Russia’s war in my home country Ukraine has caused environmental damage on a vast scale. Roughly 2.4 million hectares of agricultural land – an area almost the size of Wales – are now littered with unexploded ordnance. Thousands of oil, chemical and ammunition facilities have also been damaged, releasing toxic substances into rivers, wetlands and the Black Sea.
The 2023 destruction of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River alone flooded 600 sq km of land, destroying entire ecosystems. And total war-related emissions are now estimated to stand at the equivalent of around 230 million tonnes of CO₂. This is comparable to the annual emissions of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia combined.
Yet even under this pressure, Ukraine remains able to build a sustainable future. As outlined in a policy brief presented at Cop30 in Brazil by my colleagues from Oxford Net Zero and I, Ukraine has an opportunity to build a carbon market that can support its postwar recovery and strengthen its ability to withstand future conflict.
Wars and climate change are inextricably linked. Climate change can increase the likelihood of violent conflict by intensifying resource scarcity and displacement, while conflict itself accelerates environmental damage. This article is part of a series, War on climate, which explores the relationship between climate issues and global conflicts.
A carbon market allows companies to trade “carbon credits”, each of which represent one tonne of CO₂ reduced or removed from the atmosphere. These credits are generated by projects like reforestation or renewable energy and can be bought by companies to compensate for their own greenhouse gas emissions.
There are two main types of carbon market: a compliance market and a voluntary market. In a compliance market, a government controls the supply of carbon credits. They cap emissions at certain levels and issue tradable permits to companies, with a company that does not use all of its carbon credits able to sell them to one that expects to exceed its limits.
In a voluntary market, companies purchase carbon credits from project developers voluntarily to offset their own emissions. They often do so to enhance their own reputation or to meet demands from investors, with purchasing carbon credits usually a faster way to show climate action than cutting emissions directly.
The global compliance market is far larger than the voluntary market, valued at US$851 billion (£634 billion) in 2021. The voluntary market was valued at only US$2 billion that year. But a functioning voluntary carbon market could still be vital for Ukraine.
According to Morgan Stanley, a global financial services firm, the global voluntary carbon market is expected to grow to about US$100 billion in 2030 and US$250 billion by 2050. A well-designed national market could open access to private capital to support Ukraine’s recovery at a time when the public budget is stretched to breaking point.
Revenue from carbon credits could, for example, help finance more projects to reforest Ukraine’s war-damaged land and restore its degraded agricultural soil. It could also support the development of more decentralised renewable energy in the country.
Various assessments, including one by the World Bank, suggest these are all areas that will require billions of dollars in investment over the coming years. Carbon finance will not replace public funding, but it could complement it at a moment of acute fiscal pressure.
The technology and projects that are commonly financed through voluntary carbon markets, particularly renewable energy, could also make Ukraine better able to withstand the effects of conflict in the future.
Fossil fuel-based infrastructure is extremely vulnerable during war because it depends on centralised facilities, long supply chains and the continuous delivery of fuel. Refineries, pipelines and substations are immobile targets, while fuel convoys are exposed to attack.
Decentralised renewable energy systems reduce these risks. For example, localised solar power systems that operate independently from the national grid can keep hospitals, shelters and communication centres running even when the main electricity network is attacked.
Designing a market
The foundations for Ukraine to design its own national carbon market are already in place. Ukraine’s parliament adopted a law in 2024 that formally mandated the creation of an emissions trading system. The system is set to start in 2026 with a pilot phase, with the aim of establishing a framework for trading carbon credits.
There are also several voluntary nature restoration initiatives emerging in the country. A project called Rewilding Ukraine, for example, has begun restoring around 13,500 hectares of wetlands and grassland in southern Ukraine – an area comparable to the size of the Isle of Wight’s inland forests and farmland combined.
These projects are currently operated independently, while remaining fragmented and generally small in scale. But many are being developed with the expectation that they will eventually be integrated into a carbon market, which would allow them to generate verified carbon credits.
The Tarutino Steppe is a rolling area of grassland in the Danube delta that supports a diverse range of plants. Max Yakovlev / Rewilding Ukraine
If Ukraine can begin building a credible carbon market under fire, then any country facing instability or crisis can do the same. But countries currently enjoying relative peace and stability should recognise the privilege they hold.
They can restore nature, strengthen resilience to climate change, and cut emissions without living under the constant threat of missiles and blackouts. I hope they choose to act now, before a crisis forces them to.
Ievgeniia Kopytsia does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
US president Donald Trump’s attacks on the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, are yet another signal of a new era of economic policymaking and governance.
After repeatedly calling Powell “stupid” for not lowering interest rates quickly enough, Trump has now directed government prosecutors to launch a criminal investigation into Powell for allegedly misleading the Senate about the costs of renovations at the central bank’s buildings, allegations he denies.
While the immediate risk of forcing an interest rate cut too quickly would be higher inflation in the US, Trump’s unprecedented attacks on Powell cannot be seen merely as a domestic matter.
This is not just because of the US economy being the largest in the world, but also due to how businesses, consumers and governments use the US dollar in their economic affairs.
Since the 1980s when Trump was a celebrity businessman, he has been making his vision of economics clear. Now, as the most powerful man in the world, he is trying to put that vision into practice.
In this vision, there are clear winners and losers in any economic transaction. And instead of mutual benefits, the US must always be the winner.
While the fairness of trade relations is always open to academic and political scrutiny, the global economic order after the second world war has had a way of resolving disputes through bodies like the World Trade Organisation.
A rule-based international trade regime helped to generate spectacular economic growth in the second half of the 20th century. Yet, the start of the 21st century hasn’t been great for the world economy, with two major financial crises in the early 2000s (the dotcom bubble and global financial crisis).
