Fateh Saeidi

Postdoctoral Researcher | University of Texas at Austin

Published online by TISHK Center for Kurdistan Studies: Bonn, Germany: 16 January 2026

The Emergency Phase document (August 2025)[1] presents itself as a neutral and technical roadmap for managing the first 100 to 180 days after the collapse of the Islamic Republic. Its language emphasizes urgency, stability, and continuity, repeatedly invoking the need to “preserve the unity of the country,” “maintain order,” and “ensure security.” However, this technocratic framing conceals a political logic that sidelines the demands of non-Persian peoples and excludes a range of democratic arrangements based on decentralization and the dispersion of power. By prioritizing recentralization as the primary mode of governance, the document not only limits meaningful democratic participation but also structurally prepares the ground for a new form of authoritarian rule, potentially culminating in the emergence of a dictatorial monarch.

The most striking feature of the document is the explicit personalization of power. Reza Pahlavi is designated as “the Leader of the National Uprising,” a role that is neither symbolic nor ceremonial. He is charged with initiating the transition, forming the core institutions of governance, and approving the appointment and dismissal of their leaders. The text repeatedly states that key decisions are carried out “with the approval of the Leader of the National Uprising,” making him the ultimate source of authority throughout the transitional period. This authority is not limited to a single function but spans the legislative, executive, and judicial spheres, collapsing the separation of powers at the very moment when safeguards against abuse are most needed.

The document attempts to normalize this concentration of power by framing it as temporary and necessary. However, temporariness is asserted rather than secured. No binding mechanisms are introduced to ensure that this authority expires, nor is there any independent institution empowered to constrain or override it. In a political context shaped by repeated experiences of authoritarian restoration, this absence is not trivial. It reflects a structural preference for command over consent, and leadership over accountability.

The institutional architecture reinforces this logic. The three pillars of the transition, the “National Uprising Institution,” the “Transitional Government,” and the “Transitional Judiciary,” are all centralized bodies whose legitimacy flows downward from a single figure. Even the legislative role of the National Uprising Institution is undermined by the fact that its members are appointed, not elected, and remain subject to confirmation from the same central authority. This arrangement transforms the transition from a collective political process into a managed succession.

One of the most striking features of the Emergency Phase document is its misplaced sense of priority. The text is overloaded with unexamined and poorly integrated technical details on infrastructure and logistics, offered without a coherent analytical or academic framework. Pages are devoted to operational minutiae, yet these discussions remain detached from any serious reflection on the political conditions under which such measures would be implemented.

At the same time, the document remains entirely silent on the most consequential question facing contemporary Iran: the structure of political authority in a multi-national state. There is no recognition of Kurds or other non-Persian peoples as political communities, no engagement with national rights, and no proposed framework for addressing long-standing demands for collective self-rule. This silence is not accidental. It reflects a deliberate narrowing of political imagination, in which infrastructure is treated as a technical problem to be managed, while the question of nations within Iran is rendered unthinkable.

The only moment where ethnicity enters the document is within the security framework. There, the “national army” is explicitly tasked with combating “separatism” and “ethnic–sectarian threats” in border regions. By introducing ethnic identity solely through the language of threat, the document collapses political demands into security risks. Rather than proposing solutions to structurally unresolved national questions, it preemptively frames any rights-based ethnic claim as a danger to territorial integrity. In doing so, the text does not merely fail to address the national question; it criminalizes it in advance, transforming political dissent into a justification for repression.

The language of security further amplifies the authoritarian risk embedded in the document. Repeated references to “chain of command,” “control of the armed forces,” and “preserving territorial integrity” are treated as self-evident necessities rather than politically contested choices. Security is framed as a technical problem, stripped of political context and democratic oversight. Nowhere does the document address how these powers will be exercised, against whom, and with what limits. In Iran’s history, such language has consistently functioned to legitimize repression, particularly in Kuridstan, where “national security” has long served as a justification for militarization and collective punishment.

Equally revealing is what the document allows the public to decide, and what it excludes. While it mandates a referendum on “the type of system of government (monarchy or republic),” it carefully avoids any discussion of the structure of the state itself. Federalism, regional autonomy, or territorial power-sharing are entirely absent. The political future is reduced to a choice between two centralized systems operating within the same unitary conception of Iran. This is not democratic openness, but a controlled choice designed to preserve centralized authority regardless of outcome.

For Kurds, the implications of the Emergency Phase document are immediate and structural. Kurdistan is not recognized as a political community with collective rights, but reduced to a territory to be administered under the rubric of “national unity.” References to the “diversity and colorfulness of the unified Iranian nation” do not acknowledge genuine national plurality; they subsume non-Persian peoples into a Persian-centered national culture, recasting them as folkloric or local variations within a dominant national framework. Cultural difference is thus tolerated only insofar as it remains politically harmless, while any claim to institutional, territorial, or collective autonomy is denied. This reproduces a familiar pattern in Iranian statecraft, where cultural inclusion functions as a mechanism of assimilation and political autonomy is treated as a threat.

The document’s emphasis on individual rights does not compensate for this exclusion. Commitments to gender equality, freedom of expression, and secular governance are essential, yet they are framed exclusively at the individual level. There is no recognition of collective national rights, such as education in Kurdish as a governing language, control over local resources, or elected regional institutions with real authority. Historically, this model of abstract equality has enabled centralized power in Iran to claim democratic legitimacy while maintaining domination over non-Persian peoples.

Most revealing is the document’s understanding of political transition itself. The collapse of the Islamic Republic is not treated as a founding moment in which Iran’s peoples renegotiate the terms of political coexistence, but as an administrative disruption requiring rapid stabilization. Laws are preserved, institutions maintained, and authority concentrated to minimize uncertainty. Democracy is deferred and managed from above. In this framework, transition functions less as a rupture with the past than as a reorganization of power within established hierarchies.

Kurdistan stands as a historical counter-example to these assumptions. For over a century, Kurdish political movements have articulated demands grounded in self-determination, expressed through varying institutional forms including autonomy, federal arrangements, and projects of independent self-rule. What unites these demands is not a fixed constitutional model, but a consistent insistence that the political status of Kurdistan must derive from the freely expressed will of its people, not from decisions imposed by the center.

Historical experiences of Kurdish self-organization, from the Republic of Kurdistan in 1946 to post-1979 councils and assemblies, were not failures of governance. They were dismantled by central authorities that interpreted any dispersion of political power as an existential threat. Both the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic justified repression through the language of “national unity” and “territorial integrity,” framing Kurdish political agency as a security problem rather than a question of rights. This same language reappears in the transition document.

The refusal to engage with this historical record is not accidental. It reflects a deeper unwillingness to confront the colonial logic of state-building in Iran, in which minoritized peoples are governed through coercion rather than recognized as political subjects with the capacity to decide their own political future. A transition built on centralized authority, security-first logic, and preemptive exclusion of self-determination does not resolve Iran’s crises. It reproduces them. From a Kurdish perspective, this is not speculation, but a historically grounded warning.

Any political project emerging from Iranian opposition that claims to break with authoritarian rule cannot rely on the same logic that has long sustained it: the imposition of unity through the denial of Kurdish self-determination.

[1] See Daftarch-ye dwran-e Ezterar: https://fund.nufdiran.org/fa/projects/ipp/research/emergency-phase-booklet/