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"Through an original and close reading of the key literature regarding both revolutionary violence and nonviolence, this book collapses the widely-assumed concepts of violence and nonviolence as mutually exclusive. By revealing that violence and nonviolence are braided concepts arising from human action, Peyman Vahabzadeh submits that in many cases the actions deemed to be either violent or nonviolent might actually produce outcomes that are not essentially different. Vahabzadeh offers a conceptual phenomenology of the key thinkers and theorists of both revolutionary violence and various approaches to nonviolence. Arguing that violence is inseparable from civilizations, Violence and Nonviolence concludes by making a number of original conceptualizations regarding the relationship between violence and nonviolence, exploring the possibility of a nonviolent future and proposing to understand the relationship between the two concepts as concentric, not opposites."--

Iran in the 1960s : repressive development -- Organization of the Iranian People's Fadai Guerrillas (1971-1979) -- Bizhan Jazani : en route to a democratic theory of the liberation front -- Massoud Ahmadzadeh : theorizing armed struggle -- Three failed interlocutions : diverging propensities -- Mostafa Sho'aiyan : haunting return of plurivocal origination -- The Fadai movement -- Technologies of resistance -- Constitutive paradox : liberation, secularism, and the possibility of democratic action -- Appendix A: Fadai casualties, 1970-1979 -- Appendix B: The splits of Fadaiyan

Intro -- Articulated Experiences -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. What Can New Social Movements Tell About Post-Modernity? -- 2. Identity and Contemporary Social Movements -- 3. Identity, Experiential Hegemonies, Urstiftung -- 4. Articulated Experiences: The Epochal (Trans-)Formations of Identities and Social Movement -- 5. Technological Liberalism and the Oppressive Categorization of "Transgressive" Actors -- 6. An Epochal Theory of Action -- 7. Radical Phenomenology and the Sociology of Possibilities -- Notes -- 1. What Can New Social Movements Tell about Postmodernity? -- 2. Identity and Contemporary Social Movements -- 3. Identity, Experiental Hegemonies, Urstiftung -- 4. Articulated Experiences: The Epochal (Trans-) Formations of Identities and Social Movements -- 5. Technological Liberalism and the Oppressive Categorization of "Transgressive" Actors -- 6. An Epochal Theory of Action -- 7. Radical Phenomenology and the Sociology of Possibilities -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z.

The emergence and rapid but short-lived presence of Students for Freedom and Equality (SFE; in Persian: Daneshjuyan-e Azadikhah va Barabaritalab or DAB) across major Iranian campuses and their fateful 4 December 2007 protest rally on the campus of the University of Tehran speaks of the return of leftist student activism to Iranian campuses after almost two decades of absence or invisibility within the context of post-revolutionary Iran. SFE was an umbrella democratic organization: its activists came from a plurality of social and political backgrounds and adhered to diverse leftist ideas. But in the context of pro-Reform Movement student activism in Iranian post-secondary institutions in the late 1990s and in 2000s, for a short time the SFE tried to hegemonize student activism and challenge the various pro-government tendencies in university campuses. Before state repression forced the SFE out of operation in 2007, Students for Freedom and Equality brought to campuses candid discussions of social justice issues, critique of Iran's neoliberal economic policies, and challenges to censorship and lack of freedom.

Using a semiotic approach, this paper seeks to identify the connections between Iran's Green Movement, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy Movement. The concept of suggestion refers to the unintended releasing of possibilities for action beyond the original frames a movement. This is done through the production of new slogans and collective actions relating to them. Once 'suggestion' allows for a specific mode of acting to be taken outside of its original ambit and into a new context, action is 'translated' into the 'language' of new contexts and mandates. 'Suggestion' and 'translation' can lead to the 'transposition' of a specific collective action into a new context that captures the imagination of the activists. By drawing on the evidence and instances in the Green Movement, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy Movement, it is hoped, we can understand how movements affect each other beyond their actors' intentions.

This essay draws on an original study of the history, theories, and organizational life of Iran's most influential leftist organization in the 1970s, the People's Fedayee Guerrillas, to examine the symptomatic misconception of secularism as well as the secularization of everyday life and politics by a specific generation of Iran's Left. The essay argues that because of its ideological adherence to Marxism, the militant Left of this era simply assumed its role as a secular political force, while riveted by cultural elements that in fact undermined secularism. Moreover, it shows that a stark political dualism between the people and the shah's regime and its capitalist supporters caused the militant Left to advance a certain political binarism that later paved the way for the 1979 Islamic revolution, a phenomenon that indicates how the Left lost sight of the perils of political Islam or discounted its future impact on society. These arguments are complicated by the demographics and cultural inclinations of the members and supporters of the Fedayeen that indicate the extent of permeation of traditionalism and semireligious beliefs in the militant Left. These observations lead the author to inquire whether the Iranian Left has ever been consciously secular.

By offering a comprehensive survey of the theories pertaining to the literature produced by Iranian expatriate communities, this essay argues that the many faces of "emigration literature" indeed reflect the immigrants' varied experiences of their departure and their host societies. Furthermore, the essay pursues the points of divergence of this genus of literature to show how, ironically, various strands and different works in Iranian emigration literature contribute to the diversity of literature in their host societies. This "dual function" characterizes emigration literature: on the one hand, as a literature of departure from a homeland that vanishes in memory, this strand of literature narrates the existential dilemmas of the loss of a past in one's homeland; on the other hand, the existential settlement in the host land drifts such narrative into an ever-expanding future not necessarily bound by a place. Emigration literature dwells in this terra nulleum.

This paper uses Gayatri Spivak's discussion of Sati and Ranajit Guha's interpretive account of Chandra's death in colonial India in order to critically re-examine the concept of subalternity that runs through various postcolonial theories. It is argued that there is a major tendency in postcolonial theory to conflate hegemony with domination. By introducing the concept of experience, enabled by a reading of Antonio Gramsci's theory, the paper relates subalternity to hegemony and discusses that the success or failure of hegemony involves the degree to which hegemonic re-grounding can succeed in maintaining the existential continuum of the subject.

Based on the author's original research, the paper will offer a glimpse into the frontal theory of Mostafa Sho'aiyan. The paper draws on his life and experience of the National Front in the 1950s as a model for political thought. Next, the paper will show how he tried, through his unique and uncanonical revolutionary theory, to make a revolutionary praxis compatible with frontal thinking. Analytically, Sho'aiyan's work proves that an ideologically driven concept of national liberation becomes an impediment for frontal politics in a truly democratic way. Sho'aiyan's works represent a theoretical and existential response to the national liberation dilemma which the Iranian Marxists faced in the 1960s and 70s.