TEHRAN- Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Professor of Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies at SOAS University of London, is a leading scholar of international politics, Iranian studies and comparative philosophy. He co-directs the university’s Centre for AI Futures and Centre for Iranian Studies. His latest book, The Myth of Good AI: A Manifesto for Critical Artificial Intelligence, examines critical perspectives on artificial intelligence.
Adib-Moghaddam was among the intellectuals and cultural figures who signed a collective appeal published in Le Monde, calling for the protection of Iranian civilians and rejecting the use of political and military objectives to justify their suffering. In an interview with the Tehran Times, he discusses AI-driven warfare, civilian casualties, Iran’s national identity and the implications of the war for the international order.
Below is the full text of the interview:
You recently signed a collective appeal published in Le Monde stating that the Iranian people must not pay the price of political and military objectives. What prompted you to sign this letter, and why did you feel it was important to speak out at this particular moment?
For me personally, there has been a sense that this war will flare up every now and then and that the decision-makers in charge are not equipped to end it. The threshold for military conflict has been kept incredibly low. Certainly, there will be ongoing pressure to resume the attacks on Iran by the Israeli state and its global lobbies. So the threat of conflict lingers and it creates a constant sense of anxiety for Iranians and the peoples of the region. The only sensible way is to continue to call for peace, to protect the civilians and to demonstrate that humanity stands united against these so called “forever” wars. People are demonstrating all over the world. They want justice and social emancipation and they reject this danegrous AI-driven disorder that we are living in.
The appeal brings together intellectuals, writers, and cultural figures from different backgrounds. What do you think made this collective intervention possible, and what significance does it carry?
The declaration is in many ways historical, as it brought together a wide spectrum of voices, from Nobel Prize winners and film-directors to intellectuals and artists. Like all the other declarations that I have signed, it primarily condemns civilian sufferings. So to my mind the declaration appeals to human sentiments. I believe this human-centric approach has been lost for a long time, now. In the “identity wars” that are algorithmically fostered on social media, we are constantly asked to side with one “team” against the “other”. “We are the civilised ones and they are the barbarians.” The more extreme the viewpoint, the larger the algorithmic reward as more and more followers and likes are generated. However, there is something singular and almost divine about the truth. I think this is the main reason why the truth can never really be buried. It is always there in the “Akashic record” of humanity, even when we are living during an era of perfectly manufactured untruths. In this environment our human intelligence with all its sentient imperfections, translates into the only truthful resource to push-back against the lies, manipulations and deceptions that we are exposed to daily.
The conflict has generated intense political reactions, but what has been the nature of intellectual debate surrounding it? Do you see a meaningful debate emerging, or has it been largely absent?
There are meaningful debates on every university campus, critical social media site and community centre in the world. The so called Generation Z is demonstrating for their rights as we speak. At the same time, we are living through a period of intense censorship and not only in the obvious places that you know of better than I do. I think it is a mixture of defeatism and self-censorship when many of my colleagues shy away from controversy or the big questions of war and peace or the future of humanity in general.
In your view, why have certain intellectual circles been more vocal about some international conflicts than others? What might explain the differences in their responses to the war against Iran?
As indicated, I see a lot of self-censorship these days as the political pressures on speaking truth to power has increased immensely. There are only very few universities and institutions out there that tolerate dissenting intellectuals. This is also true for Europe and North America as colleagues have been struggling to voice their criticism against the status-quo. It is much easier to condemn Russia for the war in Ukraine, then it is to condemn Israel for the genocide in Gaza. The latter issue applies to colleagues in Israel, too, as the controversy surrounding the NAZA film indicates. The film-makers are harrased for showing the truth about the killings of Palestinians aided and abetted by a form of AI terrorism. Dissent everywhere is punished.
In Iran, the situation is worse and there is no real intellectual scope beyond the firm red lines. The result is an intense disempowerment of civil society, which in turn seriously harms the human- and by implication national security of the country. I have repeatedly argued that national security starts with the empowerment of citizens: A people with a global voice can push back against forms of dehumanisation which tend to precede western wars in the region. This is cultural diplomacy, and Iran has failed massively on that account exactly because the state has never really acted as a bridge for the full array of Iranian public opinion.
In your work, you have explored the concept of “posthuman warfare” and the delegation of life-and-death decisions to machines. What does the current conflict reveal about the ethical and legal challenges of AI-driven warfare, particularly automated targeting and civilian protection?
The Minab school war crime is the best example for a new dawn of algorithmic terrorism. There has been no accountability exactly because the new forms of AI-induced post-human warfare generate a thick technological fog around the “trigger to death” loop. The battlefields of today — Gaza, Iran, Ukraine — are testing grounds for this new geopolitics of death. Moreover, the geopolitical expansion of war has moved into space and it will soon be pushed through the Earth’s crust. Autonomous tunneling platforms launching subterranean weapons systems are already funded by private tech conglomerates and built by weapons engineers. Stripped of diplomatic defenses and trapped on battlefields used as laboratories for algorithmic warfare, innocent populations face an unprecedented threat from an invisible, multi-dimensional machinery of war. So the threat is real and it is all-encompassing.
In A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations, you examine how the idea of a confrontation between “us” and “them” developed. To what extent do Western narratives about Iran continue to reproduce these civilizational binaries?
