Publications

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MAKAREMI Chowra, Woman! Life! Freedom! Echoes of a Revolutionary Uprising in Iran, Yoda Press, 2025

With the chant of “Woman Life Freedom”, men and women in Iran, many of them young, have been engaged in a political enterprise that stirs us in a precise manner, by reminding us of the possibility, always, of revolt. The book is the chronicle of a revolt that took hold of Iran with surprise, audacity, and uncertainty in 2022. The long autumn of insurrection also conjures up other sequences in Iranian history, illuminated by other movements, and memories of struggle and violence. The result is a long history of power and resistance, which is portrayed through the lens of the author’s family history, as well as her research as an anthropologist attentive to counter archives and collective emotions. Woman! Life! Freedom! leaves the reader with an archive in the orange light of street fires, which have become the symbol of a revolt that is experienced as a combustion of anger, profanation and contagion.

28.03.2025

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MAKAREMI Chowra, Femme ! Vie ! Liberté ! Échos d’un soulèvement révolutionnaire en Iran, La Découverte, coll. Cahiers libres, Paris, 2023, 352 p.

Since September 2022, men and women in Iran, many of them young, have been engaged in a process of political conquest and the opening up of new possibilities, a process that takes us back to a precise point: that of the ever-present possibility of uprising. This is the chronicle from the outside of a revolt that has taken hold over time with surprise, daring and uncertainty. This long autumn of insurrection also conjures up other sequences in Iranian history, and is informed by other movements, other memories of struggle and violence. This is a long history of power and resistance, which Chowra Makaremi knows from her family background, and also from her research as an anthropologist attentive to counter-archives and collective emotions. The author gives the events a depth of field that enables us to identify their multiple geneses, and to grasp the irrefutable revolutionary shift they represent. She builds up an archive in the orange light of street fires, which have become the symbol of a revolt that is experienced as a combustion of anger, a profanation, a contagion.

20.10.2023

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MAKAREMI Chowra, Le Cahier d'Aziz Au Coeur de la Révolution Iranienne 1979-1988, Gallimard, Folio actuel, Paris, 2023, 272 p.

In 2004, Chowra Makaremi discovered the notebook written years before by her since-deceased maternal grandfather, Aziz Zarei. The notebook recounts the tragic destiny of Aziz s two daughters in the Teheran of the 1980s: the first one, Chowra s aunt, was arrested and executed, despite being 8-months pregnant in 1982. The second, Chowra s own mother, was arrested in 1981 and was imprisoned and tortured for 7 long years before she was finally killed in the mass-murder of political prisoners in Iran s prisons during the year 1988. Written by an ordinary, pious man and a desperate father, this notebook brings to life those tragic years in general, and in particular the prison massacre of 1988 , when personal tragedy joined History in the making of a country which has yet to find peace with itself and with the world. Chowra Makaremi was born in Teheran in 1980 but escaped very young to Paris with her brother and father when her mother was imprisoned. Aziz's notebook was initially published in French (Gallimard, 2011). It also exists in English (Yoda Press, 2013) and in Persian (H&S Media, 2014).

20.10.2023

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DARABI Hannah, MAKAREMI Chowra, Enghelab Street, A Revolution through Books: Iran 1979–1983, LE BAL/Spector Books, Paris/Leipzig, 540 p.

Enghelab Street, Revolution Street, is located in the centre of Tehran—a main artery in the city’s cultural life with a host of bookshops. The publication presents a variety of photographic and propaganda books collected by Iranian artist Hannah Darabi. Drawing on works published between 1979 and 1983—years corresponding to the short period when freedom of speech prevailed at the end of the Shah’s regime and the beginning of the Islamic government—she takes us to the heart of an intense artistic and cultural period in Iranian history. Darabi has developed a visual essay accompanied by a critical apparatus written by Chowra Makaremi. The publication with its extensive landscape of books gives us the opportunity to look at rare printed matter for the first time. It forms part of the series Applied Publishing Studies and is produced in conjunction with the exhibition Hannah Darabi, Enghelab Street, A Revolution through Books: Iran 1979–1983, LE BAL, Paris, from 9 January to 11 February 2019.

