ActionAid Association expresses its solidarity with the people of Iran, who are confronting severe economic distress, political uncertainty, and a prolonged erosion of dignity and social security. The current moment in Iran cannot be understood in isolation, nor can it be reduced to a simplistic narrative of internal failure. It must be situated within a long history of imperial interference, and geopolitical manipulation that has repeatedly destabilised the country and constrained the possibilities of autonomous, people-led social transformation.

It is not incidental that calls for mass mobilisation are being amplified by figures based in the United States, including Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah of Iran, who was overthrown during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Named the Crown Prince in 1967, Pahlavi’s political positioning is deeply entangled with Western strategic interests. Thus, this moment is very much connected with history. In 1953, British and U.S. intelligence agencies actively supported the overthrow of Iran’s elected government to secure control over oil resources, subordinating democratic will to imperial economic priorities.

At present, the Iranian population is grappling with a profound cost-of-living crisis. Inflation, which according to IMF country data stood above 40% through 2024 and between 48.6% to 52.6% towards the end of 2025, has had a devastating impact on the population. Purchasing power has severely eroded, wages have failed to keep pace with rising prices, and working-class households are bearing the brunt of economic contraction. GDP growth has remained modest at around 2–3%, while GDP per capita stagnates below USD 4,500, reflecting limited transmission of growth to living standards (IMF, 2024). The official unemployment rate stands at approximately 9%, with significantly higher vulnerability among youth and informal workers. IMF and allied macroeconomic assessments note that these outcomes are closely linked to external constraints, including restricted oil revenues, financial isolation, and sanctions-induced limitations on fiscal space and import capacity.

Workers face precarious conditions, shrinking social protections, and deep uncertainty about survival and livelihoods. These hardships are real, material, and deeply felt and they form the immediate context of popular discontent and protest.

Yet this is precisely where we must ask an uncomfortable but necessary question: while we should be supporting the will of the Iranian people and stand with them in internationalist solidarity, should we remain silent on the continued imperialist assaults and engineering of the Iranian economy and people’s living conditions through sanctions and bombing attacks. Would it not be a grave injustice to blindly accept liberal media narratives?

For decades, Iran has been subjected to one of the most extensive sanctions regimes in the world, led and sustained by the United States and supported by its Western allies. These sanctions target key sectors such as oil, banking, trade, and finance, effectively strangling the economy. While framed as tools to pressure the state, sanctions function in practice as economic warfare against the population. They restrict access to medicines, food security, employment, public services, and basic welfare while disproportionately harming workers, women, and marginalised communities.

Extensive evidence demonstrates that sanctions disable economies and governments. They deepen poverty, widen inequality, and erode social fabric. The Iranian state is compelled to divert significant resources toward security to ward off attacks and crisis management, while the working class absorbs the cost through unemployment, informalisation of labour, and declining real incomes. To ignore this reality while moralising about governance or political outcomes is to engage in deliberate misrepresentation.

Thus, we must call out the hypocrisy of Western powers that claim to stand for democracy and human rights while enforcing policies that systematically undermine the economic and social rights of entire populations. Sanctions, military threats, and media narratives that reduce complex societies to caricatures of repression are not neutral acts but are instruments of hegemonic control. They shape outcomes, constrain choices, and create conditions of permanent instability in oil-rich and strategically significant regions.

We must recognize that the current uprising in Iran is rooted in economic injustice, inequality, political exclusion, and the daily struggles to survive. However, it would be politically dishonest to ignore how these popular struggles often unfold in ways that coincide with the strategic interests of western powers. A pattern has emerged, where popular movements for dignity and self-determination coexist with external attempts to steer outcomes.

ActionAid Association affirms that self-determination cannot be selectively defended. We recognise the dangers of theocratic governance and acknowledge that systems privileging a single religion are inherently exclusionary and unjust. However, form, pace and direction of the political transition of Iran must be determined through authentic, grounded, democratic processes led by the people themselves, not through externally imposed regime-change agendas and economic strangulation.

Had countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Iran not been trapped in an overarching and permanent struggle for autonomy against external domination, it is likely that internal movements challenging patriarchy, inequality, and injustice would have evolved more organically, shaped by local histories, institutions, and social debates. Continuous intervention has not accelerated justice, rather it has delayed it by forcing societies into survival mode.

ActionAid Association stands firmly with the Iranian people, particularly the working class, women, and marginalised communities – in their struggle for economic justice, dignity, and sovereignty. We call for an end to coercive sanctions that punish civilians, a rejection of militaristic threats and regime-engineering, and a commitment to genuine internationalism rooted in respect for peoples’ right to determine their own futures.

Solidarity with popular struggles, to be meaningful, must confront imperial powers and not collaborate with them.