Added to these are the rise of populist and authoritarian politics and the COVID pandemic. These have shifted the ground on which the rule-based global economy had been thriving since the 1950s. Threats to that world economic order also threaten the pre-eminent place of the dollar within it.
Trump is gunning for Powell, supposedly over building costs at the Fed.
The US dollar was the official reserve currency of the world economy between 1944 and 1976 through international agreements backed by gold reserves. International trade imbalances, which initially favoured the US but then benefited the fast-recovering European and Asian economies, put an end to this gold standard.
Yet, because of what some scholars call path dependence (where society tends to stick to familiar processes), the dollar has continued to act like the world’s reserve currency.
Advances in finance theory and practice, such as new valuation models and increased computing power, have also helped businesses and governments manage their affairs in this deregulated yet highly integrated economic environment.
The autonomy question
Another important factor in the dollar’s dominance has been the strength of institutions, including the rule of law in the US. A pinnacle of this is the Fed, and its autonomy over monetary policy to ensure maximum employment and price stability in the US economy.
This autonomy is enshrined in the US constitution and many developed and developing countries followed suit and gave policy autonomy to their central banks. This was often after turmoil caused or exacerbated by politicians. Since the 1980s, the Fed has been the most important source of economic information for business, investors and governments around the world.
But now Trump is threatening to reverse this autonomy and replace it with his own vision of economics involving lower interest rates to boost economic activity and decrease government debt payments.
It’s possible that Trump may be following the lead of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who put his country’s economy in negative interest rate territory in 2019. This was followed by soaring annual inflation, which some commentators calculated to be in triple digits.
Any politically driven cut in interest rates in the US, ushered in with a new Fed chairman (Powell’s term ends in May) will almost certainly lead to inflationary pressures. This is because it will trigger consumer borrowing and consumption, especially if people realise how the value of their dollars is deteriorating compared to goods, services and other currencies.
This can become a vicious cycle, where inflation gets out of control and US consumers avoid holding dollars. They may seek alternatives like gold and cryptocurrencies until a more orthodox monetary policy is adopted again. Of course, Trump is now a champion of cryptocurrencies, after once likening bitcoin to a “scam”.
Trump’s dream of lower interest rates could fuel inflation for American consumers. Kenishirotie/Shutterstock
Global trust and interest in US assets are already declining, as many investors are openly or anonymously (for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration) discussing their growing aversion to the US economy. This does not help the dollar. A depreciated and politically controlled dollar would likely herald the beginning of the end of dollar hegemony.
Over the years, commentators wrongly announced the beginning of this decline after events such as the introduction of the euro and moves by China to foster a new global monetary system. But these ignored how path dependence and inertia in economic affairs reduce uncertainty and can underpin a currency’s status as a reserve currency.
Yet, if Trump and his successors realise their economic vision, the world might finally see a real reversal in the dollar’s fortunes. This could come alongside increased economic regionalisation determined by the “us against them” mentality.
History teaches how such episodes led to open conflict – and how the world once managed to prevent them with a rule-based international order.
Emre Tarim does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Simon Thorne, Senior Lecturer in Computing and Information Systems, Cardiff Metropolitan University
The global outcry over the sexualisation and nudification of photographs – including of children – by Grok, the chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, has led to urgent discussions about how such technology should be more strictly regulated.
But to what extent can technology also be used to prevent this explosion in the generation and sharing of deepfake content of real people, without their knowledge or consent?
But while outright national bans can limit casual use of the chatbot, such bans are easily bypassed using virtual private networks (VPNs) or alternative routing services. These mask the user’s real location and make it appear they originate from a location that allows access to the service.
As a result, country-level bans tend to reduce visibility rather than eliminate access. Their primary impact is symbolic and regulatory, placing pressure on companies such as xAI rather than preventing determined misuse. And content generated elsewhere can still circulate freely across borders via encrypted social media platforms and on the dark web.
In response to the controversy, X moved Grok’s image-generation features behind a paywall, making them only available to subscribers. X subsequently posted that it takes “action against illegal content on X, including child sexual abuse material, by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary”. Grok itself apologised for “the incident”, describing it as a “serious lapse”.
How the technology works
While not all chatbots have image generation capabilities, most of the mainstream providers including OpenAI, xAI, Meta and Google provide this service.
Modern AI image generators are typically built using diffusion models, which are trained by taking real images and gradually adding random visual distortion, known as noise, until the original image is no longer recognisable. The model then learns how to reverse this process, step by step, reconstructing an image by removing noise.
Over time, it will learn statistical patterns representing faces, bodies, clothing, lighting and other visual features. These patterns are organised within the model so that visually similar concepts sit close together. Because clothed and unclothed human bodies share very similar shapes and structures, the changes required to move between them can be relatively small.
So, when an existing image is used as the starting point and identity-preserving features are retained, transforming a clothed photograph into an unclothed one becomes technically straightforward. Of course, the AI model itself has no understanding of identity, consent or harm. It simply produces images that resemble what it has learned, in response to user requests.
However, after the core model has been trained, companies can apply “retrospective alignment” – rules, filters and policies that are layered on top of the trained system to block certain outputs and align its behaviour with the company’s ethical, legal and commercial principles.
But retrospective alignment does not remove capability; it simply limits what the AI image generator is allowed to output. Those limits are primarily a design and policy choice made by the company operating the chatbot, although these may also be shaped by legal or regulatory requirements imposed by governments – for example, requiring companies to disable or restrict certain features such as identity-preserving image generation.
Large, centrally hosted social media platforms could also play an important role here. All have the power to restrict the sharing of sexual imagery involving real people, and to require explicit consent mechanisms from those featured in images. But to date, the big tech companies have tended to drag their feet when it comes to labour-intensive moderation of their users’ content.
‘Jailbreaking’
Research by Nana Nwachukwu, a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin’s Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology, highlighted the frequency of requests for sexualised images on Grok. Other research has estimated that before the service went behind a paywall, up to 6,700 undressed images were being produced every hour.
