A Brutal War or a Brutal Regime…

MILITARISM, 30 Mar 2026

Derya Yüksek - TRANSCEND Media Service

When Civilians Are Forced to Choose Their Violence

14 Mar 2026 – Peace scholars and practitioners are trained to listen to civilians. We argue—rightly—that the voices of those who are affected and who bear the consequences must be centered in any discussion of war and conflict. At the same time, we consistently invoke the principle of do no harm. We call for ceasefires, for restraint, for an immediate end to armed hostilities.

But what happens when civilians themselves resist these calls? What happens when the very people whose voices we seek to amplify say, in growing numbers: not yet — not until this regime falls? This is the deeply uncomfortable dilemma emerging in the course of the current US–Israeli war on Iran. Some—particularly within the Iranian diaspora and segments of Iranian society—argue that a premature ceasefire would only prolong their oppression under the Islamic Republic. For them, the dilemma appears stark: between a brutal war and what they experience as a brutal regime.

This raises a difficult question for peace scholarship that we cannot afford to look away from: what does peace mean when those suffering under authoritarian rule perceive war—however destructive—as a possible opening for political change?

Voices from a Long Struggle

To understand these perspectives, they must be situated within decades of political repression and violence in Iran. The Iranian state has repeatedly responded to opposition and protests with lethal force. From the Green Movement of 2009 and subsequent crackdowns, many Iranians have come to see peaceful dissent as something the state responds with violence.

More recently, protests that spread across Iran beginning on 28 December 2025 were followed by what human rights organizations describe as one of the deadliest episodes of state repression in the country’s modern history. On 8 and 9 January 2026, security forces—including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Basij units, and FARAJA police—reportedly carried out a coordinated nationwide crackdown on largely peaceful demonstrators and bystanders. Estimates of the death toll range from several thousand to potentially tens of thousands. Tens of thousands more were arrested, with reports of torture, enforced disappearances, and threats of execution. Because authorities imposed a nearly total internet blackout during the crackdown, the true scale of the violence may never be fully known.

These are not abstract statistics. They form the lived political context in which Iranians now encounter the war.

The Dilemma of the Willing Risk

When US–Israeli strikes began on 28 February 2026, scenes of celebration erupted among parts of the Iranian diaspora and, in more muted and clandestine forms, within Iran itself—some describing the killing of regime leaders as a “dream come true.” Yet as the war progressed beyond a “short” campaign, without bringing the immediate collapse of the regime many had hoped for, confusion and frustration spread widely. In face of the growing scale of destruction, there are also reports of many Iranians rallying defensively around the country in response to the airstrikes, and in solidarity with the regime. These conflicting reactions show how deeply fractured the moment is.

Within diaspora debates and online discussions, one still encounters a troubling calculation. Some argue that while war is disastrous, with largely uncertain consequences, the continuation of the current political system guarantees permanent oppression. These voices cannot simply be dismissed as those speaking safely from afar. When dissent inside the country is silenced, diaspora spaces often become one of the few arenas where these frustrations can be articulated openly.

The tragic contradictions of the moment were sharply illustrated after the destruction of a girls’ primary school in Minab by US–Israeli airstrikes, which killed more than 150 children and provoked international outrage. For many Iranians, the question that followed was painfully simple: where was this same outrage when the regime itself inflicted violence on women and girls for years?

When asked whether war might ultimately strengthen the regime, some respond with bleak clarity: it may—but the alternative is already known. Early responses from Iranian officials reinforce this fear, warning that any protest during wartime will be treated as collaboration with the enemy, punishable by imprisonment, confiscation of property, retaliation against family members, or execution.

Between Bombs and Batons

The logic many voices express is thus stark. Under the current regime, violent death already feels possible—for protesters, dissidents, and women who resist compulsory veiling. While emphasizing their deep distrust of foreign military intervention and acknowledging that Western interventions in the Middle East often produced catastrophic instability, the depth of accumulated suffering leads some to conclude that war may still open a possibility for change.

Ignoring these perspectives risks paternalism. Political theorists have long noted that when authoritarian states eliminate peaceful pathways for change, some citizens begin to view external disruption as the only remaining mechanism capable of fracturing entrenched power. This is not enthusiasm for war. It is desperation after alternatives have been exhausted.

Yet embracing the logic of war risks abandoning the normative commitment to nonviolence that lies at the heart of peace research. The war that some Iranians have welcomed—or at minimum refused to condemn prematurely—is also producing atrocities against the very people it claims to liberate. External military strikes have already damaged infrastructure, including energy facilities such as oil plants. Beyond immediate casualties, such attacks carry severe environmental and public health consequences: toxic pollution released into air, soil, and water can persist for decades, long after any political settlement.

