The strategy of targeted killings in Iran is undergoing a decisive shift: from the assassination of nuclear scientists to the targeting of humanities scholars.

Dr. Ali Larijani was precisely what former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mohamed ElBaradei recently called an «interlocutor». He is the kind of figure the world today is desperately short of. Mediators are those rare individuals who can navigate a world trapped in irreconcilable binaries and steer it toward peace. Our current global order is built on such binaries: they don’t reconcile, they keep fighting, and ordinary people end up paying the price. That dialectical, conciliatory spirit is familiar to anyone who knows German idealism, and it’s no accident that ElBaradei specifically mentioned Larijani’s four books on Immanuel Kant.

Most commentary has focused on the political dimension of Martyr Larijani’s life, but the terror operation carried out by the United States and Israel was, before anything else, an attack on the humanities in Iran—more than it was a political or military assassination. It marks the latest chapter in a pattern of targeted killings of Iranian scientists that once played out only in the nuclear field and has now reached the humanities. In that sense, Dr. Larijani is the most significant “martyr of the humanities” in contemporary Iran, standing alongside figures like Masoud Alimohammadi, Majid Shahriari, Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. As remarkable as Iran’s nuclear martyrs are, Larijani held a different and arguably more distinctive place—both for Iran and for the world. He was a mediator between the various forces shaping Iran’s political and social scene, and beyond that, on the global stage.

Larijani wasn’t just a humanities scholar; his role in the world mirrored what the humanities themselves do. Much like the spirit that drives the social sciences, political theory, and philosophy, he could forge real understanding between seemingly irreconcilable domains and help create shared horizons—on a global scale. That sensibility runs counter to the logic of modern science, which tends to privilege certainty. Zygmunt Bauman, for instance, argued that modernity isn’t about freedom but about suppressing uncertainty and asserting control. From that angle, something like the Holocaust wasn’t an aberration but a logical outgrowth of modern science—an attempt to carry out extermination with precision, efficiency, and a grim kind of certainty.

The humanities, by contrast, are the domain of interpretation, dialectics, and resistance to the certainties that fuel conflict. The dialectic—understood as the humanities’ Hegelian gift to modern thought—has always been about reconciling what seems irreconcilable. That’s why the political and diplomatic art of negotiation, in which Martyr Larijani excelled, is so closely tied to the spirit of the humanities. The humanities are, in essence, a hermeneutic negotiation between different ideas and perspectives. To kill a philosopher-politician, then, is to kill negotiation itself—to shut down the very pathways that might lead us out of the current global crisis; a crisis that has drawn criticism even from European leaders who are otherwise allied with the US.

Killing a Philosopher-Politician Means Killing Negotiation Itself—in a World That Desperately Needs It

When the possibility of negotiation is destroyed, peace—the thing negotiation is meant to produce—slips out of reach. Immanuel Kant, who was the central focus of Martyr Larijani’s academic work as a philosophy professor at the University of Tehran, published Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch in 1795. That text later became a foundational inspiration for the creation of the United Nations and its pursuit of global peace. So it’s clear enough: the US and Israel aren’t just waging a war against a political system. They’re waging one against the humanities as an institution—an institution whose very nature leans toward mutual understanding and the pursuit of peace.

The natural sciences are neutral. They can be used for good or for harm—think of nuclear physics and the bomb. The humanities are different. They are inherently oriented toward peace and liberation. Seen this way, Iran today is on the front line of defending the very idea of peace, paying a higher price than any other country in the process. Whatever noise today’s empires of aggression may make, history will remember how the terrorist regimes of the twenty-first century tried to kill the humanities. And Martyr Larijani will stand as a witness for future generations who care to think through what happened.
 

Mohammad Rezvanipour is PhD Student in Sociology, University of Tehran