Commentaries by AmirAli Maleki | JURIST Deputy Managing Editor for Global Commentary

On the morning of Nov. 2, 2025, in Zeytoon Park, in Ahvaz, southwestern Iran, a municipal operation to remove a small food stall brought the authority of the state into direct contact with the material conditions of a family’s existence. The stall was more than a structure occupying municipal land. For years, it had helped [...]

I was scrolling through Instagram stories when I came across a post by a man I knew, though not closely. Since the recent war and the growing fear that Donald Trump might destroy Iran, his attitude toward the Islamic Republic seemed to have changed. He had begun to defend the government, or at least to [...]

When I was in the third grade, my teacher told us that, before she had formally begun her career as a teacher, she was sitting on a bus when she saw Iraqi fighter jets flying overhead. The Iran-Iraq War had begun, and the image of aircraft above an ordinary road became, for her, the threshold [...]

The room is dark, and only a little light enters through the windows. A man stands in the middle of it. He is a dictator, and the fear that has taken hold of him is visible now in a way that the authority of his position has perhaps never allowed anyone to see. Outside, voices [...]

“Where are you, Sepehr?” The question is not philosophical when it is first spoken. It is a question asked by a body that has been deprived of the body it seeks. Somewhere inside an unidentified warehouse, thousands of corpses lie beneath identical coverings, arranged without the distinctions through which the living ordinarily recognize one another. [...]

“I’m scared of those women in chadors.” “There’s nothing to be scared of. Not all of them are supporters of the government. Look at my aunts. They dress like that.” “Yeah, but you can’t trust them. Look at the way they’re looking at me. I feel like they’re going to come and choke me. I’m [...]

Scrolling on my phone, I happened upon a video so violent that it seemed to cross the threshold at which ordinary language begins to fail. In it, a man was seen walking down a street in Ahvaz carrying the severed head of a young woman. She was Mona Heydari, 17, killed in 2022 by the [...]

I was born into a family where law was not merely a profession; it was the ordinary language of everyday life. Around our dinner table, conversations rarely drifted far from litigation. Someone was always recounting a difficult case, a stubborn judge, an ingenious defense, an unexpected verdict, or a client whose fate had become inseparable [...]

I remember that when I was a child, a platform had been built on a barren piece of land for executions. On nights when fog passed beside it, I would look at it with fear. I was afraid of it, yet I stared at it from a distance until we had passed it. Sometimes I [...]

The subway doors open, and a dense stream of people begins to pour out of the train. For a brief moment, every face appears strangely familiar, not because they are identical, but because the movement of the crowd, the architecture of the station, and the limitations imposed by the narrow platform dissolve individual differences into [...]