The Politics of War Commemoration in Iran

Scholarship on collective memory shows that war commemoration shapes political legitimacy, national identity, and moral authority. Yet most research analyzes commemorative narratives while paying limited attention to the events through which memory is enacted. We shift the focus to public war commemoration as an event-based practice that overlaps with contentious politics and social movements: commemorative gatherings are organized, recurrent, symbolically charged, and can function as state-led movements when used to advance government agendas. We ask: Why do autocratic states hold war commemoration events at higher rates in some localities than others? Drawing on scholarship on state-led movements and research on the political consequences of war, we develop two mechanisms. First, similar to other state-mobilized activities, commemorations depend on a regime’s social bases and organizational infrastructures and should be more frequent where such networks are stronger. Second, war studies show that war-affected communities—including veterans, martyrs’ families, and districts with high fatalities—remain politically consequential long after conflict, creating incentives for concentrated commemorative activity. We analyze Iran’s postwar mobilization following the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), a paradigmatic case of prolonged conflict and sustained state-led activism. Using original subnational data on commemoration events, mosque membership, wartime fatalities, and measures of veterans' and martyrs’ families, we test these mechanisms. Negative binomial models show that commemoration is significantly more frequent in districts with stronger conservative support, denser mosque networks, larger student populations, and higher concentrations of war-affected constituencies. These findings show how postwar states transform the residues of war into patterned, state-led mobilization across space.