Massively so, and partially because the Iranian state has failed to counter the narratives effectively. This relates back to the point made above about the relative lack of an effective global PR campaign, that carries the voices of Iranians into every corner of the world. The non-sensical “clash of civilisations” thesis propounded by Samuel Huntington decades ago can only function in a vacuum. The Iran war could only be sold as “just” because of the repeated footage about Iranians being treated with horrific violence by the organs of the state that are meant to protect them. So called “regime change” can only be threatened when there is a perceived lack of legitimacy of the state that is targeted. Legitimacy starts with the nation, which is why it is the real root of true national security. To counter any us-versus-them propaganda, as Trump and the global right-wing employ it, requires widening the scope and meaning of “us” as a globally appealing voice for unity against oppression, The revolutionaries of 1979 knew that.
In Psycho-Nationalism, you explore the psychological and political dimensions of national identity. How might external military pressure reshape Iranian identity, and could it strengthen the very political structures it seeks to weaken?
Every identity is contingent upon its invention by the people. Wars can affect the way these inventions are processed and received, but not the deep content of the ideational composition of a country itself. Even if we use the concept of baqa or survival and permanence of Iranian national features, including institutions of the current state, I view continuity not as a a symptom of insular nativism, but the manifestation of what I conceptualize as Global Iran. This cosmic capacity for self-renewal endures precisely because Iran’s identity subverts neat Westphalian geography and Eurocentric cultural confines. Iran is both an author of the world and a product of it; its reservoir of baqa is infinite because it is inherently pluralistic. To sustain a rigorous dialectical analysis, we must recognize that Iranian trans-identity is never a passive object of global history or in this case a war, but an active, hybrid co-author. The standard linear narratives of history fail here. Instead, we witness a transversal dialectic: Zoroastrianism, Avicennian philosophy, Islamic mysticism, and Shi’a political theology radiate outward, even as the Iranian matrix absorbs and metabolizes Greek, Arab, Mongol, Indian, and modern European discourses.
This unique metaphysical positionality explains why Iranian cultural creativity and political agency are galvanized, rather than crushed, when under external siege. If we apply a medical analogy in the tradition of Jalal al-e Ahmad: Iran’s civilizational immune system has been permanently vaccinated by centuries of global exposure. The longue durée of its existence has generated an accumulation of historical antibodies, rendering the body-politic immune to permanent conquest from the outside. Consequently, the only pathogen capable of striking Iran down is an auto-immune crisis engineered from within. This diagnosis illuminates the strategic folly of both western-imposed “regime change” mechanics and the state’s self-harming, brutal suppression of its own domestic demonstrations. By suffocating internal dissent, the system attacks its own vital cells, risking a fatal auto-immune collapse of a civilization that external empires could never permanently conquer.
Your work engages with comparative philosophies and non-Western intellectual traditions. Do Persian or Islamic political thought offer perspectives on war, justice, and civilian protection that could enrich contemporary international debates?
When states manipulate historical grievances to engineer nationalist aggression, they weaponize trauma to build fortresses of exclusion. Classical Islamic political thought and Persian metaphysics offer a profound shift away from this destructive cycle. By treating justice as a cosmic equilibrium rather than a legal weapon, and by enforcing strict ethical boundaries—such as the explicit prohibition against harming non-combatants and destroying ecosystems—these traditions offer a blueprint for breaking the cycle of retaliatory violence. When we treat these philosophies as living co-authors of global history rather than static museum pieces, they provide the cross-cultural vocabulary necessary to heal our global collective insecurity, reminding us that civilian protection is not a western invention, but an inherently plural, universal endeavor.
An intellectual appreciation of this reservoir of thought offers what I have called a cosmic citizenship in my new book manuscript. Here, the real task is to appeal to the common humanity of everyone which requires a differentiated approach that is not artificially coded to sell a pathological emphasis on “our” superiority towards the “other”. For instance, when Saadi Shirazi famously articulated that all human beings are limbs of one body, he is not presenting a quaint piece of romantic folklore, but a foundational doctrine of universal security. In Bani Adam, Saadi established a circularity of human pain in beautiful prose, exactly because his cosmic mind was devoid of deterministic identifications that would compromise his grandiosity as a member of the human community. Stripped of all artificial layers of “identity”, there is that cosmic humanity in all of us. In this way, such literary tradition deconstructs the rigid “us versus the other” binaries. As indicated, in this philosophical framework, an attack on any civilian, anywhere, is an auto-immune trauma inflicted upon the collective body of humanity.
The letter emphasizes the protection of civilians and respect for international humanitarian law. What does the current conflict reveal about the effectiveness of international legal institutions in preventing harm to civilian populations?
Beyond the immediate conflict, what do you think this war reveals about the changing international order and the relationship between military power and international legitimacy?
The current global crisis buttresses a profound structural failure within the international legal architecture, exposing it not as a neutral arbiter of human rights, but as a hyper-politicized apparatus deeply constrained by its own lineage. The systematic failure to protect civilian populations is vibile for everyone. The selective enforcement of humanitarian law—where certain civilian lives are mourned while others are marginalized as “collateral damage”—is challenged, but continues. Instead of preventing harm, the current framework too often provides a legalistic vocabulary that powerful actors manipulate to rationalise aggression, turning international law into a site of struggle rather than a shield for the vulnerable.
At the same time, the Iran war signals a tectonic shift toward a non-polar world order, where the assumption that raw military dominance can automatically manufacture moral or legal legitimacy is collapsing under the weight of global resistance. While imperial actors still possess the material capability to deploy devastating force, they are suffering a catastrophic loss of normative authority.
Ultimately, the Iran conflict demonstrates that true legitimacy is no longer dictated by the capitals of the Global North. Instead, it is being co-authored by a pluralistic global majority that rejects all forms of exceptionalism – what I have called an emerging “cosmic citizenry”. In this world, global authority can no longer be achieved through raw military power; it requires a shared, global respect for all human life.
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