“One may glaze the vessel anew, but what emerges will always reflect the essence it contains.”

- Persian proverb

 

 

Introduction

The Islamic regime in Iran has long mastered the art of manufacturing its own opposition. Exported in glossy packaging, branded as democratic renewal, these formations are not the products of rupture, but mutations of continuity.

 

The strategy is neither novel nor subtle. When the reformist mask frays and the internal narrative implodes under its own contradictions, the regime rebrands its operatives and markets them abroad as dissidents (Suren-Pahlav, 2011). Under the cover of Western media platforms and, at times, the sponsorship of foreign intelligence services, they are reinserted into the diaspora as counterfeit revolutionaries. They speak the rhetoric of resistance, yet function as agents of paralysis, agents of managed dissent, of disorientation, of deferment. They are the poisoned fruit of a totalitarian rootstock, repurposed for foreign consumption.

 

A conspicuous iteration of this tactic is the group recently assembled under the name ‘Farashgard’. Even their name reveals more than intended. It is a philological distortion of the Zoroastrian frašō.kərəti (fraš(e)gird in Middle Persian), the doctrine of eschatological renewal. Nonetheless, the group has misguidedly adopted the form ‘Farashgard’ in place of the correct ‘Frashgard’ in New Persian, having made no effort to consult a scholarly source for the proper form. Instead, they have indiscriminately replicated the mistaken version circulated within social circles. This signals a deeper intellectual estrangement from the civilisational grammar they seek to invoke. The misnaming is emblematic: a borrowed sanctity, unmoored from meaning, repurposed for branding. More pointedly, it constitutes a cultural affront. These figures, formed within the ideological structure of Islamism, a current historically hostile to Iran’s pre-Islamic and Zoroastrian heritage, now exploit the very symbols their tradition once sought to erase. In doing so, they perform not renewal but desecration: the cynical instrumentalisation of a civilisation they neither comprehend nor respect. Like their politics, it is derivative, styled for recognition, not rooted in understanding.

 

However, not a single individual among its core membership can be said to have emerged in genuine opposition to the regime. Every figure involved, without exception, was a loyalist, drawn from the ideological substructure of the regime. They passed through the ranks of Islamic student societies and the Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat (Office for Strengthening Unity), a body founded in 1979 with the explicit mandate to combat secular, leftist, and especially Marxist currents, serving as a theocratic extension of state power cloaked in academic garb.

 

Their departure from the regime was not principled. It was not defection; it was disposal. Their transition into the vernacular of opposition was not born of political awakening or moral reckoning, but of exclusion. The regime abandoned them, sidelined, purged, or discarded them once their strategic utility expired. Had the state continued to accommodate their ambitions, they would still be in Iran, administering its repression, legitimising its violence, and defending its crimes.

 

This article clarifies what they are. Some, without doubt, are regime agents, deployed under the long-established strategy of false opposition. But most fall into a category arguably more insidious: instrumental defectors. They are not adversaries of the Islamic regime per se; they are adversaries of Iran’s future. Their hostility to the regime is circumstantial, not ideological. Their exile is not sacrifice but strategy, a recalibration, not a rupture. Now, they seek rehabilitation through the language of dissent, imposing themselves upon genuine movements and coopting the grammar of resistance. To integrate such actors into the opposition is not strategic pragmatism; it is political capitulation.

 

Even the Crown Prince  Reza Pahlavi, has not been immune to their theatre. His endorsement of Farashgard appears less an act of complicity than a symptom of misplaced trust, an error in political judgement born of overzealous inclusivity. One might recall the adage: ‘he who walks beside the cesspit risks falling in.’ In aligning with such elements, even tacitly, he imperils not only his credibility but the moral clarity of the opposition itself. One cannot perfume a cesspit and call it a garden. Those who once served corruption will carry its stench, however earnestly they rehearse the language of reform.

