Violence, State formation and memory politics: an off-site ethnography of post-revolution Iran

Project Information

OFF-SITE

Grant agreement ID: 803208

DOI

10.3030/803208

Project closed

EC signature date 13 December 2018

Start date 1 January 2019

End date 30 June 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 223 843,75

EU contribution

€ 1 223 843,75

Coordinated by

CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS
France

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - OFF-SITE (Violence, State formation and memory politics: an off-site ethnography of post-revolution Iran)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the new Islamic Republic carried out an extensive campaign of repression. Tens of thousands of political opponents were imprisoned, executed, or forced into exile. While this violence was central to the consolidation of the regime, it has remained largely undocumented and unacknowledged. Official archives are inaccessible, public debate is tightly controlled, and the few surviving traces are dispersed across private or exile collections. As a result, a crucial decade of Iran’s contemporary history—the 1980s—remains a blind spot, both in scholarship and in public memory.

The OFF-SITE project set out to address this gap by examining how state violence has been lived, transmitted, and denied over time, and by reconstructing the “long revolution” from 1979 to 1989 through fragmented materials located outside official repositories. Its starting point was methodological: how can ethnographic and historical knowledge be produced when direct fieldwork is impossible and archives are restricted or dangerous to access? This question, rooted in the Iranian case, echoes broader challenges for researchers working on authoritarian and inaccessible contexts.

To respond, OFF-SITE developed an innovative framework—“off-site ethnography”—combining micro-historical inquiry, anthropology, and digital humanities. Rather than seeking proximity to the field, it works through distance, analysing traces, testimonies, and images collected in exile or online and connecting them to lived experiences. This approach draws inspiration from feminist and postcolonial historiography, particularly from scholars who have examined slavery or colonial violence through fragmentary archives.

Three research clusters structured the project. The first explored the micro-politics of violence after 1979 and its impact on everyday life, education, and citizenship. The second examined counter-memories of violence, showing how victims and activists sustain alternative narratives through oral testimonies and acts of commemoration. The third analysed hegemonic memory and the politics of denial, studying how the Islamic Republic institutionalised selective remembrance through education, media, and heritage policies.

At their intersection, the project elaborated the concept of “counter-archives”—materials created or preserved outside state control that challenge dominant narratives. These include photographs, letters, underground publications, and digital repositories, but also immaterial forms such as silence or embodied memory. By documenting and analysing these traces, OFF-SITE sought both to recover lost histories and to understand how knowledge about violence circulates, disappears, and resurfaces.

Empirically, it identified and contextualised dispersed archives of the revolution and its aftermath; conceptually, it rethought what counts as an archive and how ethnography can operate without a physical field site. Ethical issues—anonymity, consent, and data protection—were treated as central to the inquiry. Finally, OFF-SITE pursued a public mission: to create infrastructures ensuring that these counter-archives survive and circulate beyond the project’s duration. Its broader goal was to transform inaccessibility into an opportunity for methodological innovation and to rethink how knowledge can be produced when the past is officially denied.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Fieldwork and archival research were conducted in Europe and North America among exiled activists and families of victims, alongside the collection and digitisation of several private archives. Three international workshops, seminar series, and public events (EHESS, Le Bal, GEI Braunschweig) built a transnational network of scholars on violence and memory.

Scientific and public outputs include two documentary films (Hitch, an Iranian Story and Guerrilla Archive), an award-winning exhibition (Enghelab Street: A Revolution through Books), a special journal issue, and a collective volume forthcoming with Bloomsbury. Three monographs were published or forthcoming. Four peer-reviewed articles consolidated the project’s theoretical and empirical results.

OFF-SITE also created three interconnected digital platforms: the main website (off-site.fr) the "Counter-Archives" database cataloguing public and private archives, and a Chronology of State Violence (1978–1983) built from multiple sources. These tools provide an enduring digital infrastructure for collaborative, open-access research.

Monographs

Makaremi, C. (2023) Femme! Vie! Liberté! Échos d’un soulèvement révolutionnaire en Iran. Paris: La Découverte.
Makaremi, C. (2025) Résistances affectives. Les politiques de l’attachement face aux politiques de la cruauté. Paris: La Découverte.
Nadir, Y. (forthcoming 2027) The Politics of Teaching History in Iran. London: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature.

Edited Volumes

Makaremi, C. and Shafafi, P. (eds.) (forthcoming 2027) The Long Iranian Revolution: Memories, Oblivions, and the Afterlives of 1979. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Makaremi, C. (ed.) (2020) ‘Desire for Justice, Desire for Law: An Ethnography of People’s Tribunals’, Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), 43(2).

Peer-Reviewed Articles

Pashkeeva, N. (2024) ‘Building Ignorance by Disseminating “Evidence”: An Agnotological Look into the Digital Archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran’, Archival Science, 24, pp. 455–479.
Makaremi, C. (2024) ‘Insurrections in Iran: An Off-Site Ethnography’, Geographica Helvetica, 80, pp. 9–17.
Pashkeeva, N., Makaremi, C. and Saadoune, J. (2024) ‘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, 156(2).
Montazeri, O. (2025) ‘The Spectre of National Liberation: The Dialectic of Legacy and Defeat in the Middle East’, Multitude, 99(2).

Exhibition Catalogue

Darabi, H. and Makaremi, C. (2019) Enghelab Street: A Revolution through Books. Iran 1978–1983. Paris: Le Bal/Walther König.

Filmography

Makaremi, C. (2019) Hitch, an Iranian Story [Film]. Alter Ego Productions. 73 min.
Makaremi, C. (2025) Guerrilla Archive [Film]. 52 min.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

OFF-SITE advanced methodological innovation by formalising off-site ethnography, enabling the study of closed societies through hybrid archival and digital analysis. This framework proved decisive during the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2022–23 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, allowing real-time investigation of an unfolding event at a distance.

The project also made a technical and epistemological contribution to archival science through the Counter-Archives of the Iranian Revolution database, developed with the French National Archives and the Heurist consortium using the new Records in Contexts (RiC) standard. The database transforms dispersed materials into structured, relational data, exposing provenance and ideological bias and functioning as both inventory and analytical tool.

By critically mapping both exile and state-produced digital archives, OFF-SITE has redefined how scholars can study denied histories and state violence. The open-access infrastructures to be completed in 2026 will provide lasting resources for researchers, educators, and civil society, ensuring the project’s scientific and ethical legacy endures beyond its completion.

Off-Site programme's website