The Media Line: Women’s Voices Redefine the Conversation on Iran’s Future 

Women’s Voices Redefine the Conversation on Iran’s Future 

Iranian-born activists and writers convened by Women Champions for Change shape a nuanced debate on war, protest, and the prospects for political transformation 

By Steven Ganot / The Media Line 

What does it mean to stand with the people of Iran? In a webinar convened by Women Champions for Change (WCC), that question became the thread binding together an unusually intimate and urgent conversation: an Israeli moderator in Japan, three Iranian-born women speaking from perspectives shaped by exile and activism, and an audience spread across 15 countries. The discussion was about war, protest, repression, and political possibility, but it was also about something less often heard in public debate: the authority of lived experience, especially women’s lived experience. 

From the start, moderator Stav Bar-Shany made clear that this was not intended to be another abstract geopolitical panel. Frustrated by coverage dominated by “numbers of bombs, military analysis, statements of the heads of our states, which, let’s be honest, are all men,” she said she had gone looking for something else: viewpoints rooted in reality rather than rhetoric. What she found, through the WCC network, was “a more nuanced understanding of what is happening,” formed not by slogans but “based on the lived experience of women that I trust and that I know.” 

That framing shaped the entire event. The central voices—human rights activist Nazanin Afshin-Jam Mackay, writer Roya Hakakian, and media producer Shirin Taber—did not always agree. But the power of the discussion came precisely from that mix of convergence and tension: shared outrage at repression, shared concern for Iran’s future, and different emphases on protest, intervention, messaging, education, and civil society. 

Bar-Shany’s own introduction widened the lens beyond Iran without losing the human scale. She spoke about the realities of war in the region, recalling a previous round of fighting when she was pregnant and ran to the shelter with her three-year-old in her arms. She shared stories from women across the WCC network—women coping with missile strikes, children learning on Zoom during the turmoil, and communities improvising solidarity under pressure. “War is a terrible thing, period,” she said, but she also wondered what light might still be found within it, what opportunities might exist “to move forward.” 

One of the most striking moments in her opening came through a written quotation read by Bar-Shany from another WCC member, Christina from East Jerusalem, who described tourism as “about openness, the willingness to encounter people, cultures, and history with curiosity and respect.” Christina imagined a day when people could “visit Iran freely,” “break bread with local Iranians,” and listen to their stories, and when Iranians might come in return “to experience this land, its people, and its history in the same spirit.” It was, in effect, a counterpoint to the language of war: not a denial of conflict, but an insistence that another regional imagination remains possible. 

Bar-Shany captured the shift in her own thinking with unusual candor. A year earlier, she said, the word Iran would have brought to mind “nuclear, threat, oppression, regime.” Now, after connecting to these women, other words had entered the picture: “struggle, belief, roots, homesick, and deep desire for change.” That transition—from abstraction to complexity, from enemy-image to human texture—set the stage for what followed. 

Nazanin Afshin-Jam Mackay began with the story that launched her into activism. Early in her advocacy work, she said, she campaigned to save a teenage girl sentenced to death by hanging after stabbing one of three men who had tried to rape her. “With much international pressure, we managed to save her life,” she said, and that effort led to the founding of Stop Child Executions, aimed at helping “160 other children on death row at that time.” Gradually, however, she concluded that individual rescue could not be enough. “I’ve moved away from trying to put Band-Aids on these problems per se,” she said, and instead focused on “the root of the problem, which is a complete change of regime.” 

What sustains her, she explained, is not only outrage but admiration: “the courage and resilience of the Iranian people over thousands of years,” especially, today, the women and “the young people that continue to make these sacrifices, that continue to risk their own life for the sake of freedom.” Her account of Iranian resistance traced a long arc from the imposition of hijab wearing in 1979 to the student protests of 1999, the Green Movement of 2009, the “Bloody November” protests of 2019, the 2022 “Women Life Freedom” uprising, and the protests at the end of 2025 and start of 2026. The pattern, according to her interpretation, was both grim and galvanizing: repeated state violence met by repeated civic defiance. 

Roya Hakakian, by contrast, answered Bar-Shany’s question about how her writing shaped public understanding by explaining that she wrote to challenge false hopes that the Iranian system could reform itself. She recalled the global optimism that greeted Mohammad Khatami’s rise in 1997 and her own refusal to share it. “I thought, this is ridiculous,” she said, because the power structure of post-revolutionary Iran, as she understood it from experience, “was built up in such a way that it would not allow for such flexibilities, for changes like that.” Two years later, after the student crackdown, she decided she needed to “give voice” to those instincts and explain why the system was “built up in such a way, constitutionally, legally, religiously, that it could not transform.” 

Hakakian’s intervention was a reminder that the conversation was not simply about events, but about the durability of institutions and ideologies. She stressed that Iran’s history of resistance did not begin in the Islamic Republic and could not be reduced to one protest cycle. “Iran has had a very robust history of civil rights movement,” she said, extending back “for the past 150 years.” What distinguished the January 2026 protests, in her view, was that they fused different strands of dissent: movements led by “the youth, by women,” and protests emerging from “the lower classes, the less well-off people in Iran.” For her, that convergence mattered deeply. 