 

 

Naming the Enemy: Terminology, Power, and the Politics of Defection

Political language is never innocent. Within oppositional and revolutionary contexts, the failure to differentiate between the defector whose conscience compels rupture, and the insider whose opposition only germinates in the soil of personal betrayal, is more than an epistemological lapse. It is a tactical error and a moral capitulation. To collapse these categories is to flatten intention, erase complicity, and poison the discursive terrain upon which resistance movements must be built. Language, here, is not decorative. It is forensic. Who we call a 'dissident', and who we name as an 'opportunist' or 'turncoat', governs not merely perception but strategy, legitimacy, and the future integrity of oppositional memory. The, stakes are plain. Totalitarian regimes depend on a machinery of consent, not only through coercion but through ideological complicity. The bureaucrat who drafts surveillance protocols, the party member who distributes propaganda, the academic who furnishes apologias for state violence, these are not neutral functionaries. They are nodes in a system of repression. When such individuals, having exhausted their use to the regime or having fallen foul of its internal purges, suddenly reappear wearing the garments of dissent, the temptation to rebrand them as converts must be resisted. Too often, the language of redemption is marshalled not by the converted but by the opposition itself, seduced by the illusion of elite validation or the strategic advantage of high-profile recruits. In doing so, they invite the parasite into the host.

 

Terminological precision is, therefore, not pedantic but structural. The term 'defector', long used in Cold War discourse to romanticise East-to-West crossings, bears ideological weight. It connotes courage, choice, and an implied moral awakening. Yet not all who exit regimes do so from conscience. Many are expelled. Many defect only after falling from grace. To group such figures with those who resisted from within, who spoke out when it was dangerous to do so, who paid personal costs for their disobedience, is a form of political erasure. It is also an act of betrayal.

 

Hannah Arendt, writing in the wake of the Nazi and Stalinist epochs, warned repeatedly against the conflation of categories. In her analysis of totalitarianism, she identifies the functionary as a key enabler of evil, not because of monstrous intent, but due to banal obedience (Arendt, 1951). The bureaucrat, the silent collaborator, the careerist: these are the substrate upon which totalitarian power rests. When such figures turn oppositional only after being cast aside, their motivations must be interrogated, not embraced. Arendt's warning is not merely historical; it is diagnostic.

 

To misname such figures is to disfigure the political record. Language sanitises, absolves, or indicts. When the former censor rebrands himself as a free speech advocate, or the ex-security chief positions herself as a defender of civil liberties, the lie gains traction not through their actions alone, but through the permissive language of the opposition. The danger is twofold. First, it demoralises authentic dissidents by equating their lifelong resistance with the opportunistic pivots of regime loyalists. Second, it introduces into the movement an element fundamentally shaped by the logic of survival, not conviction. This breeds factionalism, mistrust, and eventually co-optation.

 

Post-authoritarian transitions are littered with such examples. In post-Soviet republics, former Communist Party members re-emerged as nationalists or democrats, often retaining informal power while shedding ideological skin. In apartheid South Africa, security officials reappeared as consultants to the new state, laundering reputations while protecting networks. These were not ideological conversions but strategic repositionings. When opposition movements fail to name these shifts for what they are, they become complicit in the laundering of history.

 

Moreover, precision in naming is not only retrospective. It has forward implications. Resistance movements, once infiltrated by those who bring with them the habits, tactics, and political grammar of authoritarianism, are vulnerable to internal decay. Language, in this sense, is a prophylactic. The refusal to misuse terms like 'dissident' or 'whistle-blower' is a refusal to cede epistemic control to the regime's residue.

 

Even in supposedly liberal democratic contexts, where the apparatus of surveillance and repression is cloaked in legality and bureaucratic neutrality, the same principle applies. The rebranded insider poses a threat not merely because of their past but because of the continuity of their methods. A figure who served the state’s repressive arm, then turns critic only when sidelined, is unlikely to have experienced the deep moral rupture required for genuine transformation. Their presence in opposition spaces, if uncritically accepted, reproduces the logic of power, hierarchy, and self-preservation that resistance seeks to overturn.

 

This is not an argument for purism. It is an argument for clarity. Political struggle is not church, but it is not theatre either. The cost of misnaming is real. In the fog of revolution, the clarity of language becomes the first casualty. To resist euphemism, to insist on the distinction between the ideological defector and the self-serving exile, is to maintain the oppositional edge. Without it, the movement risks becoming a sanctuary not for the righteous, but for the rehabilitated functionary. And history, once again, is rewritten by those who merely survived it.

 

To reckon with defection is to reckon with contamination. The vocabulary of betrayal must not serve the sentimental impulses of liberal inclusivity or the strategic conveniences of opposition coalitions desperate for legitimacy. Too often, regimes collapse only to have their former custodians re-emerge, draped in the rhetoric of resistance, welcomed by the very movements they once suppressed. This is not mere irony. It is structural inversion. If language is our first line of defence against historical laundering, then conceptual clarity must be deployed with surgical precision. What follows is not taxonomy for its own sake; it is an attempt to re-weaponise political language, to restore the definitional sharpness dulled by opportunism and euphemism. In naming the defector, the turncoat, the renegade, we do not moralise; we demarcate. The integrity of resistance demands it.

