Jin, Jiyan Azadî: decolonising the ‘Iranian Nation’

The national question in Iran has been both a catalyst for and an obstacle to the women-led 2022 Jin, Jiyan, Azadî (JJA; Woman, Life, Freedom) movement. While the movement generated unprecedented transnational solidarity, it also exposed entrenched and incommensurable demands, particularly regarding self-determination among non-Persian communities such as the Kurds. These demands are resisted not only by the state but also by segments of the opposition, producing a structural impasse that fragments solidarity and undermines oppositional unity. This article argues that such incommensurability is not merely political but also epistemological, sustained by methodological nationalism and the naturalisation of the nation-state as the sole horizon of legitimate political community. Drawing on a decolonial feminist epistemology and Robbie Shilliam’s threefold decolonising manoeuvre of ‘recontextualising’, ‘reconceptualising’ and ‘reimagining’, the article rereads Iranian nation-state formation from a Rojhelatî Kurdish standpoint as a colonial, racialised and heteropatriarchal project. It shows how both dominant historiography and critical scholarship remain constrained by methodological nationalism. Finally, it turns to Abdullah Öcalan’s democratic confederalism as a heuristic that decouples self-determination from statehood and reimagines coexistence beyond nation-statist frameworks, thereby reopening possibilities for a plural and decolonised political community.