Historical evidence offers little reassurance. External military intervention rarely produces stable democratic outcomes and often imposes its heaviest costs on the most vulnerable—women, children, the poor, and the displaced.

This is the paradox we must name clearly: the same structural violence that makes the regime intolerable is now being met with a military intervention that generates its own forms of intolerable violence. Iranians are being asked—by history, geopolitics, and desperation—to choose their catastrophe.

When the Choice Itself Is Stolen

What makes this moment so searingly unjust is not only the violence itself but the structural silencing surrounding it. Iranians cannot choose their government through free elections, cannot protest without risking massacre, and cannot publicly support or oppose the war from within the country without facing imprisonment or worse.

The war is being waged over them, not for them—shaped by a regime that has spent decades crushing civic agency and by external powers whose strategic calculations have never been subordinated to Iranian civilian consent.

In both cases, civilian life becomes the terrain on which that logic unfolds, not a voice that shapes it.

When Iranians and diaspora communities take to social media to insist on being heard—to say they do not want a ceasefire that preserves their oppressors—they are not simply expressing a position on the war. They are attempting, with the limited tools available to them, to reclaim a say in their political future. That act of speaking is itself a form of civic resistance. It deserves to be taken seriously—as testimony that genuine peace cannot be built over the heads of the people it is meant to serve.

Many of these civic voices challenge the international community in a different way. They warn that opposing war should not become a reflex that ignores the violence of the regime itself. To oppose war, they argue, must also mean asking what concrete actions are being taken to protect Iranians from decades of repression. A “no war” position that fails to confront this reality risks becoming what some describe as only half a thought.

Some therefore call for non-military forms of solidarity: ending arms transfers, designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization, imposing targeted sanctions on regime leaders rather than the population, securing the release of political prisoners, and pursuing international accountability for human rights violations.

What Peace Scholarship Owes This Moment

These voices emerging from Iran remind us that peace cannot simply be proclaimed through diplomatic statements or ceasefire agreements while structural repression persists. Yet neither can war be imagined as a reliable path to liberation. For civilians caught between bombs from above and batons from within, the promise of peace remains painfully distant.

Listening to these voices does not resolve the dilemma—but it forces us to confront it honestly. If peace scholarship is to remain meaningful in such contexts, it must grapple with the uncomfortable reality that civilians themselves may experience peace and justice not as aligned goals but as competing and uncertain horizons.

In this environment, peace scholarship cannot discharge its responsibility by simply restating the case against war. That case—however well founded—must now reckon with what civilians themselves are saying about the alternative they already live.

What we can offer instead is a framework capable of holding both truths simultaneously.

First: the Islamic Republic’s systematic violence against its own people—the January massacres, decades of executions, the killing of women for acts of self-determination—constitutes structural violence of the gravest kind. Any peace proposal that does not address this reality at its core is incomplete. A ceasefire that restores the pre-war status quo is not peace; at best it is a pause in a different war waged against Iranian society.

Second: the current military campaign is not a liberation. It is producing civilian casualties, environmental devastation, and regional destabilization—and historical evidence gives little reason to believe that regime change achieved through external force will produce democracy or stability.

What, then, can be demanded? Immediate accountability for war crimes—including the Minab school strike and attacks on civilian infrastructure—from all parties. Accountability as well for IRGC massacres before international legal institutions. Support for the UN Fact-Finding Mission and unhindered access for investigators. Amplification of Iranian civil society actors—inside and outside the country—who are building democratic alternatives that do not depend on foreign bombs. And a question that must be asked openly: who will protect Iranian civilians after the war, from whichever authority claims power next?

The Iranian people deserve peacebuilders who refuse both the easy ceasefire slogan and the easy pro-war enthusiasm. They deserve interlocutors who can say: we see the trap you are in, and we will not stop asking what a genuine third path might look like.

That path does not yet exist in finished form. But naming the dilemma honestly—refusing to dissolve it into slogans from either side—is where the work of peacebuilding must begin.

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Dr. Derya Yüksek is a communication and media studies scholar whose work focuses on alternative media, participatory democracy, and conflict transformation. Her research bridges theory and practice to examine how participatory processes reconfigure political imagination and civic agency in contexts marked by division and protracted conflict. Alongside her academic career, she has specialized in project management and worked as a manager and consultant on international cooperation initiatives in the field of culture, arts, and education across the Euro-Mediterranean and beyond.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 30 Mar 2026.

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