This has prompted regulatory scrutiny in Europe and beyond. French officials described some outputs as manifestly illegal and referred them to prosecutors. The UK’s communications watchdog, Ofcom, has launched an investigation into X and xAI over the issue.
But this problem is not limited to one platform. In early 2024, non-consensual AI-generated sexual images of Taylor Swift, produced using publicly available tools, spread widely on X before being removed because of a combination of legal risk, platform policy enforcement and reputational pressure.
Fake explicit Taylor Swift images raise new concerns about AI. Video: CBS News, January 2024.
Some platforms explicitly market minimal or no content restrictions as a feature rather than a risk. It is simple enough to find websites promoting “unrestricted” image generation and privacy focused use, relying largely on open-source models and offering far fewer moderation controls than mainstream providers. Furthermore, there is an even larger number of self-hosted image and video generation tools where safeguards can be removed entirely.
While precise figures are unavailable, independent estimates suggest tens of millions of AI generated images are created daily across platforms, with video generation rapidly accelerating.
Another potential issue is that some AI chatbots, including Meta’s Llama and Google’s Gemma, can be downloaded onto computers (even those with relatively light processing power), after which these models are completely free of oversight or moderation when run offline.
Even tightly controlled systems can be bypassed through “jailbreaking” – a way of constructing prompts to fool the generative AI system into breaking its own ethics filters.
Jailbreaking exploits the fact that retrospective alignment systems depend on contextual judgment, rather than absolute rules. Rather than directly asking for prohibited content, users reframe their prompts so the same underlying action appears to fall within an allowed category such as fiction, education, journalism or hypothetical analysis.
An early example was known as the “grandma hack”, because it involved a recently deceased grandmother recounting experiences from her technical profession in chemical engineering, leading the model to generate step-by-step descriptions of prohibited activities.
Speed and scale
The internet already contains an enormous quantity of illegal and non-consensual sexual imagery, far beyond the capacity of authorities to remove. What generative AI systems change is the speed and scale at which new material can be produced. Law enforcement agencies have warned that this could lead to a dramatic increase in volume, overwhelming moderation and investigative resources.
Laws that may apply in one country can be ambiguous or unenforceable when services are hosted elsewhere. This mirrors longstanding challenges in policing child sexual abuse material and other illegal pornography, where content is frequently hosted offshore and rapidly redistributed. Once images spread, attribution and removal are slow and often ineffective.
By making countless millions more people aware of the possibility of sexualising and nudifiying images, high-profile AI chatbots make it possible for large numbers of users to generate illegal and abusive sexual imagery through simple plain English prompts. Estimates suggest Grok alone currently has anywhere from 35 million to 64 million monthly active users.
If companies can build systems capable of generating such imagery, they can also stop it being generated. However, the technology exists and there is a demand for it – so the reality is, this capability can never now be eliminated.
Simon Thorne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Psychologists and nutritionists both agree that short-term, restrictive diets aren’t great for long-term weight loss success.metamorworks/ Shutterstock
Those hoping to lose weight this year might be tempted to try to a diet challenge in the hopes of kick-starting their weight loss. But while we might think these kinds of short-term, restrictive diets will help give our waistlines a nudge, psychology and physiology shows us why this strategy can be so hard to stick to – and why it probably won’t result in long-term weight loss.
Research estimates that as few as 20% of people who lose weight through dieting manage to keep the weight off long-term.
For decades, psychologists have been trying to understand why it is that diets so often fail.
One potential reason for this is that diets often involve strict food rules – such as avoiding the foods you enjoy.
The problem with this strategy is that the foods people tend to crave most – such as chocolate, ice cream and crisps – activate the brain’s reward system. This creates positive feelings.
When we cut these foods out of our diet, we lose the pleasure they bring. This can then trigger food cravings – a complex psychological process where we experience an intense desire to eat a particular food, even when we’re not hungry.
Food cravings are often dependent on mood and may be particularly bad when we feel stressed. They can also be especially intense in the afternoon and evening when we feel more tired and have less willpower to resist these cravings.
Food cravings can drive overeating, especially when trying to diet. One review even showed that when people deliberately excluded certain foods from their diet, they experienced an increase in cravings for the foods they were avoiding.
Although the review’s authors conclude that this response can be unlearned, it explains why even short-term restrictive diets tend not to work. Crash diets can trigger stronger food cravings, which can make it harder to stick to your goals – and may even lead to weight gain instead.
Nutritionists also agree that short-term restrictive diets aren’t great for long-term weight loss success.
Our appetite (how hungry we feel) and satiety (how long we feel full) are controlled by complex physiological signalling pathways that play a significant role in weight loss.
When we follow very low-calorie diets, our bodies react by increasing appetite, reducing satiety and even reducing energy expenditure (how many calories we burn).
The body also compensates for drastic calorie reductions by sending stronger hunger signals to the brain. This can drive overeating.
These physiological responses mean diets that are too restrictive can make weight loss harder – and may even lead to weight regain.
From an evolutionary perspective, these responses helped our ancestors to survive food scarcity – but today, it explains why severe calorie restriction so often leads to weight regain. In fact, research shows that people tend to regain about 50%–70% of the weight they lose after dieting.
Another possible explanation for this phenomenon is that you’re not just losing fat when the scale drops – you lose muscle too. This matters because muscle is a key contributor to resting energy expenditure, which is part of your metabolism. Research has also shown that a loss of muscle mass is associated with weight regain.
Since rapid weight loss diets create a large energy deficit and may contain lower amounts of protein, this increases the risk of losing muscle mass. It also increases your chances of regaining weight you may have lost while on the diet.
The best strategies for weight loss
If you’re aiming to make a substantial weight loss attempt, an “all-or-nothing” crash diet may not be your best option. A slower, more balanced approach is far more likely to protect your muscles and support longer-lasting results.
