I am an Iranian woman. The country I call home, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, marked its 46th anniversary this year amid the most violent repression since its establishment. Now, as military strikes by the United States and Israel unfold, the questions surrounding Iran’s future feel less theoretical than they did only days ago.

Iran has experienced repeated eruptions since 1979, some driven by economic collapse, others—such as the recent Woman, Life, Freedom movement—by demands for basic civil rights. Taken together, these protests point in the direction of freedom: democratic freedom, freedom of thought, freedom of dignity, and inevitably, freedom of markets.

The most recent protests were triggered by unimaginable inflation and the collapse of Iran’s currency. But what I want the world to see aligns more closely with the focus of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, not as an economic program but as a cohesive moral claim.

I think of an image that circulated widely: protesters throwing rice into the air. A gesture that says human dignity has value, however deprived. It may be scarce, but it is not expendable. Even when people have little left to eat, dignity remains.

Growing up, I remember celebrating the last Tuesday of the year by jumping over fire to welcome the new year. The military would arrive. We would scatter. And once they left, the celebration would resume. I also remember, during the 2009 Green Movement, timidly shouting “death to the dictator” from a rooftop with my girlfriend, our voices barely louder than our fear.

We learned to survive by dispersing.

But Iran’s Gen Z does not disperse.
It stands.
It demands.
It absorbs the cost.

Since 2009, Iran’s resistance has evolved into a disciplined ecosystem. Teachers’ unions, workers’ assemblies, and pensioners have organized sustained sit-ins. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement has materially transformed how women occupy public space, not episodically but insistently.

What Should the World Do?

From the outside, the question inevitably arises: sanctions? military rescue? strategic patience? silence?

What feels nonnegotiable to me is this:

I can accept that prosperity, even under authoritarian rule, may create conditions for democracy. What I cannot accept is the idea that human dignity must wait its turn.

This economic distinction clarifies the target of external policies. It does not, however, consider whom they burden.

Sanctions fail this moment. Broad sanctions collapse civilian life while leaving authoritarian power structurally intact. They do not discipline the state; they send suffering downward. They hollow out the middle class that sustains nonviolent movements, push survival into informal economies controlled by regime insiders, and turn everyday life into a humiliating negotiation. Sanctions demand that dignity be postponed indefinitely in the name of strategy.

None of this absolves the Islamic Republic of responsibility. Its regional militancy, opacity, and corruption helped produce the sanctions it faces. Even without sanctions, mismanagement and extraction would continue to distort public life. But that is precisely why broad sanctions fail as a democratic strategy: they do not reform governance, instead they deepen scarcity inside a system already controlled by the same actors. What is meant to pressure the state often tightens its grip over society.

Sanctions are imposed not because the regime is merely corrupt, but because it is strategically dangerous, including through its nuclear program. Preventing escalation is a legitimate international concern. But sanctions are a tool for managing states, not for cultivating democratic societies, and the two should not be conflated.

When people chant the name of opposition leader Reza Pahlavi, they are not voting on sanctions or endorsing war. They are reaching for a symbol of dignity, openness, and a life not organized around deprivation. Under repression, symbols travel faster than policy; confusing the two has been one of the world’s most persistent mistakes.

Now that military strikes have begun, another possibility moves from speculation to reality. For many Iranians exhausted by decades of repression, economic decline, and political suffocation, the idea that external force might fracture the regime carries understandable appeal. When change has been blocked for so long, rupture itself can begin to look like an opening.

Yet military intervention fails for a different reason. It may weaken authoritarian power, but it can also replace internal struggle with external command. It trades one monopoly on violence for another. When freedom arrives without the agency of the society that must sustain it, the foundations of democratic life are fragile.

That is the paradox.

Preserving Agency

Democracy may require both economic and imaginative abundance. Poets and organizers emerge when survival is no longer the only task. Prosperity may precede freedom. But dignity is not a future deliverable. It is a present claim, and the rice thrown into the air insists on that truth.

As events unfold, the paradox sharpens rather than disappears. External force may fracture authoritarian power, and the possibility that such fracture could open a path toward freedom is real. But even when authoritarian systems break, freedom does not automatically follow. The society that must build what comes next can be weakened in the process. The desire for a decisive end is understandable. The responsibility to protect the people and the country that must live afterward remains.

Traditions of disciplined nonviolence, exemplified by figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., remind us that power does not belong only to those who wield force. Nonviolence is often mischaracterized as passivity, yet it is costly, strategic, and generative. It builds capacity without authorizing erasure.

The world can support nonviolent resistance in Iran without endorsing the regime. That means rejecting military intervention that replaces agency, avoiding broad sanctions that hollow out society, and investing instead in the civic infrastructure resistance requires: connectivity, independent media, labor organizing, documentation of abuses, mobility for students and scholars, and sustained accountability for perpetrators.

None of these legitimize repression.

They constrain it.

The world does not need to save Iran. It needs to stop confusing state management with democratic strategy.

Dignity does not wait its turn.
And neither should those who claim to stand with it.

Afsaneh Haddadian  is an Iranian-born researcher and nonprofit leader working at the intersection of democracy, social movements, and community resilience in the United States and globally.

Resilience & Resistance is a Charles F. Kettering Foundation blog series that features the insights of thought leaders and practitioners who are working to expand and support inclusive democracies around the globe. Direct any queries to globalteam@kettering.org.