From Iran outward
After Exile publishes essays on political rupture, inherited loss, adopted lands, and the work of rebuilding what was broken.
Featured essay
Migration is often described as movement—but beneath it lies something deeper. A quiet extraction of people, potential, and the future from the places that need them most.
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In Afghanistan, where years of conflict, economic collapse and restrictions on women's independence have pushed millions of families towards desperation, childhood itself has become a means of settling debts and surviving hunger. Girls who should be attending school, discovering their abilities and imagining their futures are instead being promised in marriage, sometimes before they are old enough to understand what marriage means. Sold Before She Grew Up, the third article in The Theft of a Future, examines the devastating relationship between poverty, child marriage and the systematic exclusion of Afghan girls from education and economic independence, revealing how the destruction of opportunity can transform a daughter's future into a family's last remaining resource.
In Afghanistan, the theft of a girl's future does not always begin with a closed school gate; sometimes it begins inside her own home, where poverty, family authority and laws that deny women equal protection can turn marriage into a transaction in which her consent carries little weight. As the Taliban's latest decrees further restrict women's ability to challenge or leave unwanted marriages, the lives of girls and women reveal the devastating distance between the promise of protection and the reality of coercion. This second article in The Theft of a Future examines what happens when a woman's silence can be interpreted as agreement, her refusal can expose her to violence, and the people entrusted with protecting her become those from whom she most desperately needs protection.
Alireza Sepahi married the woman he loved by telephone from prison. The next morning, Iran executed him. His story belongs to a wider crisis: a regime answering economic desperation with killings, while violence and intimidation also fracture communities across Europe. From burning schools and attacks on teachers to migrants risking their lives for safety, the same question demands an answer: who will take responsibility for protecting the places we share, and rebuilding the countries people have been forced to leave?
Dr Peyman Bakhshayesh examines how Reza Pahlavi could help guide a democratic transition in Iran through a limited, inclusive mandate. Exploring constitutional monarchy, national reconciliation and the dangers of factional control, he argues that the transition must protect the Iranian people’s freedom to choose their future system of government.
Football is meant to bring people together. At the IrelandIsrael match, Iranians in exile saw a question beneath the gestures of mourning: can compassion include Palestinians, Israelis and Iranians at once?
At the UN, Iran’s president displayed the faces of children killed by an American strike. Months earlier, his government cut communications as protesters were killed. Whose grief is allowed onto the world’s stage?
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Reflects on the societies that receive exiles—what stability looks like, what makes a country livable, and the ethical relationship between newcomers and their new home.
Examines the lived condition of exile—loss, adaptation, identity, and the tension between belonging and displacement that defines life away from home.
Traces the modern and historical trajectory of Iran: a civilisation of depth and continuity disrupted by invasion, ideology, and revolution—yet sustained through memory, culture, and resistance.
Explores the earliest experiences of displacement—how exile first emerged in human history, from ancient empires to sacred narratives, and how the idea of leaving, returning, and rebuilding shaped civilisations.
Focuses on the future—how societies can be rebuilt after rupture, through institutions, education, civic life, and the long work of restoring dignity and possibility for the next generation.
Asks difficult questions: why did we leave, what broke our homeland, and what obligations do exiles carry—both toward the country they left and the one that received them.
Women, Freedom & Erasure explores how political, religious and social power can restrict women’s autonomy, visibility and choices—and the ways women continue to resist, speak, create and claim their place in society.
Browse by diaspora
A diaspora shaped by revolution, repression, and rupture—carrying a deep civilisational memory while negotiating identity, loss, and the hope of renewal beyond the Islamic Republic.
The Afghan diaspora carries the story of a country repeatedly fractured by war, political upheaval, foreign intervention, persecution, and displacement. Across Europe, North America, Australia, Iran, Pakistan and beyond, millions of Afghans have rebuilt their lives while remaining deeply connected to the homeland they were forced to leave. Exile, however, is more than geographical separation. It is the experience of carrying language, memory, family and culture across borders while watching events at home from a distance. For Afghan women and girls in particular, the return of the Taliban has made that distance especially painful, as freedoms once fought for, including education, employment and participation in public life, have been systematically restricted. After Exile explores the Afghan diaspora not simply through the language of refugees and migration, but through the voices of people: women resisting erasure, families divided across borders, younger generations negotiating inherited identity, and communities preserving culture while imagining a different future for Afghanistan. These are stories of displacement, but they are also stories of survival, memory, resistance and belonging.
Formed through colonisation, famine, and emigration—an enduring example of how a people can preserve identity abroad while contributing to and reshaping the societies that receive them.
Exile is not singular. Every people carries its own history of leaving and remembering. If yours is not yet here, you are invited to begin it by submitting your exile testimony.
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We welcome serious essays on exile, homeland, adopted lands, historical rupture, memory, and the responsibility of reconstruction.