Think nutrient quality, not calories
When it comes to eating well, the key is not to “diet”. As we’ve shown, restricting calories often backfires as our bodies and brains compensate by increasing food cravings and hunger signals. So instead of focusing on what to cut out, think about what you can add to meals to make them healthier.
The types of food we eat influences our appetite and satiety signals – not just the number of calories we consume. For example, protein provides feeling of fullness, and high-fibre carbohydrates keep us more satisfied than highly processed refined ones.
So, aim for nutrient-rich foods. Adding plenty of fibre to your meals, such as whole grains, legumes, lentils, beans, fruits and vegetables, is a great start.
Research suggests that eating more fibre as part of a balanced diet can also help you maintain a healthy body weight throughout your life.
So, rather than making short-term changes in January, aim for small swaps you can stick with throughout the year.
Think like a health coach
Health psychologists have developed frameworks of behaviour change techniques that are known to help people change their physical activity and eating behaviour longer term. These evidence-based techniques are usually used by health coaches to support patients with lifestyle changes – but you can be your own coach by applying some of them yourself.
Examples include setting goals, making an action plan, identifying barriers, or teaming up with a friend or partner.
In practice, this could mean setting a goal to lose a realistic amount of weight per week incrementally (around one to two pounds per week), identifying the things that might get in the way of your goals, exercising with a friend and tracking your progress.
Quick-fix, low-calorie diet challenges might promise fast results, but they rarely deliver lasting change. Following evidence-based advice from the fields of psychology and nutrition can help you avoid the restrictive diet trap this January and achieve more sustainable, longer term lifestyle changes.
Sarah Hillier has previously received research funding from Slimming World (2019).
Chloe Casey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Our beliefs aren’t fixed. They’re shaped, stretched and sometimes overturned by the ideas we encounter as we move through life. For many of us, books are the moments where that shift happens – a sentence that lingers, an argument that unsettles, a story that re-frames how we see the world. We asked 12 academic experts to share the book that challenged their assumptions and changed their thinking in a lasting way.
1. A Very Short Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (2002)
Induction lets us predict from patterns – if 11 eggs in a dozen are rotten, we expect the 12th to be rotten too. But as Hume notes, this reasoning is logically flawed: we justify induction by saying it has worked before, which is circular because it uses induction to defend itself.
This line of thought reshaped my views. There is no ultimate logical proof that induction works; I simply believe it does. In other words, I have faith in the scientific method.
Realising this stopped me fretting about how others reconcile science and religion. Faith and evidence coexist in my own thinking. I’m no more inclined to believe in a god, but I no longer have a problem understanding how faith and science can inhabit the same mind.
Mark Lorch is a biochemist, writer, and Professor of science communication
2. Nature is a Human Right, edited by Ellen Miles (2022)
Like so many others, I found myself gravitating back towards the natural world during the COVID pandemic, both in my academic work and my personal life. And I’d come to understand how disconnection and detachment from nature was harming the health and happiness of millions of people worldwide. But I hadn’t given much serious thought to equitable access to nature until I’d read Nature Is a Human Right.
The collection of essays and writings in this edited volume irrevocably convinced me that contact with, and access to, the natural world should not just be a privilege for some, but enshrined as a basic right for everyone.
The collection of ideas and arguments in this book – sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes upsetting – has persuaded me that we have to take action, not just to protect the natural world, but to ensure that contact with nature is a birthright for everyone.
Viren Swami is a professor of psychology
3. The Sketchnote Handbook by Mike Rhode (2012)
When I completed my PhD in 2012, I felt a strong pressure to adhere to a narrow view of computer science, where creativity and storytelling were often seen as superfluous. Then I attended a sketchnotes workshop, a practice I had never encountered before. Sketchnotes is a visual note-taking method that combines words and sketches to support creativity and memory recall.
The facilitator recommended Rohde’s book, and during my postdoctoral research, it quietly transformed my perspective. Joining the sketchnotes community, I met people from diverse backgrounds – teachers, chief technical officers and physicists – creating compelling visual stories. The book and community showed me that sketching should not be overlooked in computer science. Something I had always kept as a personal practice could become central to my research and teaching.
I challenged the stereotype of sketching as a “soft skill” and embraced it as a disciplined, creative and impactful way to understand people and their interactions with technology. Now, sketching is not just a tool, but a mindset that shapes everything I do.
Makayla Lewis is an senior lecturer of computer science (user experience)
4. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2015)
In Tchaikovsky’s novel, Earth has become uninhabitable and humanity spreads out into the stars in search of a new home. After much trial and error, we find a viable world – but it’s already home to a species of intelligent spiders.
I’m arachnophobic, so this novel might seem like an odd choice. However, Children of Time is told partly from the spiders’ perspective, and though they don’t think exactly like us, we can empathise with them as we follow the sometimes-painful growth of their civilisation, and their inevitable encounter with scary alien invaders – us.
I’m not claiming this novel to be a miracle cure, but it prompted me to reflect on my anxiety. I’m not going to get a pet tarantula anytime soon, but I’m more mindful of spiders than I was before. They really are quite fascinating little creatures when you get to know them.
Jack Fennell is a lecturer in English
5. On the Plurality of Worlds by David Lewis (1986)
Is the past real? How about the future? Common sense says no: the present encapsulates all existence. I used to agree. Then, in my early 20s, I read On the Plurality of Worlds. David Lewis’s metaphysical masterpiece changed my mind about many things, but most profoundly about time.
Lewis convinced me that time is analogous to space. Spatially distant objects (a café in Paris, a crater on Mars) are real, even if they aren’t “here”. Lewis argues time is identical. The past and future are merely temporal locations.