 

 

‘Defection and its Discontents: Typologies of Departure and the Politics of Re-entry’

Defection is not a singular phenomenon. It fractures along lines of intention, complicity, and consequence. Beneath the surface of every act of political departure lies a battle over meaning: who left, why they left, and what their exit authorises. In oppositional movements, the refusal to differentiate between the ideological defector and the instrumental defector is not intellectual imprecision; it is a betrayal of political memory (Hirschman, 1970; Tomm, 2013). The former breaks with the regime as an act of conscience, having inhabited its machinery and now turning against it in deliberate repudiation. The latter arrives only after exclusion, repackaging expulsion as epiphany. One brings rupture, the other residue. What follows are two distinct inquiries: first, into the anatomy of principled departure from totalitarian systems; second, into the manufactured dissent of opportunists who mimic rupture to re-secure relevance, cloaking their return in performative dissent and strategic deception.

 

1. Defectors, Turncoats, and Renegades: Political Departure under Totalitarianism

A defector is an individual who once served within the machinery of a totalitarian regime and later renounces that system, publicly, irrevocably, and often at great personal risk. Unlike dissidents, who typically resist from the margins or under the gaze of power, defectors are internal actors turned adversaries. They abandon ideological loyalty, denounce the apparatus they upheld, and re-enter political life not as neutrals, but as enemies of the state they once fortified.

 

This departure is not merely spatial; it is epistemological. The defector shifts from reproducing the regime’s logic to unmasking it. They carry insider knowledge of how power operates, how propaganda is engineered, how repression is systematised, how language is instrumentalised to sustain obedience. Their testimony, when not distorted by liberal sanitisation or dismissed by anti-communist spectacle, exposes the operational grammar of authoritarian control.

 

The term ‘defector’ must be retained because it names both rupture and prior complicity. It offers no refuge in moral innocence. To have served a regime, whether in the intelligence directorate, the central committee, the state publishing house, or the paramilitary, renders the individual structurally implicated. To defect is not to erase that record, but to confront it. The liberal impulse to replace the term with managerial euphemisms, ‘former official’, ‘retired administrator’, ‘ex-party member’, is politically evasive. It reframes ideological betrayal as career mobility. This rhetorical laundering de-escalates the threat the defector poses to power.

 

There is no uniform profile. Some defectors were true believers turned disillusioned. Others were technocrats who became morally unsettled. Some were expelled and radicalised in exile. The motivations vary, but the political consequence is the same: their break disturbs the fantasy of internal consensus. Regimes respond with calculated brutality, revoking citizenship, erasing family ties, denouncing defectors as traitors or mentally unfit. This treatment is not incidental. It signals to others inside the system that departure will be met with annihilation.

 

Defection, then, is as much a symbolic act as it is logistical. Its significance is amplified by the nature of the regime itself. In open political systems, resignation or realignment is often tolerated, even expected. But under totalitarian rule, which relies on ideological unanimity and centralised control over historical memory, defection is heresy. It punctures the regime’s myth of inevitability. It shows that departure is possible, and worse, that it is justified.

 

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarian systems is instructive. She argues that such regimes depend not only on repression, but on the atomisation of the subject and the collapse of public space into propaganda (Arendt, 1951). The defector, by stepping outside and speaking back, reconstitutes that space, however momentarily. They reassert the political as a realm of choice and consequence, against the regime’s demand for total submission.

 

At times, however, the reception of defectors in liberal democracies is shaped less by solidarity than by utility. The Cold War period illustrates this contradiction starkly. Defectors from the Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc, or Maoist China were alternately celebrated and censored. If their narratives aligned with Western ideological interests, denouncing communism, praising liberal markets, they were platformed. If they critiqued the structural violence of global capitalism or exposed liberal complicity in authoritarian regimes abroad, they were sidelined. The liberal state, like its totalitarian counterpart, manages dissent according to strategic imperatives.