19.02.2019

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Edited volumes

MAKAREMI Chowra, SHAFAFI Pardis, « Desire for Justice, Desire for Law: An Ethnography of Peoples’ Tribunals » – Symposium edited in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, N°42 Issue 2, 2019, p.191-243

Publicized in 2000 through the Women’s International Tribunal on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, civil society tribunals—also called tribunals of opinion, symbolic tribunals, peoples’ tribunals, citizens’ tribunals—are the most common form of prosecution projects in situations of impunity, and challenge the fundamental premise that the law is the exclusive domain of states. They take the form of legal prosecutions and truth commissions run by prominent international law practitioners, public figures, and activists. Yet they do not have any institutional mandate or enforcement capacity. Multiplying projects of peoples’ tribunals in contexts of impunity are interesting at several levels: first, new forms of collective mobilizations question core issues of legitimacy and sovereignty in the production of law; second, productions of collective memories and narratives of violence use legal frameworks and terminology and yet are outside of institutional apparatuses; and third, sources of empirical data are used when on-site investigations prove difficult or unfeasible, and thus contribute to the debate of ethnographies in “off-limits” zones. Engaging in a multidisciplinary conversation, this symposium aims at an empirical, comparative approach to peoples’ tribunals through the multiple levels on which they act: of the defiant telling of public secrets through testimony, the establishment of a creative space of resistance, and of shaping and developing a new understanding of international law. What are the outcomes of these legal mobilizations and arenas? How is one to understand the gap between the desire for justice they perform and the limitations that are carried within these unofficial legal projects? As the contributions enlighten, echo, and enrich one another, they also bring new insights, as a whole, on how peoples’ tribunals challenge the relationships among law, justice, and power; the definitions of political and moral subjectivities; and the boundaries of engaged fieldwork. Giovanni Prete and Christel Cournil investigate the International Monsanto Tribunal, organized in 2016 in Brussels, to address a double challenge of impunity: that of a private transnational corporation accused of inducing ill-health and environmentally damaging toxins through its business, and that of transgressions that as yet have no legal qualifications—advocated through a new legal concept of “ecocide.” Nicky Rousseau reflects on the Speak Out Against Poverty commissions set up by local communities throughout South Africa in parallel to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with the aim of bringing back into conversation the economic inequalities, structural violence, and longer term socio-economic colonial domination within the debate of apartheid violence and rights violations. Shahla Talebi looks at the Iran Tribunal against state crimes held in The Hague in 2012 as the inverted reflection of a very different “space of law”: the revolutionary courts as chilling stagings of “popular justice” that conveyed the culture of terror in postrevolution Iran. In this heuristic juxtaposition, Talebi reminds us how the violence and injustices that the people’s tribunal exposed were “themselves part of the way State legality operate[d]” (Merry 2016). Are peoples’ tribunals counter-hegemonic projects? What does the concept of hegemony bring to the understanding of these political experiences and their inherent paradoxes? This symposium explores these paradoxes not to assess popular justice initiatives in terms of their legitimacy or achievements, which are undoubtedly worthy and valuable in their own right, but rather to consider these impasses as indicative of some major challenges of political resistance in contemporary times.

09.01.2020

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Articles

MAKAREMI Chowra, Anthropologie des luttes, Délibérée, 2025/1 N° 24, 2025. p.67-75.

