Anti-government protests in Iran have killed thousands of people. The relative calm in the country today was imposed by force. Protests that began over economic collapse quickly evolved into an overt political uprising, as chants moved from demands for survival to outright rejection of the regime.

Since early January, repression has intensified sharply. Human rights organizations report thousands killed and tens of thousands arrested, while warning that the real toll is likely far higher, concealed through enforced disappearances, secret burials and executions carried out without due process.

The absence of reliable figures is one of repression’s central techniques.

On Jan. 8, authorities imposed a near-total shutdown of internet and telephone communications. Families were cut off from one another, and the country was isolated from the outside world.

As an Iranian feminist researcher living in the diaspora, I was without news from close relatives and friends for nearly two weeks. When limited connectivity partially returned, information arrived only as fragments: unstable voice messages, blurred images, names circulating without confirmation.

This enforced silence reshapes how death is perceived. By cutting communication at the moment of killing, the regime creates a closed space of violence — without witnesses, verification, or collective response. Mourning is halted before it begins.

This confusion is deliberate. Fragmented information turns people with lives and faces into disputed numbers and uncountable bodies in overcrowded morgues. When a state eliminates witnesses, it does more than hide violence — it reorganizes power.

Cameroonian historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe defines “necropolitics” as a form of sovereignty exercised through the capacity to decide who lives and who’s disposable.

In Iran, the state is both repressing dissent and sorting lives. Protesters, political prisoners, ethnic........

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