Younes Saramifar – författare

'Through a caring and courageous ethnographical endeavor, The promise of violence offers an intricate analysis of a revolutionary temporality that unfolds and finds meaning simultaneously in the past, present, and future. In that very sense, the book advances an anthropology of history through which it situates revolutionaries in perpetual yearning for the realization of messianic futures and global justice. Saramifar has produced a remarkable piece of scholarship that is going to be the subject of conversation for many years to come in anthropology, memory, and Iranian studies.'Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Princeton, the author of The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions'Younes Saramifar delivers a dazzling and intellectually fearless book. With a uniquely empathetic touch, this study traverses multiple disciplines to uncover the paradoxes of revolution through a close reading of one of the greatest examples: Iran. Both conceptually bold and deeply personal, this work of rare erudition will leave a lasting imprint on debates about the politics of memory, revolutions, and the Iranian experience in particular.'Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, SOAS, the author of What is Iran? and Psycho-nationalism: Global Thought, Iranian ImaginationsThe promise of violence is a captivating read. Younes Saramifar’s profoundly researched book adds much needed nuance to our understanding of transnational Shi’i militants, their motivations, goals, worldviews, and cultural production. The study’s portrayal of fighters and their allies, spanning the Iran-Iraq War to the Iranian intervention in Syrian, is neither apologetic nor clichéd. Rather, it is historically informed, sophisticated, and ethical. It gives voice to a range of Shi’i revolutionaries, crossing generations and including those based far from Tehran, ethnic minorities, and Afghans, whose perspectives are rarely given such careful attention.Amir Moosavi, Rutgers University, the author of Dust that Never SettlesAway from hackneyed diasporic accounts and unencumbered by epistemological coloniality, Saramifar offers deep immersion in the opaque lives of IRGC revolutionaries awaiting martyrdom. Rather than use ready-made categories designed for a different moral universe, he takes us on a tour of the 'futurepast' - and, from his own situated vantage, lays bare the Persian racism that structures the mistreatment of Afghan combatants within that same revolutionary world. Astutely theorised and deeply personal, this is an important book.Professor Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, author of Antisémitisme et islamophobie: Une histoire croiséeRevolutionaries in Iran choose to identify memories of the Iran-Iraq War as their ‘collective’ memory to mark the war era as the temporal reference in history – the time of times, or sometimes even a time beyond time. Can a sole event and its violence truly become – for some – the all-encompassing, constituting element of history and memory? This book pursues this question and follows revolutionaries in the maze of ‘collective’ memory to offer a temporal account of the breakdown of happenings – as well as the mending of happenings through the force of remembrance.

This book relates stories of everyday life revolving around small-scale urban gardens in Central Havana and focusing particularly on that of Marcelo, a seventy-four-year-old revolutionary and gardener. The urban gardens are contested spaces: though monitored and controlled by Cuban state institutions, they also offer possibilities of crafting life in resistance. The experiences the authors narrate are not ‘thick descriptions,’ linked to larger political issues, but rather rhizomatic observations that highlight the relationships between humans and non-humans within the nature-culture debate. Using these experiences, the authors argue that ‘the political’ reaches beyond the affairs of state and governance and should be seen as an all-encompassing part of life. The authors thereby invite the social sciences to focus on the microscopic and the day-to-day to illuminate how the political affairs of lives can be imagined differently.