It also shaped her reading of the war’s impact. The regime, she said, had been exposed as “a very weak and incapable regime,” unable to protect the population despite all its propaganda. Yet she worried that international messaging had shifted. “… The tone shifted within the international community from a tone of changing the regime to a tone of the regime is unchangeable,” she said. The consequence, she warned, could be devastating: a population that had expected the war to end the regime might instead conclude it was “invincible.” 

Shirin Taber brought yet another lens, one rooted in family, faith, and cultural crossing. “I grew up in a home with an Iranian Muslim father and an American Christian woman,” she said. As a child moving back and forth to Iran before the revolution, she found herself asking basic questions: “How do we live together? How do we function in a home?” Those questions later widened into a political and moral project. She remembered asking her father when Iran might become a place where girls could “choose their education, choose their career, who they want to marry, travel,” and hearing his bleak reply: “That won’t happen unless there’s war, unless there’s bloodshed.” She refused to accept that fatalism: “I remember thinking, no, I think it can happen in our lifetime.” 

For Taber, October 7 was catalytic. Thinking of her Irish Catholic grandfather who fought in World War II “because of the genocide of Jews,” she asked herself, “If I were living at that moment, would I have stood up for Jews?” Her answer became action. “This is my moment to do it,” she said. “I have to do it.” Out of that came the Abraham Women’s Alliance, which she described as “a very intentional initiative to counter antisemitism and to invite Jewish women into our network.” 

Her vision of the future was the most explicitly constructive and cross-border of the panel. “Our number one goal,” she said, is that “when this regime falls, or as soon as there’s an opening,” women from different faiths will be able to travel to Iran for “a women’s empowerment and religious freedom summit.” Her dream extended beyond symbolic reconciliation to ordinary exchange: “business, sports initiatives, art, film. There’s so many small businesses, so many things that we can do together as women.” 

As the conversation turned to the war and the protests that followed, the panelists sharpened both their agreement and their differences. Afshin-Jam Mackay described the January uprising as “unprecedented, like none other,” saying that on January 8 and 9 “over 30,000 innocent Iranian peaceful protesters were slaughtered on the streets by machine gun, in a complete internet blackout by the regime.” She described parents “rooting through piles and piles of body bags” and said many Iranians had initially hoped foreign intervention would “cripple the regime” while sparing civilians. 

Taber said that from her network’s contacts, some inside Iran were openly calling for intervention in ways she had never expected. “They’re actually calling the name Trump. They’re calling out the name Bibi,” she said, adding that some people appeared to welcome bombing because “they would rather have bombs fall than to live as they have lived.” Yet both she and Afshin-Jam Mackay argued that sentiment had shifted as rhetoric and targets changed, especially when talk moved from weakening the regime to damaging infrastructure. “The messaging is not clear,” Taber said plainly. 

Hakakian agreed. What had first sounded like support for the Iranian people, she said, became once again “all about … the nuclear this and the nuclear that.” That, she argued, sent a dangerous signal: that the regime could preserve itself through negotiation, even after all the bloodshed. At the same time, she still left open the possibility that enough weakening at the top might create conditions for internal change, provided outside powers recognized that “people can never take to the streets when the bombs are falling.” 

If war exposed uncertainty, education and civil society emerged as the panel’s clearest terrain of future-making. Asked what children in Iran are being taught, Taber argued that “education is key,” and proposed alternative forms of learning delivered through “TV broadcasting and radio and online platforms using WhatsApp,” focused on “the benefits of pluralism,” “religious freedom,” women’s rights, and stronger economies. In her view, education was not a side issue but a strategic one: the path to “the tipping point where people really believe in this vision of pluralism and democracy.” 

Hakakian answered with equal urgency, but from the standpoint of institutional memory. One of the regime’s earliest moves after 1979, she said, was to “overhaul the education system,” from universities to textbooks. It would take no less effort, she argued, “to rewrite those books” and free the next generation from “the sort of permanent state of hostility that it promotes and perpetuates.” Afshin-Jam Mackay added a crucial qualification: propaganda has not fully won. “The vast majority of Iranian people never bought into that,” she said. 

In the final minutes, the webinar circled back to the question of how change happens and how people endure long enough to pursue it. Afshin-Jam Mackay offered the most deeply felt answer of the event: “Change is rarely linear.” Activism, she said, feels urgent, but must be sustained “like a marathon.” It requires “resources, both human and financial,” as well as “a structure and a roadmap and patience.” Most of all, she said, it requires fidelity to principle: “never give up on your values and principles for expediency.” 

Taber’s closing note pushed toward a broader ethic. “The greatest democracies support pluralism,” she said, arguing that religious liberty is inseparable from women’s freedom and human rights. “We’re all better when we’re all free to live what we believe.” 

The power of the conversation lay in who was speaking and how. These were not distant analysts but women whose lives have been shaped by revolution, exile, faith, activism, and the long afterlife of war, and who spoke with the authority of memory rather than abstraction. By the end, Bar-Shany’s closing refrain of “perseverance” and “values of liberty, of freedoms, of women’s rights” felt less like a summary than a charge: to keep listening, keep resisting simplification, and keep making room for voices too often pushed to the margins.