The 1981 Massacre in Iran: Uncovering a Forgotten Mass Atrocity

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June 2023 marks the 42nd anniversary of the 1981 massacre in Iran, the most extensive massacre in its recent history. Only two years after the 1979 revolution, the Iranian regime executed thousands of its political dissidents within a few months. For about 40 years, however, there was very little known about the extent and scope of this mass atrocity. The Iranian authorities have systematically and deliberately tried to cover up historical traces relating to this massacre by the destruction of (mass) graves of political dissidents, distortion of historical data, and active harassment of survivors and family members of the victims.

In the past few years, a group of scholars and investigative journalists formed a research collective (Rastyad Collective) and studied this highly neglected massacre. After years of archival and field research under challenging circumstances, Rastyad Collective succeeded in creating an online database which covers the identities of more than 3500 victims in 85 cities (including hundreds of minors) and grave locations of hundreds of dissidents in the city of Tehran.

In this event, the speakers will discuss the historical, legal, and political significance of the 1981 Massacre and reflect on the results of this research project.

About the speakers

Javaid Rehman is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran and a Professor of Law at Brunel University London. He was formerly a Professor of Law at the Transitional Justice Institute, Ulster University (2002 – 2005) and lecturer and Senior Lecturer at the Law School University of Leeds (1996 – 2002). Between 2019-2021, he acted as a member of the Coordination Committee of the Special Procedures United Nations Human Rights Office. 

Marlies Glasius is a Professor in International Relations at the Department of Politics, University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include authoritarianism, global civil society, international criminal justice and the global rise of the super-rich. She is the author of Authoritarian Practices in a Global Age (Oxford University Press, 2023) and The International Criminal Court: A Global Civil Society Achievement (Routledge, 2006). She previously worked at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she was a founding editor of the Global Civil Society Yearbook.

Leila Faghfouri Azar is a lecturer in law and politics at the PPLE College and a researcher in legal theory at the Paul Scholten Center for Jurisprudence, University of Amsterdam. Her main areas of research and interest include critical legal theory, law and violence, law and inequality, law and political theology and human rights. As part of her work on Iran, she co-authored The Repressed Voices of the Iranian Revolution (Sweden, 2020) and an article on the 1981 Massacre of Political Dissidents in Iran, published in the Journal of Genocide Research (2022).

Shahin Nasiri is a lecturer in applied ethics and philosophy of science at the Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and the spokesperson of Rastyad Collective. His areas of interest include political theory, theories of freedom, phenomenology, critical theory, migration and citizenship, and genealogy of resistance movements. He is the (co)-author of Investigating the 1981 Massacre: On the Law-Constituting Force of Violence (2022), The Repressed Voices of the Iranian Revolution (2020), and the book project Decolonising Political Concepts (Routledge, forthcoming).

Uğur Ümit Üngör (moderator) is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute. His main area of interest is the historical sociology of mass violence, with a particular focus on the modern and contemporary Middle East. His publications include the award-winning The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2011), Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State (Oxford University Press, 2020), and Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prisons, 1970-2020 (IB Tauris, 2023). He is currently finishing a book on the Assad regime and mass violence in Syria.