Editor’s note: AmirAli Maleki is a philosophy researcher in Tehran and the founder of Praxis Publication. After the February 2026 strikes on Iran, JURIST confirmed that he was safe, though internet disruptions and conditions on the ground temporarily prevented him from filing. He has since resumed publishing. I tell his story because his warning about language, negotiation, and state power begins with autocracy in Iran but reaches citizens and intellectuals, left and right, far beyond it.
When the internet went dark and the world outside narrowed to one room, AmirAli Maleki kept writing. His phone’s notes app became a means of defiance. He recorded each conversation, image, expression of fear, or act of solidarity before it disappeared.
In late 2025, after protests swept Iran, the philosophy teacher entered his classroom in Tehran. His students did not ask about missiles, troops, or weapons. They asked:
“When will the United States attack? Will it attack at all? What will happen? Is negotiation good for us, or bad?”
Their questions concerned language. Could threats, promises, rumors, and silences still sustain a world between rulers and citizens, allies and enemies?
That exchange prompted Maleki’s essay, “When Power Cannot Hear: Political Stuttering and the Fate of Iran,” which he submitted to JURIST before the strikes. Drawing on Henry Kissinger’s distinction between “psychological” and “theological” diplomacy, Maleki argues that negotiation fails when each side treats its vocabulary as sacred. Words cease to convey thought. They become articles of faith.
Maleki calls this failure “political stuttering.”
He does not mean doubt or the struggle to find words. He means repeating words that have lost their power. A regime suppresses dissent and drives out rival accounts of the world. In time, it loses the means to describe the world even to itself. It can no longer turn conviction into an argument that citizens or enemies can hear.
When slogans fail, the state repeats them. When repetition fails, it raises its voice. Volume stands in for truth. Propaganda stands in for consent. Before the state breaks, its language does.
“Political stuttering is not hesitation. It is speech that repeats itself because it cannot change. It is language that believes it is final. It is the condition in which power confuses volume with truth.”
Then Maleki turns the word against itself.
A stutter can expose the limits of speech. It can mark the moment when certainty gives way and another person becomes audible. Drawing on the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maleki calls this the “wisdom of stuttering.” No one possesses the last word. Understanding begins with speech that can be interrupted.
The difference is not between fluency and hesitation. It is between two relations to truth. The regime repeats itself because it has settled the answer. The citizen falters because it has not. One cannot hear. The other has begun to listen.
Vocabulary bounds action. The words we use shape what we can perceive, understand, and do. History turns not only on the acts of leaders but on the speech of ordinary life. Politics begins when we open our mouths.
That warning belongs in America, too. Long before a vote is cast or a march assembled, politics takes shape at the dinner table, among family and friends. There we learn whether disagreement permits curiosity, whether loyalty requires silence, whether contempt passes for conviction, and whether the pose of detachment passes for intelligence.
The words chosen for a conflict shape the responses it permits. Once every dispute is reduced to victory or surrender, compromise looks like corruption. No law by itself can repair a common life whose members have lost the speech needed to imagine one.
Change requires more than persuading the other side. It requires attention to the web of relationships in which conflict lives. The task is not to erase difference or manufacture agreement. Trust matters because it lets people say what the other side would rather not hear.
JURIST awarded Maleki its 2026 David M. Crane Rule of Law Award for this work. His argument leaves a warning. A state that cannot permit dissent at home cannot sustain dialogue abroad. Negotiation becomes recitation, and compromise betrayal. Each failure demands more of the same.
The danger is not that power lies. Power has always lied. The danger comes when power loses the ability to recognize anything its language cannot contain.
Then it does not fall silent. It issues commands.
Another kind of speech begins when someone can falter, hear an answer, and change what they were going to say.
Notes and reading
I am taken by Maleki’s attention to the ordinary. Writing from Tehran amid repression, war, and internet shutdowns, he sees how horror takes root in daily conduct, far from what we call resistance or rebellion. His thought draws as much from walks and conversations on Tehran’s streets as from the history of philosophy, especially Hegel.
AmirAli Maleki—“Iran, Israel, and the US: When Governments Lose the Language of Diplomacy, War Follows,” JURIST, May 29, 2026. Maleki argues that war can begin in a failure of language before weapons are used. Coercion fills the space language has abandoned. As Philosophy Now’s Islamic Philosophy editor, he also brings thinkers such as al-Farabi into conversation with Western philosophy and international law.
Hans-Georg Gadamer—Truth and Method (1960), especially its discussion of language and understanding. Gadamer holds that understanding takes shape in conversation, where neither speaker can settle its meaning alone.
“My Country, I Will Build You Again”—Simin Behbahani: Often called the “lioness of Iran” and Iran’s national poet. “My country, I will build you again,/ if need be, with bricks made from my life./ I will build columns to support your roof,/ if need be, with my bones. . . .”
Irshad Manji—Moral Courage College, especially its short videos and case studies. Manji teaches people to ask sincere questions and listen without surrendering their convictions. The encounters range from family conflict to disputes over books. Conversation takes courage when telling the truth might cost us someone’s approval.
“Small Courage”—Timothy Snyder, Thinking about…, September 22, 2026. Recorded in Kharkiv, Ukraine, amid missile and drone attacks, Snyder argues that courage need not be fit for film. It can be an act within our grasp when the moment calls for one. Maleki shows us such everyday courage in Tehran, both in his decision to keep writing and in the acts of solidarity he records.
Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.