 

There is also a critical difference between defection and reinvention. A defector who joins the opposition and becomes politically active does not merely narrate departure but participates in struggle. Some became organisers, writers, or whistleblowers. Others drifted into obscurity or were absorbed into institutional structures that diluted their oppositional potential. The defector’s legacy depends not only on the act of leaving, but on how that rupture is sustained, interpreted, and weaponised within wider political movements.

 

Terminologically, then, the refusal to call such individuals ‘defectors’, ‘turncoats’, or ‘renegades’ is not neutral. It is a discursive strategy aimed at softening critique. These terms carry historical sharpness precisely because they reject innocence. A turncoat is not a reformer. A renegade does not request permission. These figures represent betrayal as a form of political clarity. In a context where authoritarian regimes thrive on consensus and euphemism, to name the defector truthfully is to preserve the grammar of confrontation.

 

There is no virtue in euphemising rupture. Political language must remain calibrated to power. To name the defector for what they are is to uphold the seriousness of their act, to acknowledge the cost of leaving, and to refuse the regime the luxury of linguistic control.

 

 

2. Agents of Betrayal: The Instrumental Defector and the Dangers of Manufactured Dissent

No revolution is free of parasites. No transitional moment escapes the opportunist’s grasp. Among the most corrosive figures to emerge from collapsing regimes are those who only discover their moral conscience after the regime ceases to reward their loyalty. These are not revolutionaries. They are not dissidents. They are the instrumental defectors: functionaries, enforcers, and bureaucrats who, when sidelined, purged, or betrayed, abandon the hand that once fed them, only to repackage themselves as voices of conscience.

 

What defines them is not opposition to tyranny, but estrangement from power. Their defection is not ethical rupture but political fallout. As long as the regime serves them, they serve the regime. When it no longer does, they flip. Their revolt is retroactive, manufactured in the wreckage of their careers.

 

Such figures have acquired a lexicon of euphemisms, ‘former insiders’, ‘turncoats’, ‘late-stage critics’, but the language should not soften. They are disgruntled loyalists, purged elites turned oppositionists, reactionary defectors. Their presence in opposition movements is not a gift; it is a liability. They bring not courage, but calculation. Not resistance, but self-preservation. They defect not from tyranny, but from irrelevance. A serpent that sheds its skin remains a serpent; only the sheen has changed. So it is with the instrumental defector, renewed in appearance, unchanged in essence.

 

Their defection is, at its core, a reaction to exclusion. For many, the transition into opposition is less an awakening than a compensatory theatre, a substitute for the power they once wielded but have since lost. These are not individuals driven by moral conviction, but by wounded vanity, professional redundancy, and unmet ambition. Having risen within the regime through networks of loyalty and ideological conformity, they find themselves discarded, displaced by younger rivals or shifting political winds. In exile, they rehearse dissent not out of belief, but out of necessity, a means to preserve status, visibility, and access. Their sudden embrace of democratic rhetoric is not evolution but camouflage: a way of re-entering the political field without confronting their past. They do not seek truth, but relevance. And in the marketplace of post-authoritarian transition, relevance is often sold under the counterfeit label of ‘reform’. Among these instrumental defectors do not merely turn against the regime; they turn against their own country. Their trajectories often carry a malignant inversion: rather than atoning for their complicity, they exact vengeance against the very people they once claimed to serve. Before the group formally coalesced, a number of these actors participated in a letter addressed to then-President Donald Trump, calling for military strikes against Iran (Suren-Pahlav, 2016; 2017) Such gestures are not rhetorical hyperbole. They are performative acts of national betrayal, a way to externalise guilt, to shift responsibility outward, to recast themselves as victims rather than perpetrators. In effect, they weaponise foreign intervention against their homeland as a substitute for internal accountability.

 

This posture is juvenile, not courageous. Instead of confronting their own crimes, instead of hanging themselves metaphorically with their past, they lash out. The defector’s revenge becomes the victim’s bombardment. This inversion underlines the severity of the “instrumental defector” model: not just an imitation of dissent, but an active role in the subjugation of their people.

 

Their nature, however, remains unchanged. When they served the regime, they acted against Iran and against the Iranian nation; now, seated beneath a different master’s umbrella, they continue the same vocation by other means. Their allegiance is not to principle, but to patronage. Today they sit in foreign studios and think‑tanks, draped in the rhetoric of democracy, while serving the same strategic purpose they once did inside the regime: to weaken Iran, to fragment its identity, to render it pliable to external interests. Whether under the flag of the Islamic regime or the banner of its supposed opposition, they are united by a single instinct: to sell Iran to whoever will subsidise their relevance.

