Feminists for Jina

Internationalism from below: In Support of the Open Letter Published in Solidarity with Political Prisoners in Iran

The Feminists For Jina Global Network expresses solidarity with the signatories of the letter “To Iran’s political prisoners, trapped ‘between two blades of a scissors’” published in The Guardian on August 20, 2026. 

Among us are former political prisoners who know well the value of being remembered, of being addressed, when the biggest fear of the prisoner is to be forgotten. Among us are families of the purged political prisoners of the 1980s, who know very well what function silencing the truth-tellers has for the executioners. 

We were heartened to read your solidarity letter in The Guardian, which has circulated in Persian translation inside Iran. It is all too rare for the struggles of political prisoners in Iran to be taken seriously by well-known activists and scholars in the West who have long opposed war and sanctions, by people who understand how imperialism, authoritarianism, and the death penalty intersect in the lives and on the bodies of those who are both bombed and imprisoned. Usually when repression in Iran is mentioned, it is done so in the service of justifying US and Israeli aggression against Iran. This letter does the opposite: using a quote from an Iranian political prisoner who described their own lived experience as “being stuck between two blades of a scissors,” the letter calls for an end to war, sanctions and executions, affirming “our collective dreams of freedom and dignity.”

The two blades of the scissors are not identical, but they do come together to cut and to destroy. The letter points to the relationship between historically distinct forces, imperialism and state repression, as they operate on the ground, and to the shared logics of  domination as they operate across borders. 

This analysis has already been articulated far and wide, including in a solidarity statement published by the Zapatistas and signed by over 100 collectives, organizations and individuals in January 2026:

“There are those who, from the outside, look upwards and not downwards: those who justify the Iranian government in the name of supposed anti-imperialism, ignoring that this same government applies logics of occupation, apartheid, plunder, and neoliberalism against its own people; and those who promote reactionary, authoritarian, and dependent alternatives that promise salvation while perpetuating domination.

These are false dichotomies. Up above against up above. Power against power. Down below are the people, trapped between two forces that claim to be opposed but act in concert.”

Transnational solidarity must always take specificity and context into account, but that does not mean exempting Iran from any analysis of militarism, carcerality, nationalism, or patriarchy. Iran is not an exception, but a particular iteration of larger crises and histories that shape our planet. It is precisely in the context of the unjust, imperialist economic and military war against Iran that we must not line up behind the state, but rather must carve out a political space to sustain the possibility of liberation from below.

The moment is dire and urgently calls for acts of solidarity with prisoners facing execution in Iran. In the summer of 1988, in days such as these exact days, amid the war between Iraq and Iran and during the first crisis of succession of the leadership of the Islamic Republic, state forces massacred thousands of leftist political prisoners. This was an atrocity whose scale and the very reality of which was a closely guarded secret of its perpetrators. It caused a piercing pain suffered in silence and fear by its survivors and affected families.

Today, the Islamic Republic is revisiting its old handbook. Amid another war and in the midst of another crisis of succession, it is attempting to prepare the ground for a new consolidation of power by frightening, silencing and disciplining the Iranian population into submission. Since January 2026, when the Islamic Republic massacred thousands of protesters, the state has executed more than 500 people under the pretence of ‘threats against national security,’ without anything resembling due process.

In part what made the 1988 massacre possible was the extraordinary foreign pressure (Iran was resisting a war of aggression by Iraq) and the intense oppression, systematic censorship and environment of fear installed inside the country.

People simply did not know what was happening behind the walls of the prisons across the country. And those who knew dared not speak publicly. Those who heard did not believe what they were hearing. It took decades of clandestine memory-work and persistent resistance of  mothers (and entire families) and generations of survivors seeking justice for those crimes to become part of our collective public memory. Censorship, discrediting and silencing the truth-tellers, suppression of information and spread of misinformation were not incidental to the purge; they were the conditions of possibility for a purge on that scale.

Today, the systematic backlash against the letter of solidarity has worked to create a similar environment of doubt, fear and mistrust necessary for keeping the gallows running. It is the letter’s principled stand against this project of erasure that makes it a valuable act of conscience. It breaks through a narrative that privileges the ‘grand scale’ of geopolitics over the lives of ordinary people and their grievances. 

We learned from our common and chosen ancestors, such as Amilcar Cabral and Franz Fanon, that the purpose of anti-imperilist resistance is not simply to kick out the colonialist, only to do to our people what the colonialist used to do. Indeed, Third World and decolonial feminists have long insisted on the necessity of resisting imperialism and local authoritarian states at the same time.

Those who justify mass incarceration and executions in Iran as necessary for national security or claim that now is not the time to oppose these executions because Iran is resisting US and Israeli imperialism conveniently ignore  the ways the Islamic Republic has (and would again)  collaborated with both the settler colonialists of our region and the global imperialist whenever and wherever it was in its own strategic benefit. They celebrate the Iranian government’s anti-imperialist posturing while that same state disenfranchises and decimates religious and ethnic minorities in Iran, expels thousands of Afghan migrants, and crushes popular movements for self-determination. Anti-imperialism used this way becomes severed from any connection to justice or emancipation.

We believe life is precious and we oppose the death penalty, whether it be used against our political allies, or against any other prisoner, political or not, leftist or not. We oppose putting people in cages. That, too, is the lesson of Women, Life, Freedom, to work against the legitimacy of the prison as a whole.  

We, too, know that the hard thing and the right thing is to call out the genocidal war of Israel in Palestine and the imperialist thuggery and war of aggression of the US against Iran while also refusing to sanctify a brutal and murderous state. We, like the signatories, know that choosing the lesser of two evils, as some  suggest, is nonetheless a choice of evil and, once made into a political principle, is a justification for greater evil to come. 

We share here a selection of resources we have developed over our years of organizing against state repression, the genocide in Palestine and the imperialist war against Iran, work that must continue against all odds.

We are also signatories to the following statements mentioned in the text: