‘It's almost like it's not a choice, I just have to’: diasporic agency under gender-based transnational repression

The 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement mobilized Iranian women across the diaspora, yet their activism also exposed women to gender-based transnational repression. Drawing on 19 semi-structured interviews with Iranian women activists across Europe and North America, this paper examines how women navigate activism under sustained transnational repression. We argue that agency is exercised through ongoing negotiations of relationships, care, solidarity, and responsibility. Decisions about whether, how, and at what cost to continue activism are shaped through relationships with family members, fellow activists, and communities inside Iran. These same relationships simultaneously sustain activism while exposing women to new forms of vulnerability as authoritarian regimes exploit familial and social ties to silence dissent. This paper demonstrates that understanding resistance under authoritarianism requires examining not only how repression operates but also how relationships enable activists to sustain political action under conditions specifically designed to undermine it.