DISCLAIMER
On February 28, a military operation by Israel and the United States targeting various sites in Iran began. This attack marked the beginning of a war that, at the time of writing (April 2026), is still ongoing and has claimed thousands of lives. These events make it necessary to point out that this episode was recorded before the outbreak of this war and was therefore not meant to be a commentary on it.
ABOUT THE EPISODE
In July 2025, Laurens Schlicht spoke with our colleague Sana Chavoshian about her newly published book Martyrs and Stones in Iran’s Post-War Politics. The book begins with the traumatic legacy of the Iran–Iraq War, the brutal conflict fought between 1980 and 1988. Only a year earlier, in 1979, the Iranian Revolution had overthrown the Shah, and Iran had been declared an Islamic Republic. The war soon became one of the defining events in the Republic’s early years.
Hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers were killed. The state honored them as martyrs, and in this context, mothers developed their own forms of remembrance—forms that often stood in a complex relationship to public, state-sanctioned memorial practices. Sana Chavoshian addresses this relationship in her book as well.
Martyrs and Stones explores the lives and memories of these mothers. As an anthropologist, Sana Chavoshian conducted extensive fieldwork with them: she joined remembrance rituals, observed gatherings of pious women, visited Tehran’s largest cemetery, and participated in state-organized bus tours to former battlefields in the Khuzestan region.
Sana Chavoshian: Women, Martyrs and Stones in Iran’s Post-War Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025.