 

Therefore, to trust them is to court co-optation. These are individuals whose political instincts were shaped in the architecture of authoritarianism. Their operational habits, secrecy, hierarchy, command, do not disappear with a change in uniform. When brought into opposition coalitions without scrutiny, they reproduce the very structures they once upheld. They import the logic of the regime into the body of its opposition.

 

The dangers are not hypothetical. Post-authoritarian transitions are littered with cases where such defectors undermined reform from within. In East Germany, former Stasi informants secured influential positions in reunified Germany’s administrative apparatus. In post-Soviet states, many who enforced party orthodoxy under Brezhnev or Gorbachev re-emerged in liberal clothing, seizing the language of democracy while gutting its substance. In Latin America, intelligence operatives turned ‘reformers’ derailed truth commissions by pre-emptively managing narratives of state violence. These are not accidents. They are tactics of survival by those whose politics has never been guided by principle.

 

The Western media, ever hungry for redemption stories, plays a reckless role here. It is quick to elevate these figures, mistaking access for authenticity. An ex-minister who ‘sees the light’ attracts far more airtime than a lifelong activist crushed under the state’s boot. The Western academy, too, too often conflates insider knowledge with political clarity, allowing the instrumental defector to masquerade as an oracle. There is a perverse logic at work: those who participated in repression are given platforms precisely because they were once part of it.

 

Diaspora institutions are not exempt from complicity. Too often, exiled media platforms, think-tanks, and community organisations engage in the same valorisation of the instrumental defector, mistaking notoriety for legitimacy. There exists within parts of the Iranian diaspora a pathological hunger for elite validation, a longing to hear the rhetoric of resistance spoken in the polished cadence of former power. In this climate, the defector is not interrogated, but feted; not scrutinised, but platformed. Their fluency in institutional language, their curated grievances, their visible proximity to past power, all become credentials in a market that rewards spectacle over integrity. In the process, those who resisted at personal cost, those without state pedigrees, without insider networks, are marginalised yet again. It is a second betrayal, dressed in the language of inclusion but rooted in amnesia.

 

This discursive perversion corrupts not just memory but legitimacy. To allow instrumental defectors to narrate the fall of regimes they once defended is to grant them the final word in a story they tried to suppress. Their accounts crowd out the testimony of real dissidents, those who resisted at cost, not convenience. As a result, the history of resistance becomes a palimpsest overwritten by those who resisted too late.

 

Hannah Arendt’s work remains vital here. Her insistence that totalitarianism demands the obliteration of individual responsibility (Arendt, 1951) exposes the alibi these defectors often deploy: that they were merely following orders, acting under constraints, unaware of the full extent of the regime’s violence. Yet Arendt does not permit that moral evasion. She reminds us that even under conditions of coercion, there remains the capacity to think, and to refuse. Those who did not refuse, who collaborated until their own downfall, cannot now be entrusted with the ethical grammar of resistance.

 

There is also a deeper betrayal at stake. Every instrumental defector who is welcomed uncritically into the opposition displaces a voice that never compromised. It is not merely symbolic. Resources, media attention, political capital, these shift towards those who possess the credentials of power, not the scars of struggle. The dispossessed are dispossessed again. The loyal oppositionist is rendered invisible while the turncoat is lauded as visionary.

 

The strategic risks compound the moral ones. These defectors, owing no real allegiance to oppositional principles, can be turned again. Their loyalty lies with power itself. If a regime is restored or a new one emerges with rewards to offer, they will reposition accordingly. They are structurally unstable. Their politics is liquid, shaped by context not conviction.

 

Some will argue that movements cannot afford to exclude them. That their expertise, contacts, or insider knowledge are too valuable to waste. Perhaps. But inclusion must never mean rehabilitation. Access must never become amnesty. Trust, if extended at all, must be provisional, conditional, constantly re-evaluated. These figures should be used, not celebrated; interrogated, not entrusted.

 

Opposition movements built on the bones of authoritarian states must protect themselves not only from their enemies, but from those who claim to be friends after the fact. The line between critic and opportunist must be drawn with surgical precision. Failure to do so does not only imperil internal coherence, it contaminates the ethical foundations of political struggle.

 

To put it plainly: not every defector is a dissident. Not every enemy of the regime is a friend of the liberation and democracy. Memory must be curated with discernment. Language must name the truth. And those who come late to the barricades must stand at the back, not hold the megaphone.

