As Monika Barthwal-Datta argues, visibility is never neutral: it is bound up with power, vulnerability, and recognition. Marginalized groups often seek visibility “as an affirmation of our humanity,” yet visibility also exposes bodies to intensified surveillance and violence (Barthwal-Datta 2023, 10–11). Visibility is thus ambivalent—emancipatory and perilous at once. Neo-Pahlavism exploits precisely this condition, transforming visibility into a sovereign technology of intimidation.

Neo-Pahlavism is aggressively masculine, enacted not through argument but through embodied posture. Its politics does not operate as deliberation but as performance: the male body—figured as the sole legitimate vessel of monarchical continuity, anchored in the constitutional imagination of 1906—is staged as sovereign entitlement. Speech becomes a form of masculinist vulgar occupation of the public, and virile, sexualized verbal cruelty functions as a credential of authenticity. What emerges is an affective atmosphere in which domination becomes the very grammar of the political. Intimidation displaces debate, aggression substitutes for critique, and vulgarity is transfigured into legitimacy. Politics is reduced to an economy of invasion: who can appear louder, humiliate more thoroughly, monopolize space more completely, and silence others more effectively.

Neo-Pahlavism is never about substance but about masculinist visibility. Yet this emptiness is not a failure—it is a technique. It is performed as sovereignty. The absence of program becomes the enactment of entitlement: a spectacle of power that refuses the grammar of justification. Neo-Pahlavism does not argue because it claims an a priori sovereignty—self-authorizing, beyond contestation, and immune to public debate. It stages legitimacy through the sovereign claim that legitimacy requires no mediation, no discourse, no accountability—only the capacity to appear, to dominate the political frame, and to render all other appearances illegible in advance.

Ruth Wodak’s analysis of right-wing populism helps clarify the broader political form at work here. In contemporary “media-democracy,” politics is increasingly shaped less by programmatic substance or institutional deliberation than by frontstage performance and the reduction of complexity into slogans (Wodak 2015, 34). Populist actors often acquire disproportionate power through visibility itself, even in the absence of durable organization or coherent political projects (Wodak 2015, 34). In this environment, provocation, scandalization, and dramatization become central techniques for manufacturing authority and staging legitimacy (Wodak 2015, 34–35). Neo-Pahlavism operates through precisely this logic: politics as spectacle, saturation as a substitute for substance, and aggression as a regime of enforced visibility. What is ultimately at stake is not simply persuasion, but the monopolization of recognizability itself—the power to determine what can appear as legitimate politics at all.

Neo-Pahlavism does not seek attention in order to persuade; it seeks attention in order to foreclose alternatives. Its hypervisibility is monopolistic, striving to become the only recognizable Iran, the only imaginable political horizon. Here spectacle does not supplement politics—it replaces it. Performance becomes sovereignty, and sovereignty becomes the power to render all other politics unnatural, illegible, and suspect.

What is at stake, then, is a struggle over appearance itself: over who may enter the political field as legitimate. As Barthwal-Datta notes, marginalized bodies are often made simultaneously hypervisible and invisible—conspicuous as marked bodies, yet excluded as authoritative ones (Barthwal-Datta 2023, 6). Neo-Pahlavism weaponizes this structure. It consolidates itself as the sole authorized visibility while forcing others into a condition of exposure without recognition. Others are permitted to appear only as deviation, interruption, or threat, visible not as political subjects but as problems to be managed or eliminated.

This is a politics that claims universality while practicing exclusion. The neo-Pahlavi spectacle insists that it is not an ethnic or racial position at all—only “Iran itself,” only “national unity,” only “normalcy.” Yet it reserves for itself the exclusive right to delimit others: to name virtually any Arab, Baloch, Kurdish, or Turkish political demand—regardless of its form, scale, or content—as separatism; to cast such claims as danger or criminality; and to treat pluralism itself as betrayal. Sovereignty here consists precisely in the refusal to be named, coupled with the exclusive power to name others.

Judith Butler’s account of the “frame” is crucial for grasping this mechanism. Frames do not simply represent reality; they structure the conditions under which something can appear as intelligible in the first place (Butler 2009, 12–13). Neo-Pahlavism operates through such framing: it seeks to monopolize recognizability itself. It establishes the terms under which political life becomes legible, while casting all other forms of life and politics into the zone of noise, threat, or disposability.

Butler’s point is that certain populations are not merely opposed but rendered unreal—positioned outside the field in which they could even count as lives, claims, or political subjects. Once a population is placed beyond the norms of citizenship and humanization, the rationale for exclusion becomes structurally secured rather than contingently argued (Butler 2009, 130–131). Neo-Pahlavism is therefore not merely a rhetorical style. It is an attempt to reorganize the political field itself: to determine who counts as political, who may appear as human, and whose very appearance is treated as a subversive violation.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this phenomenon is that meanness itself becomes the medium. Cruelty is not an accident; it is a technology. Humiliation, mockery, derision, affective aggression, and even sexualized verbal abuse function as instruments of a regime of exhaustion: they terrorize opponents, drain their capacity to respond, and produce disempowerment as an atmosphere. The aim is not to refute but to render the political field uninhabitable for those who refuse the spectacle.

Barthwal-Datta reminds us that silence can become a coping mechanism in toxic environments, especially when speaking would only intensify vulnerability (Barthwal-Datta 2023, 6–7). Neo-Pahlavism exploits precisely this dynamic. It turns appearance into risk, and risk into silence. It produces a field in which opposition becomes psychologically costly, socially dangerous, and politically unsustainable. Wendy Brown likewise shows how identities can become bound to forms of injury that promise redress yet reproduce domination, converting grievance into compensatory authority (Brown 1995, 52–54). Neo-Pahlavism performs precisely such compensatory sovereignty: a masculinist spectacle that substitutes domination for politics and vulgar entitlement for democratic substance, while presenting an unmarked, self-righteous “Iranian universality” as the sole measure of legitimate belonging. Entitlement becomes the only remaining content, and the eradication of plurality becomes the condition of its self-certainty.

Neo-Pahlavism is a politics of domination—Persian fascism staged as “national rescue.” It marks the return of racialized sovereignty articulated through the masculinist slogan mard, mihan, ābādi (“man, fatherland, prosperity”), posed against the emancipatory horizon of “Woman, Life, Freedom.” In this formation, “prosperity” is tethered to a phallocentric model of sovereign order, one that valorizes vulgarity, violence, and an atmospherically coercive masculinity as the very substance of political authority. Its force lies in its capacity to monopolize space, exhaust opposition, and convert intimidation into legitimacy through performative virility—through the exhibition of male sexualized loudness, aggression, and entitlement as political style. It is not merely an ideology but a regime of exclusive visibility: an attempt to become the only recognizable Iran by rendering all other politics not simply wrong but unthinkable.

Against this, the task is not simply critique but demystification. The neo-Pahlavi spectacle must be named for what it is: not neutrality, not universality, not “Iran,” but a positional sovereign formation that seeks monopoly over the political field through framing, aggression, and the production of silence. What presents itself as national normalcy is, in fact, a technology of exclusion that secures its authority by derealizing alternative forms of political life.

The struggle, then, is over appearance itself: over who may speak, who may be legible, who may count as political, and who is forced into silence under the weight of spectacle. It is a struggle over the very conditions of recognizability—over whether plurality can appear as politics at all, or only as deviation, threat, and disposability.

References

Barthwal-Datta, Monika. 2023. “On In/Visibility.” Journal of Critical Southern Studies 4: 1–14.
 Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
 Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
 Wodak, Ruth. 2015. The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage.