Anti-imperialism has long served as a central organizing principle of leftist political thought, particularly in relation to the Global South. Opposition to Western military intervention, economic domination, and political coercion is historically grounded and normatively defensible. Yet in recent years, anti-imperialism has increasingly been theorized—and practiced—through a narrowed geopolitical lens that equates resistance to Western power with emancipatory politics as such. Within this framework—visible in strands of campist analysis, sovereigntist Marxism, and contemporary “multipolar” discourse—state sovereignty is often treated as a proxy for popular sovereignty, and opposition to U.S. hegemony is taken as sufficient evidence of progressive political content.

The case of the Islamic Republic of Iran exposes the limits of this approach. Despite its long-standing opposition to U.S. and Israeli power, Iran exemplifies a political configuration in which anti-imperialist discourse is mobilized to legitimate authoritarian rule, suppress popular struggles, and stabilize hierarchical social relations. This essay argues that Western leftists should resist supporting Iran’s authoritarian regime despite its anti-imperialist posture. More broadly, it contends that anti-imperialism, when severed from commitments to popular sovereignty, democratic accountability, and social emancipation, can be appropriated by authoritarian states and redeployed as a technology of rule.

Against dominant tendencies in contemporary left theory that privilege geopolitical alignment over social relations of power, this essay advances the concept of authoritarian anti-imperialism: a generalizable political form in which resistance to external domination is articulated through the consolidation of internal domination. By theorizing this form and examining Iran as a paradigmatic case, the essay seeks to re-ground anti-imperialism in mass agency and emancipatory practice rather than state sovereignty alone (Gramsci 1971; Poulantzas 1978; Achcar 2023).

Anti-Imperialism as Position and as Practice

Authoritarian anti-imperialism intervenes directly in debates within left theory and critical international political economy. Much recent scholarship frames anti-imperialism primarily in terms of geopolitical polarity, treating the erosion of U.S. hegemony or the assertion of state sovereignty as inherently progressive. This orientation risks reproducing a state-centric conception of emancipation that brackets questions of internal domination, class power, and democratic agency.

This essay instead approaches anti-imperialism as a social and political relation whose emancipatory content must be evaluated in terms of its effects on popular sovereignty. When anti-imperialism is reduced to foreign policy alignment or interstate rivalry, the question of who exercises power internally—and in whose name—recedes from view. The result is a form of left analysis capable of opposing imperial domination while remaining agnostic, or even apologetic, toward authoritarian rule.

Analytically, anti-imperialism can be understood in two distinct registers. First, as a structural position: opposition to Western political, military, and economic domination, particularly that exercised by the United States. Second, as a political practice: the pursuit of popular self-determination, social equality, and freedom from both external and internal forms of domination. While these registers are often historically intertwined, they are analytically separable—and, under certain conditions, politically opposed.

The conflation of these registers underpins campist reasoning, in which geopolitical alignment against Western power is treated as sufficient evidence of emancipatory politics. Iran exemplifies the dangers of this conflation: it occupies an anti-imperialist position within the global order while systematically negating anti-imperialist practice at the level of domestic political life.

Authoritarian Anti-Imperialism as a Political Form

Authoritarian anti-imperialism refers to a state project in which opposition to external domination is articulated through the consolidation of internal domination, and where anti-imperialist discourse functions less as a vehicle for popular emancipation than as a legitimating ideology for authoritarian rule.

This political form is not unique to Iran. Comparable configurations emerge where states confront imperial pressure while monopolizing the language of resistance. Under conditions of prolonged external confrontation, partial or dependent integration into global capitalism, and the weakening or destruction of autonomous popular institutions, anti-imperialism becomes detached from mass agency and rearticulated at the level of state sovereignty. The state positions itself as the sole legitimate bearer of resistance, transforming anti-imperialism from a horizon of struggle into a monopolized resource of rule.

Authoritarian anti-imperialism exhibits several recurring features. First, it collapses the distinction between resistance to external domination and loyalty to the existing state apparatus, rendering dissent synonymous with treason. Second, it securitizes social contradictions—class conflict, gender struggle, ethnic marginalization—by reframing them as instruments of imperial destabilization rather than expressions of internal antagonism. Third, it displaces responsibility for exploitation and inequality onto external enemies, allowing repression and austerity to be framed as unavoidable costs of resistance. Finally, it operates through a politics of permanent emergency, in which imperialism is imagined as omnipresent, justifying the indefinite suspension of democratic accountability.