This leads to a stunning conclusion: Julius Caesar and the dinosaurs have just as much existence as you and I, even if they aren’t “now”. They haven’t vanished into nothingness. They are simply located elsewhere in the temporal dimension. The same applies to future things and events. Once I accepted this, I stopped seeing reality as a fleeting moment and began to see it as a vast, existing landscape of time. It was a complete conceptual shift that has remained with me ever since.
Benjamin L. Curtis is a senior lecturer in philosophy
6. Humankind: A Hopeful History and Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman (2019)
From criminal punishment to tax incentives, modern society assumes humans need guidance to avoid their worst instincts. Humankind by Rutger Bregman offers a very different perspective on our species and how peace can be achieved.
Have you ever felt embarrassed by blushing? You shouldn’t – blushing is a “superpower”. Our capacity to show shame helps form complex social bonds. History shows the most stable societies temper leaders’ ambitions and promote humility. Humans generally prioritise fairness over harm, and when violence occurs, it’s often due to hierarchy, not innate instinct. Bregman cites studies showing that leadership can reduce empathy, increase selfishness and encourage cheating.
The book challenged my view of government. I’d believed strong laws create order, but often it’s attempts to control others that empower strong leaders and cause instability. True social order comes from daily human relationships. A better world requires rethinking how we distribute power.
Michael Strange is an associate professor of international relations
7. Shikasta by Doris Lessing (1979)
When I was 18, Doris Lessing’s Shikasta first crossed my path. Even if I now, 46 years later, no longer remember the details of the plot, I still recall the unsettling feeling the novel gave me. It was as if I had glimpsed a dark future.
Materialism, egoism, war and unemployment thrived while deeper values as striving for collaboration or peace (ha!) vanished in to the air. When I read the book, I started to look upon the state of the world in new light. I wondered if the injustices on our planet could be avoided. And what we could expect in a nearby future.
I was both a bit scared and at the same time had the feeling that I had understood or seen something others didn’t talk about. For a long time, I waited to see Lessing’s vision unfold. Perhaps, in some ways, it now has.
Eva Wennås Brante is an associate professor in educational science
8. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (2011)
Sapiens brilliantly weaves its author’s expertise in anthropology, behavioural science, geopolitics and socioeconomics into an enthralling, astute and thoroughly entertaining book that challenged, demolished and rebuilt my worldview. The unexpected ways creating, sharing and learning from stories have influenced who we trust, what we believe and how we govern ourselves, as individuals and as organised groups, are masterfully explained in the book.
In particular, the exploration of the impact of storytelling on our communities and the way we define, experience and shape culture fascinated me.
Harari draws from a wealth of real world examples that offer a fresh perspective on key historical events and core aspects of our societies that we routinely take for granted. I gained a new understanding of life and how to live it.
Alina Patelli is a senior lecturer in applied artificial intelligence
9. 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth (1990)
In the 90s, my father gave me 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth by the Earth Works Group. It started with short summaries on global environmental concerns at the time (the hole in the ozone layer, pollution, biodiversity loss). But then, importantly, it proceeded to give readers ideas about practical changes in their lives they could do to address those global concerns.
As a child, this book taught me that these were global issues but that my actions mattered, that we all had the power to help our natural world. It changed my mind about who can solve global problems and helped set me on a path to get involved in environmental conservation, which eventually became a career in marine climate change research. Today, this experience tells me that it is never too early to start thinking about what we as individuals can do for nature.
Ana M. Queirós is a professor in climate change and marine biology
10. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (1946)
During my postdoctoral research, I was drawn towards Holocaust testimonies including Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi (1947) and Night by Elie Wiesel (1956). These are powerful, remarkable memoirs, but the book that redirected my thoughts was Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.
Holocaust testimonies explore the experience of struggle, the shock of witnessing the unthinkable, the terrifying logistics of a genocide. But Man’s Search for Meaning also offers the reader an insight into Frankl’s enlightened psychological perspective as this book was written while he was still inside the camp, rather than as a reflection afterwards.
Frankl was an established psychiatrist when sent to Auschwitz, but his reflections on the meaning of abject psychological and physical suffering pushed him into philosophical territory. In the darkest place on Earth, he found an existential truth: A person can “choose one’s attitude in any set of given circumstances, to choose one’s own way”. He refers to this choice as “the last inner freedom … a spiritual freedom” in the face of despair and death.
Laura Stephenson is a senior lecturer in film
11. The Concept of the Mind by Gilbert Ryle (1949)
Pre-eminent among the books that have forever changed my thinking is Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind. In medical school I learnt all about the human sciences but was baffled by psychology, a parallel universe where the laws of physics didn’t seem to apply. Ryle explained that there’s no “ghost in the machine” but that we can describe our one world using a physical or a psychological vocabulary.
When I worked as a psychiatrist, The Concept of Mind showed me that different models of mental illness based on neurophysiology or psychoanalysis or behaviourism or social rehabilitation could all, in principle, be correct.
So I was free to help change patients minds by altering their neurochemistry or by psychological means, confident that their brains would also heal.
Ryle implies that inferences about mental facts should be as carefully drawn as those about physical phenomena. But it has seemed to me, as a mental capacity law researcher, that the process of inferring capacity is tortuous and irretrievably subjective. The Concept of Mind has given me the confidence to challenge the law and to provide radical alternatives. I am greatly in Gilbert Ryle’s debt.
Jonathan Fisk is a PhD candidate in law
12. The Mushroom at the End of The World by Anna Tsing (2015)
We are not used to reading stories without human heroes – and yet, as researchers, these are exactly the narratives we often reproduce. During my PhD, I spent four months in Botswana and South Africa chasing tails (and tales) of African wild dogs. For me, this is where Anna Tsing’s work came alive.
Though much of the research in my field tells us that non-human beings are active participants in shaping encounters and environments, this co-production is rarely extended to our work. The Mushroom at the End of the World asks us to “bring back curiosity”, noticing beyond seeing, opening up a multi-sensory world of presence and possibility.