 

 

Conclusion

‘He who walks beside the cesspit risks falling in.’

 

Farashgard is not the future; it is the return of the repressed. To accept its operatives as credible opposition is to endorse amnesia as strategy and betrayal as method. Their reappearance, dressed in the grammar of revolution, speaks not of rupture but of ideological recycling. This is the regime’s final trick: to implant within the body of the opposition those who once enforced its will, and to have them dictate its trajectory.

 

Resistance, if it is to remain worthy of the name, must draw a hard line. No discourse of transition, no calculus of utility, no invocation of inclusivity can justify the political laundering of those whose only transformation has been circumstantial. To treat instrumental defectors as equals to lifelong dissidents is to conflate conviction with convenience and courage with opportunism.

 

A nation cannot be rebuilt with the same hands that once dismantled it, nor can treachery be re-forged into virtue by a change of uniform.  The stakes are not semantic. They are structural, historical, existential. If the opposition absorbs its former jailers, it forfeits its soul. If it hands the megaphone to those who silenced others, it replicates the logic it claims to oppose. Every revolution has its undertakers. The question is whether they are recognised and rejected, or invited in to write the next chapter.

 

Let it be clear: reconciliation must not precede reckoning. There can be no rehabilitation without truth-telling, no unity without accountability. The grammar of resistance must be sharpened, not dulled by sentiment. A new Iran will not be built by those who only discovered their conscience when their career paths collapsed. It will be shaped by those who resisted before it was safe, who spoke when silence was mandatory, who chose exile not as strategy but as sacrifice.

 

History owes them clarity. The revolution owes them the microphone. And the counterfeit opposition owes them silence.

 

One final warning must be issued without euphemism: these instrumental defectors, once appendages of the regime’s machinery, are not merely morally bankrupt; they are ideologically unmoored. Possessing neither patriotism nor principle, they move as mercenaries, offering their services to the highest bidder, be it state, corporation, or clandestine agency. Their allegiance is transactional, their politics for hire. In this, they pose the gravest threat: not as spies, but as saboteurs in suits, unbound by loyalty, driven by utility, and capable of poisoning the opposition from within at the behest of any foreign power prepared to exploit their treachery. They are not exiles; they are agents for rent.

 

Worse still, they mutate. Like a virus, they adapt their rhetoric, mimic resistance, and reconstitute themselves in ever more palatable forms. Today a reformist, tomorrow a nationalist, the day after an advocate for secular democracy. Their sole ideological commitment is to survival. If the Crown Prince fails to keep his distance, he risks contamination. Their proximity is not merely politically costly; it is existentially fatal. They are the cesspit that does not merely stain by association but swallows its allies whole, dragging them down to preserve their own relevance. In the name of unity, they will ensure disintegration.

 

 

Citations and Bibliography

• Arendt, H. (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken.

• Hirschman, A.O. (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Chapter 1, pp. 1–43.

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2011) The Reformist Movement: A False Opposition Strategy of Iran’s Totalitarian Theocratic Regime. [online] Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/the-reformist-movement-a-false-opposition-strategy-of-iran-s-totalitarian-theocratic-regime.html [Accessed: 8 October 2018].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2011) Reformism and the Green Movement: Factional Constructs in the Islamic Regime’s Strategy of False Opposition,  (22 February). [online] Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/the-reformist-movement-a-false-opposition-strategy-of-iran-s-totalitarian-theocratic-regime.html [Accessed: 8 October 2018].

•  Suren-Pahlav, S. (2016) ‘The ‘External Liberation’ Narrative As Information Strategy: The Normalisation Of War And The Hollowing Of Sovereignty’, suren-pahlav.com (26 December). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/external-liberation-narrative-as-information-strategy-the-normalisation-of-war.html [Accessed: 8 October 2018].

Suren-Pahlav, S. (2017) ‘Xenophilia, Self-Contempt and Treachery: How the Islamic regime and Exilic Dislocation Produced a Nation Estranged from Itself’, suren-pahlav.com (7 January). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/iran-and-xenophilia-self-contempt.html [Accessed: 8 October 2018].

• Tomm, J. (2013) ‘Deliberation in anarchy: deliberative trust-building outside the state,’ CPSA paper. [online] Available at: https://cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2013/Tomm.pdf [Accessed: 8 October 2018].