Crucially, authoritarian anti-imperialism does not negate imperialism; it presupposes it. Imperial pressure provides the external antagonism through which the state legitimates internal domination. Yet the existence of imperialism confers no emancipatory content upon the regimes that oppose it. Rather, authoritarian anti-imperialism represents a mode of managing imperial confrontation that stabilizes domestic hierarchies rather than dismantling them.

Iran: Anti-Imperialism as Hegemonic State Ideology

Since 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has articulated anti-imperialism not merely as foreign policy, but as hegemonic state ideology. Drawing on genuine experiences of imperial domination—most notably the 1953 CIA-backed coup and Iran’s subordinate position in global capitalism—the regime has reconstituted anti-imperialism as a resource monopolized by clerical and para-state elites.

The 1979 Revolution can be understood as an organic crisis of the Pahlavi order. The Islamic Republic emerged through a process akin to Gramsci’s passive revolution, in which popular and anti-imperialist energies were absorbed into a new state form that preserved core relations of domination while altering their ideological expression. The revolution displaced a comprador monarchy but recomposed class hierarchy under a theocratic banner.

Anti-imperialism has since functioned as the ideological glue of the ruling bloc, suturing clerical elites, the security apparatus, bazaar capital, and later military-economic actors. By presenting itself as the exclusive agent of resistance, the state collapses the distinction between opposition to imperialism and obedience to internal authority. Nation, revolution, and regime become interchangeable.

This configuration is sustained through calibrated consent and coercion. Repression is justified through a discourse of permanent siege, in which imperialism is recoded as a continuous “soft war” waged through culture, media, NGOs, and civil society. Feminist mobilization becomes cultural imperialism; labor militancy becomes foreign agitation; ethnic grievances become separatist conspiracies. Social contradictions are depoliticized and securitized.

Politically, this ideological formation defines the limits of legitimate dissent—a national-popular without the popular. Counter-hegemonic projects linking resistance to imperialism with struggles against patriarchy, exploitation, and authoritarianism are systematically foreclosed.

Protest, Rupture, and the Limits of Counter-Hegemony

The protest waves of 2017–18, 2019, 2022, and January 2026 constitute recurring moments of counter-hegemonic rupture. Each exposed the fragility of the regime’s ideological settlement without crystallizing into a durable war of position (Gramsci 1971).

The 2017–18 protests signaled a crisis of consent among subaltern classes, articulating grievances rooted in austerity and uneven development. The 2019 uprising marked a further shift toward domination without consent, as the state abandoned ideological leadership in favor of naked coercion. The 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising represented the most profound ideological rupture, directly challenging the gendered and disciplinary foundations of the regime’s authority. Yet each wave remained fragmented, lacking the organizational density necessary to consolidate a counter-hegemonic bloc.

The 2026 uprising, sparked by economic collapse following a brief regional war, again exposed the regime’s fragility. Strikes by bazaar merchants escalated into nationwide unrest, but external interventions—including calls by U.S. and monarchist actors to seize state institutions—reinforced the regime’s siege narrative, narrowing the space for autonomous mass politics.

Across these cycles, a consistent pattern emerges: rupture without re-composition. The regime’s legitimacy erodes, yet opposition is repeatedly exhausted. This produces a condition of interregnum, marked by intensified repression, ideological paranoia, and the securitization of everyday life.

Conclusion

The failure of Iran’s protest movements to evolve into a war of position should not be read as absolute defeat, but as the result of structural constraints imposed by an authoritarian state that has hollowed out civil society while monopolizing the language of anti-imperialism. Resistance remains expressive rather than strategic—capable of negating legitimacy, but not yet of constructing an alternative common sense.

Iran thus confronts a paradoxical stability: rule persists not through hegemony, but through the managed perpetuation of crisis. Anti-imperialism, once a mobilizing language of popular struggle, now functions primarily as a defensive grammar that blocks the articulation of emancipatory alternatives.

For Western leftists, the implication is clear. Solidarity that aligns with state sovereignty against popular sovereignty reproduces domination rather than resisting it. An anti-imperialism grounded in geopolitical alignment rather than mass agency risks becoming the ideological mirror image of the domination it seeks to oppose. Until anti-imperialism is re-grounded in emancipatory practice, protest in Iran will continue to erupt as rupture—courageous and destabilizing yet structurally prevented from transforming the state.

Contact Information:

Nader Rahimi

Email: nrahimi@bu.edu