Chowra Makaremi is an anthropologist at the CNRS and the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), film-maker and author. Her work focuses on the Iranian revolution of 1979, as well as social and political mobilizations in Iran up to the present day. Her short film "Hitch, une histoire iranienne" reveals that shortly after her birth, her mother, an opponent of the regime, was arrested during a demonstration and imprisoned for several years before being murdered along with several thousand other people. In her latest book Femme! Vie! Liberté ! published by La Découverte in 2023, she chronicles the Iranian revolution of 2022 with the aim of “keeping track of micro-events”. Her involvement with l'Association nationale d'assistance aux frontières pour les étrangers (ANAFÉ) in the early 2000s, when she was a student, led her to write a thesis on the confinement of migrants in airport waiting zones, and to begin looking at the state from its margins. She has also studied the immediate appearance procedure, which she describes as “a penal response to a political and social issue: regulating marginal populations”. Her reflections question the paradox of the parallel increase in legal victories and the increase in violations of rights. They also build bridges between movements such as the women's movement in Iran, the uprisings of the black population in the United States and those in the suburbs of France. Above all, they open up perspectives, in particular through the emancipatory prism for all of feminist struggles. Could this be the light at the end of the tunnel?

08.04.2025

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MAKAREMI Chowra, Insurrections in Iran: an off-site ethnography, Geogr. Helv., 80, 9–17

The text explores the challenges and methods of research in repressive contexts, through the case of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprisings in Iran. Drawing on a study of post-revolutionary Iran, it discusses the production of empirical knowledge without direct presence, through digital tools and archival practices. Examining images, discourses and acts of revolt, such as unveiling, it analyzes a radical shift in collective values, affects, belongings and the relations between state and society.

21.03.2025

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PASHKEEVA Natalia, MAKAREMI Chowra and SAADOUNE Johanna, From the Critical Ethnography of Archives to the Modelling of a Database for the Study of Post-Revolutionary Iran, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée [Online], 156 (2/2024) | 2024

The history of revolutionary violence in Iran is not linked as much to the struggles that led to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 as to the solidification of the Islamic republican regime in the 1980s. Our collective, interdisciplinary research on this under-studied period explores the connections between violence, the construction of the post-revolutionary nation-state in Iran, and national and transnational memorial policies. We have created a database cataloguing the various sources, archives, and counter-archives of the long Iranian revolution, stored in repositories and accessible to researchers, or disseminated online through various networks of memorial activism. This article discusses the analytical, methodological and technical aspects of database production, exploring both conceptual and administrative issues. Their interrelations reveal the political stakes of research in Digital Humanities and project-based research.

21.03.2025

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PASHKEEVA Natalia, Building ignorance by disseminating “evidence”: an agnotological look into the digital archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Archival Science, Volume 24, p. 455-479, 2024

In democratic contexts, the discussion of digital technology in the field of archival heritage highlights its potential benefits for expanding access to archives to the wider public. It also focuses on the legal, moral, and ethical issues raised by copyright or privacy concerns. Using the digital archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) as a case study, this article thoroughly analyses another facet of digital technology, namely its role in building and perpetuating ignorance about the past through the mass digitization of archives in authoritarian contexts. The analysis scrutinizes digitally processed archives that are accessible as carefully curated data—some digitized and some born digital—through a network of open access web-resources developed by several institutions in the IRI. The article briefly considers the broader context of access restrictions to archives and information, and of the intentional and institutionalized opacity of this field in the IRI. These digitally processed archives are evaluated through the lens of archival science theory. Several macro- and micro-aspects of the kind of knowledge that scholars can produce from these digitally processed historical sources are considered.

13.12.2024

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MAKAREMI Chowra, « Working with the Unknown of the Self and of Others. Interview with Chowra Makaremi on Her Film Hitch: An Iranian Story », Cultures & Conflits, 118 | 2020, 131-148.

The film to which this entry is closely connected to a previously published work: Aziz’s Notebook, a book published in 2011, presented and translated by Chowra Makaremi. Aziz Zarei is her maternal grandfather. Written by Aziz for his grandchildren, the book recounts the story of his two daughters, who as political activists in the 1979 Iranian Revolution opposed the Islamic Republic Party and became affiliated with the Mojahedin-e Khalq-e Iran. Whereas one of his daughters, Fataneh, would be executed a few months after her arrest in 1982, his other daughter Fatameh, Chowra’s mother, spent several long years in prison before eventually being killed in the 1988 massacre of Iranian political prisoners. This entry permits us to pursue a long-term reflection on the logics and effects of certain forms of violence, including the enforced disappearance of persons. It unravels what happens to them, that is the direct targets of violence, as well as to others, namely people with whom targets of violence had more or less close relationships. Finally, it documents mourning and its absence as well as how the intimate is not outside the political but sometimes the only trace that one can follow back to the facts.

