Sara Kermanian

Sara Kermanian is a scholar working across and beyond the disciplinary boundaries of International Relations and International Political Theory. Her research develops conceptual and methodological tools to examine how actors — particularly non-Western actors — imagine world order, and how these imaginaries shape plural yet entangled experiences of time, space, justice, and political possibility in world politics and social life. She also explores how such imaginaries open or reduce possibilities for democratic coexistence, and how they enable a reconceptualization of the dynamics through which authoritarian, colonial, and imperial forms of closure are (re)produced.

Her PhD in International Relations from the University of Sussex developed a methodological and conceptual framework for analysing world-ordering projects beyond the West–Rest binary, focusing on the entangled emergence of Kurdish democratic confederalism and Turkish neo-Ottomanism. She has also examined nation-building in Iran and resistances to it beyond this divide, highlighting the entanglement of inter-subaltern colonialism and patriarchy. Alongside her academic publications, Sara contributes to public debates on world politics, Middle Eastern affairs, and Iranian politics through multiple media outlets.

Sara Kermanian’s project investigates how anti-authoritarian resistance collapses into the autoreduction of political horizons, explaining how international imaginaries shape the imaginaries of resistance. Taking post-Jina Uprising Iran as a paradigmatic case, it argues that this process is driven by an internalized dualist international imaginary — a West–Rest binary rooted in a Cartesian subject–object divide — mobilized to evade the temporal and existential weight of democratic uncertainty, contested nationalism, and geopolitical contingency.

In response, she develops a methodological framework that situates resistance narratives within their historical self-understandings, accounting for the historicity of imaginaries without determinism. The framework builds upon ‘self-comparison’, an approach developed in her PhD by bringing Castoriadis’s theory of the social imaginary into a dialogue with Karen Barad’s relational onto-epistemology. Extending this framework, the project interprets resistance imaginaries as grounded in actors’ relationally constituted imaginaries of their positionality within the world order and the (in)justice of that positionality. This context-sensitive approach enables mapping the conditions under which resistance leads to authoritarian consolidation or democratic exhaustion. The project also advances ‘post-restorative hope’ as a way to reclaim uncertainty as a condition of democratic freedom.