Moral Polarization in Exile: Necessary Evil and the Decoupling of Nation and State in Wartime

Golasa sadat Haji mirzaei, Yale

This paper examines how members of the Iranian diaspora in the United States interpreted the June 2025 military escalation between Iran and Israel and justified opposing positions toward war. Classic sociological accounts of wartime crisis often anticipate patriotic consolidation or “rally” effects that strengthen national unity in the face of external threat. Yet among diaspora actors positioned between homeland conflict and transnational distance, the escalation instead generated sharp moral polarization. I ask whether opposing actors shared a common understanding of war as a tragic but necessary instrument, differing primarily in strategic evaluation, or whether they fundamentally disagreed about the moral legitimacy of violence. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted between September and December 2025, I analyze how participants justified their positions within a contested moral landscape. Participants occupied different political and moral positionalities shaped by their relationships to the Iranian regime, their interpretations of the nation–state distinction, and their sense of responsibility toward civilians inside Iran. While some framed war as a tragic but potentially necessary instrument for dismantling authoritarian rule, others rejected the legitimacy of violence, arguing that military intervention inevitably harms the population it claims to liberate. I show that wartime crisis became a site of symbolic boundary making through which participants differentiated the Iranian nation from the Iranian state. This decoupling enabled some actors to interpret military escalation as violence directed against a regime while sustaining attachment to the Iranian people, whereas others rejected such distinctions and viewed war as harm inflicted upon a shared moral community. By examining moral reasoning among diaspora actors during an unfolding geopolitical conflict, the paper contributes to scholarship on politics and society by showing how wartime crises reorganize boundaries of belonging, responsibility, and national identification.

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 Presented in Session 214. Émigré Regimes, Diaspora Mobilization, and Underground Resistance