04.04.2020

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KUNTH Anouche, MAKAREMI Chowra, "When regimes become violent. Dislocation and resistance among families subjected to mass violence", Sensibilités, 2019/1 (No 6), p. 48-67

Experiences of intimacy are teased out by exploring how relationships within families are affected by the abuses visited upon them in such a context. The approach is a painterly one, the accretion of subtle brushstrokes gradually revealing a picture of how family configurations are subverted by state violence and illuminating the shadows where emotional resources are recalibrated and deployed to resist the menace of death.

19.12.2019

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Book chapters

MAKAREMI Chowra, ALLOA Emmanuel, « Counter-Investigations. On Matchboxes, Black Boxes and other Forgotten Futures », in M. Wittmann; U. Holl. Counter-Memories in Iranian Cinema, Edinburgh University Press, 2021

Reassesses the post-revolutionary Iranian Cinema from a new mnemo-political perspective - Establishes a new framework of understanding the tensions between hegemonial and excluded aesthetics and rhetorics, between censorship and resistance, carving out resistant points of remembering within and outside state-controlled cinema - Exposes silenced experiences and suppressed struggles that nevertheless articulate themselves in cinematic forms - Looks for ruptures, frictions and sudden re-distributions within the trauma- and memoryscapes of Iranian Cinema - Introduces new readings of Iranian films and thus suggest a theory of trauma and memory inspired by cinematic procedures and orientated towards specific materials Farīd ad-Dīn-e ʿAṭṭār’s Persian folk tale The Conference of the Birds relates the quest by thousands of pilgrim birds for an ideal king, the mythical bird called Sīmorgh. At the end of the quest, the surviving birds recognise that the longed-for king is nothing other than the reflection of their own existence. But what about those other birds that were not able to become part of the final representation? This groundbreaking book calls them ‘counter-memories’; memories that are barred from hegemonic history, but are, nevertheless present in cinematic forms. Due to the strategic and artistic interventions of a range of Iranian filmmakers, such as Abbas Kiarostami and Shahram Mokri, Ali Hatami and Tahmineh Milani, Kianoush Ayari and Rakshan Banietemad, the history of post-revolutionary Iranian Cinema is also structured by counter-memories, with the potential to destabilise officially fabricated success stories of revolution, war and sacred defence. Counter-Memories in Iranian Cinema establishes a new framework for understanding the tensions between censorship and resistance, helping to carve out resistant points of remembering both within and outside state-controlled cinema.

04.04.2025

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MAKAREMI Chowra, « Filming disappearance: account of a visual battle », in A. Crosby, M. de Alwis, H. Evans, Remembering and Memorializing Violence: Transnational Feminist Dialogues, Chicago, Rutgers University Press

Memorializing Violence brings together feminist and queer reflections on the transnational lives of memorialization practices, asking what it means to grapple with loss, mourning, grief, and desires to collectively remember and commemorate–as well as urges to forget–in the face of disparate yet entangled experiences of racialized and gendered colonial, imperial, militarized, and state violence. The volume uses a transnational feminist approach to ask, How do such efforts in seemingly unconnected remembrance landscapes speak to, with, and through each other in a world order inflected by colonial, imperial, and neoliberal logics, structures, and strictures? How do these memorializing initiatives not only formulate within but move through complex transnational flows and circuits, and what transpires as they do? What does it mean to inhabit loss, mourning, resistance, and refusal through memorialization at this moment, and what’s at stake in doing so? What might transnational feminist analyses of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nation have to offer in this regard?

21.03.2025

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