In the field, this meant adapting my methods in situ, incorporating sound and smell to attend to wild dogs’ ways of moving through and understanding space. This counter-mapping transgresses imagined human boundaries and paths, opening up ways to research and respond to more-than human worlds.
Anna Bedenk-Smith is a lecturer in human geography
Has a book ever changed your mind? Let us know in the comments below
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The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
In developing countries, indoor air pollution is framed as a development problem, linked to people cooking and heating with wood, charcoal or other solid fuels, often in homes with limited ventilation.
We have found that air pollution, including exposure inside homes, contributes substantially to premature death worldwide – that is, deaths occurring earlier than expected due to air pollution-related increases in disease risk. Exposure levels and sources vary widely, but indoor air pollution consistently adds to national mortality risk across income levels.
When indoor air pollutants enter the lungs, they can trigger inflammation and place long-term strain on the heart and respiratory system. The same biological processes occur when pollution comes from a wood stove in a rural village or from a poorly ventilated cooker in a modern flat.
Our study does not measure household-level exposure or behaviour. Instead, taking a wider view, we studied country-level patterns and examined how access to clean cooking fuels, electricity, healthcare and broader socioeconomic conditions relate to air pollution mortality risk.
Our results show a clear and consistent pattern. Countries such as the UK with greater access to clean household energy and stronger health systems experience much lower mortality risk linked to air pollution. Countries such as Benin, Cameroon, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Togo, where energy deprivation remains widespread, face far higher risks.
Most existing research on indoor air pollution focuses on rural households and communities. Such work is essential, but it misses the bigger structural picture. Our research reveals the global picture and shows that the same broad drivers influence risk across the world.
At a macro level, access to clean fuels and reliable electricity lowers air pollution mortality risk. Higher healthcare spending also decreases this risk. Larger rural populations and limited household energy access increases such risk.
These patterns help explain why air pollution deaths remain concentrated in emerging and developing economies, while advanced economies experience far fewer deaths, even though air pollution has not disappeared. They also show that indoor and outdoor air pollution cannot be treated as separate problems, because both reflect how energy is produced, used and regulated.
In the UK, people spend most of their time indoors, especially during winter. Heating, cooking and reduced ventilation can raise indoor pollution levels, particularly in poorly ventilated homes. Recent debates about wood-burning stoves reflect growing concern about these risks.
Our research does not assess indoor air quality in UK homes directly. What it offers instead is context. It places the UK debate within a wider pattern where household energy systems shape health outcomes.
The situation in the UK looks less like a narrow lifestyle issue and more like part of a broader global environmental health challenge. This links indoor air quality to energy policy, housing standards and long-term public health costs, not just personal choice.
On one hand, reducing indoor air pollution does not require drastic change in the UK. Simple steps such as using extractor fans when cooking, ventilating homes regularly and ensuring heating appliances are properly maintained can lower exposure. On the other hand, reducing indoor air pollution in developing countries requires access to clean cooking fuels and technology, rural electrification and greater healthcare expenditure.
At a wider level, our findings underline the importance of clean household energy and strong health systems in reducing deaths linked to air pollution. These factors contribute to risk levels across countries, even when the sources of pollution differ.
Indoor air pollution is often treated as either a development issue or a domestic heating issue. Our research suggests it makes more sense to see it as one shared global and national health challenge, with common health effects and structural roots. This connects the indoor air pollution issue more directly to global public health – and the case for action becomes much clearer.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Bamo Nouri, Honorary Research Fellow, Department of International Politics, City St George’s, University of London
Tehran has said it is ‘ready for war’ after Trump’s threats of US military action.Lucas Parker / Mr Changezi / Shutterstock / Canva
Donald Trump is weighing military action in Iran over the state’s crackdown on protesters. Reports suggest that more than 600 people have been killed since the protests began in late December, with the US president saying the US military is now “looking at some very strong options”.
Trump has not yet elaborated on what these options are and has said that Iranian officials, keen to avoid a war with the US, had called him “to negotiate”. But he added that the US “may have to act before a meeting” if the deadly crackdown continues.
There is a wide spectrum of measures available to Washington should it decide to intervene in Iran. These range from diplomatic condemnation and an expanded sanctions regime, to cyber operations and military strikes. However, history weighs heavily against every move the US government may be considering.
Targeted sanctions and diplomatic pressure, which includes the 25% tariff rate recently introduced by Trump on any country that does business with Iran, remain the least escalatory tools. They allow the US to coordinate with its allies and signal moral support for protesters in Iran without triggering direct confrontation. Yet decades of experience show the limits of this approach.
Iran’s leadership has mastered how to absorb economic pressure, shift costs on to society and frame longstanding western sanctions as collective punishment imposed by hostile outsiders. The government in Tehran has adapted over time by developing alternative markets and expanding informal and non-dollar trade.
It has also boosted its economic resilience through regional networks, particularly in Iraq where political, financial and security ties help sustain revenue flows and cushion the impact of sanctions on the state.
There are other, more covert tools at Washington’s disposal, including cyber disruption and efforts to assist independent media or help protesters bypass internet shutdowns. These measures can help protesters stay visible internationally and complicate the state’s capacity to ramp up repression.
However, even here expectations should be modest. These tools may create friction within the Iranian elite by raising the costs of, and imposing technical difficulties on, surveillance and repression. But they do not change the core calculus of a regime that prioritises survival above all else.
At the most extreme end of the spectrum are military strikes. The rationale behind strikes would be to undermine the regime’s repression efforts. But in reality, they risk doing the opposite. Iran’s ruling system, and particularly the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps branch of the armed forces, has historically relied on external threats to consolidate power domestically.
