From Grief to Grievance: The Sociology of Collective Mourning and State Violence in Iran

نویسنده: رضا عاشوری

Public grieving following state-sponsored violence is a profound sociological and psychological phenomenon. When a government orchestrates mass killings, as seen recently in Iran where thousands of peaceful protesters were slaughtered and ongoing executions continue, grief ceases to be a private emotional state and becomes a highly charged collective experience. To understand the depth of this trauma, we can look to established theoretical frameworks developed by scholars analyzing similar crises in other authoritarian contexts. Sociologists and psychologists define collective grief as the shared emotional and psychological response of a community to a significant loss or trauma. Western models of bereavement have historically pathologized grief as an individual ailment requiring a private cure (Granek, 2014). However, cross-cultural research and contemporary grief sociology demonstrate that mourning is inherently relational and political. Neimeyer, Klass, and Dennis (2014) argue that grief is a process of communal narration, where societies construct collective meaning out of shared loss. When trauma is inflicted by the state, the very institutions that typically facilitate this c…

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