Generations in turmoil: Youth, state, and family during the Iran-Iraq war

This paper presents a qualitative study of Iranian youth in the Iran-Iraq war. Through state interventions, the war, and youth’s self-promotion, intra- and inter-generational relations were politicized and incorporated into the project of nation-state formation in distinctly gendered ways. It finds that the mobilization of youth for the war empowered them to challenge the political moral authority of the domestic patriarch, on the one hand, while repositioning them as subordinates within state patriarchy on the other.