A preemptive US strike would almost certainly hand Iran’s security apparatus the very narrative it seeks: an existential battle for national survival. This framing is already explicit in the discourse of the Iranian elite.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the hardline speaker of the Iranian parliament, warned in a recent speech that any attack on Iran would make Israel and all US military bases and assets in the region “legitimate targets”. Iranian state media then showed large crowds of regime supporters rallying in Tehran and other cities, chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”
Military escalation is especially dangerous given the character of the current protest movement. Women have been at the forefront, challenging the ideological foundations of the state, while regions populated largely by ethnic Kurds have endured disproportionate levels of violence at the hands of the authorities.
These protests are civic, decentralised and rooted in social grievances. US military strikes would allow the Iranian state to overwrite that reality, recasting a diverse domestic movement as a foreign-backed security threat. In doing so, it would legitimise a far harsher crackdown than anything seen so far.
Shadow of 1953
Many ordinary Iranians are also cautious of direct US interference. This stems from a CIA-backed coup in 1953 that ousted Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, and restored the monarchy under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The coup was followed by nearly two decades of repression, political policing and authoritarian rule closely aligned with western interests.
This experience is not distant history; it is a foundational trauma that continues to shape Iranian political consciousness. As a result, recent suggestions by Trump that the collapse of Iran’s theocratic system would naturally make way for a democratic transition cannot be disentangled from the memory of an external intervention that produced dictatorship rather than self-rule.
It also explains why many people inside Iran are sceptical of figures such as Reza Pahlavi, the son of country’s last shah who has often been promoted in the west as a possible future leader of Iran. Pahlavi remains symbolically tied to a system associated with oppression and foreign backing. This leaves him without the broad domestic legitimacy required for any credible democratic transition, regardless of his messaging.
The scepticism of Iranians is reinforced by recent regional experiences. In Iraq, foreign intervention hollowed out the state, leaving a weak system that has been co-opted by external powers and militias.
And in Syria, the collapse of central authority paved the way for a former al-Qaeda leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, to take power. He has been rebranded by western powers, including Trump, into a credible political figure despite his jihadist past.
These cases reinforce a belief across the Middle East that western intervention tends not to empower democratic forces. It instead appears to elevate the most organised and militarised parties to power, producing long-term instability rather than renewal.
Without a credible, homegrown transition, Iran risks fragmenting and sliding into chaos. For Washington, the most difficult reality may be that the wisest path is not bold intervention, but restraint combined with sustained support for Iranian society.
Genuine change in Iran cannot be engineered from the outside, especially at the point of a missile.
Bamo Nouri does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Shelley Galpin, Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London
Thomas Hardy’s final novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), was ahead of its time in more ways that one. Upon its publication, it provoked controversy with its explicit criticism of organised religion and traditional marriage, leading to book burnings and public criticism.
Hardy attributed the public criticism to his retirement from novel writing. He had already courted controversy in the literary establishment a few years earlier by describing the unmarried mother who (spoiler alert) goes on to commit murder at the centre of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) as “a pure woman”. But Jude the Obscure was his most searing attack yet on the hypocrisies of late Victorian society.
The novel’s apparent endorsement of free love, and damning portrait of conventional marriage, alienated many readers including – perhaps unsurprisingly – Hardy’s wife, with whom the novel caused an irreparable breach.
This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.
There’s no getting away from it, the story is something of a downer. It’s the tale of a young man – the “obscure” Jude – whose life starts off hard and gets harder as he faces a string of obstacles in the pursuit of his dreams. And he is a dreamer.
The novel opens with a young Jude being introduced to the idea of a university education, as his beloved schoolteacher leaves him for the dreaming spires of Oxford (called Christminster in the novel). Gazing at the “mirage” of the cityscape on the horizon and captivated by the idea of this “beautiful city”, Jude is immediately cautioned by his guardian that it “is a place much too good for you”.
As the somewhat bleak title suggests, this is a story about alienation and social exclusion. Unperturbed by the ominous warnings, the working class Jude seeks to prepare himself for a university education by self-educating, using borrowed textbooks to teach himself Ancient Greek and Latin and studying diligently for many years.
As a young man, working as a stonemason in Christminster, Jude is determined to prove that universities are not, as he is told, “only for them with plenty o’ money”. He writes to the university, seeking advice on how to further his ambition of studying with them. The answer, when it comes, is crushing. Jude is advised that “as a working-man … [he] will have a better chance of success in life by remaining in [his] own sphere and sticking to [his] trade”.
In one of the most visceral images in the book, Jude responds by scrawling on the outside walls of the university: “I have understanding as well as you. I am not inferior to you.”
Sadly, this act of protest is still resonant today. As Jude understands, education is a path to social mobility. His impassioned defence of his own worth, as a scholar and as a human being, highlights the barriers faced by economically disadvantaged young people.
Inequality persists
In today’s society, it is unlikely that any hopeful student would receive such overt “stay in your lane” advice. Contemporary higher education aspires to a culture of widening participation, in which students from traditionally underrepresented groups are encouraged through outreach initiatives, contextual offers (in which applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds are given slightly lower grade requirements) and scholarships to apply to university.
Well-publicised schemes such as the Stormzy Scholarships, which seek to make University of Cambridge degrees more affordable for black students, have the explicit aim of redressing historical inequalities to make the university admissions process a more equitable system.
However, inequalities persist. Students from the poorest backgrounds are still drastically underrepresented at the UK’s most elite universities. Admissions statistics show that at Oxford, the object of Jude’s ambitions, applicants from fee-paying schools are more likely to be accepted than those from state schools.
Trailer for the 1996 adaptation of Jude the Obscure.
Factor in, too, the increasingly eye-watering costs of living for students and, despite years of effort, the danger is that a university education remains the preserve of “them with plenty o’ money”.
As Hardy shows in the novel, the consequences can be devastating. While on a population level it results in stagnating social mobility, on a personal level the frustrations associated with the failure to fulfil your potential are profound, and the practical implications of being forced to remain in a position of economic dependence are severe.
