Nader Rahimi

Nader Rahimi is a scientist, poet, translator, professor, and political activist. He is the author of Songs of Being and translator of The Scarlet Stone and Other Poems by the celebrated Persian poet Siavash Kasrai. His third collection of poetry, Water Lily Kingdom, is the winner of Moonstone Press’s 2025 Chapbook Contest. His other writings and translations appear in numerous anthologies from Moonstone Press anthologies and in Parsagon: The Persian Literature Review.

Recent Articles by Author

When Anti-Imperialism Becomes Authoritarian

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…

Power as Piety: The Sanctification of Political Authority in Iran

Analyses of Iran’s political system often emphasize overt coercion: imprisonment, torture, executions, and episodic violence against widespread protests. These instruments are real and consequential. Yet an exclusive focus on repression obscures a more pervasive and durable mechanism of rule: the…

You Can’t Bomb Your Way to Democracy

Calls for U.S. military intervention to bring democracy to Iran rest on a dangerous illusion: that democracy is something foreign powers can install from the outside. History suggests the opposite. When democracy is imposed through force, it rarely produces freedom—and often strengthens…

The Open Society in the Age of Vulgar Imperialism

Karl Popper once argued that the defining virtue of democracy lies not in expressing a collective will or fulfilling a historical destiny, but in something more modest—and more radical: fallibility. A democratic society, in Popper’s view, is one that accepts its own capacity for error. It builds…

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