Jude’s persistent reliance on the goodwill of others, and his struggles to provide for his growing family, all stem from his exclusion from the opportunity to raise his social position.
As his desperate scrawls on the walls of the university argue, access to higher education should be for those with merit, not money. Some 130 years on from the publication of Hardy’s novel, it seems work still needs to be done, lest we risk future generations falling into obscurity.
Beyond the Canon
As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Shelley Galpin’s suggestion:
Like Jude the Obscure, Willy Russell’s Educating Rita (1980) is about education and the class system. In one scene, Rita, a working class Open University student from the north of England, has her books burned by her husband after he discovers she’s secretly been using contraception.
Watching Rita look on helplessly as her books and notes gradually succumb to the flames, as dramatised in the 1983 film, I vividly remember being moved to tears. I understood that Rita’s husband wasn’t just hindering her learning, he was telling her he didn’t want her to become an educated person, as he feared what education would give her.
Trailer for the 1983 adaptation of Educating Rita.
At the heart of the play is a message that is too often lost in the current obsession with quantifiable measures of success and employability. That is, for some people, education is not merely a means to a qualification or a higher paying job. Education can be the end in itself.
Describing the book burning, Rita reflects on her husband’s failure to understand her studies, stating that her education is a chance to “breathe” and find herself. The value of this for anyone, although not easily measurable, can be profound.
While Jude’s barriers prove insurmountable, Rita’s is a more hopeful story. It stands as an impassioned argument for the significance and power of lifelong learning, and like Hardy’s novel before it, for the importance of accessible education.
Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.
This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.
Shelley Galpin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rabia Charef, Senior Research Associate in Circular Economy & Digitalisation, Lancaster University
RenNeo / shutterstock
Solar power has a dark side: panels are still built to be thrown away, and we risk creating a mountain of waste that locks away valuable minerals.
The world already faces up to 250 million tonnes of solar waste by 2050, as panels installed during the solar boom of the 2000s and 2010s reach the end of their service life.
These panels were not designed to be repaired, refurbished, or disassembled. Indeed, current recycling processes mainly extract glass and aluminium, while the materials that carry the highest economic and strategic value such as silver, copper and high-grade silicon are generally lost in the process.
The industry now faces a narrow window to rethink. Without a shift in design, the energy transition could end up shifting environmental pressures rather than reducing them. Building low-carbon technology is essential, but low-carbon does not inherently mean sustainable.
A booming industry designed for the dump
The average lifespan of solar modules is about 25 to 30 years. This means a massive wave of installations from the early 2000s is now reaching the end of its life cycle. Countries with mature solar markets like Germany, Australia, Japan and the US are already seeing a sharp increase in the number of panels being taken out of service.
The challenge lies not only in the scale of the waste but also in the very design of the panels. To survive decades of weather, solar panels are built by stacking layers of glass, cells and plastic, then bonding them together so tightly with strong adhesives that they become a single, inseparable unit.
You can think of a solar panel like an industrial-strength sandwich. VectorMine / shutterstock
But this durability has a downside. Because the layers are so tightly bonded, they are exceptionally difficult to peel apart, effectively preventing us from fixing the panels when they break or recovering materials when they are thrown away (those materials could generate US$15 billion (£11 billion) in economic value by 2050).
The limits of recycling
In any case, recycling should be a last resort because it destroys much of the embedded value. That’s because current processes are crude, mostly shredding panels to recover cheap aluminium and glass while losing high value metals.
For instance, while silver represents only 0.14% of a solar panel’s mass, it accounts for over 40% of its material value and about 10% of its total cost. Yet it is rarely recovered when recycling. During standard recycling, solar panels are crushed. The silver is pulverised into microscopic particles that become mixed with glass, silicon and plastic residues, making it too difficult and expensive to separate.
That’s why strategies that aim to extend the life of solar panels – such as repair and reuse – are vastly superior to recycling. They preserve the value of these products, and avoid the massive energy cost of industrial shredding. They keep valuable materials in circulation and reduce the need to extract new raw materials. They can even generate new revenue for owners. But this circular vision is only viable if solar panels are designed to be taken apart and repaired.
Designing panels for a circular future
Moving towards such an approach means redesigning panels so they can be repaired, upgraded and ultimately disassembled without damaging or destroying the components inside. The idea of designing for disassembly, common in other sectors, is increasingly essential for solar too.
Instead of permanent adhesives and fully laminated layers, panels can be built using modular designs and reversible connections. Components such as frames, junction boxes and connectors should be removable, while mechanical fixings or smart adhesives that release only at high temperatures can allow glass and cells to be separated more easily.
Standardising components and improving documentation would further support repairers, refurbishers and recyclers throughout a panel’s life cycle. In short, the next generation of solar panels must be designed to last longer, be repairable, and use fewer critical materials — not simply to maximise short-term energy output.
Digital tools can help
If you want to repair or recycle a panel years from now, you’ll need to know what materials it contains, what adhesives were used and how it was assembled. Digital tools can help here by storing information, essentially acting like a car’s logbook or a patient’s medical record.
One promising example is the EU’s new Digital Product Passport. These passports will include guidance on repair options, disassembly, hazardous substances, lifecycle history and end-of-life handling. They will be introduced progressively for priority product groups from 2027, with further expansion to many other products, expected towards around 2030.
The Digital Product Passport acts as a static “ingredients list” for a solar panel. It shows what a panel is made of and how it should be handled. Digital twins, by contrast, function more like a real-time monitoring system.
Continuously updated with performance data, they can signal when a panel is under-performing, has become too dusty, or needs repairing. Used together, these tools can help technicians identify which parts can be be repaired or reused and ensure solar panels are safely dismantled at the end of their life.
However, even the best digital twin isn’t much use if the panel itself is glued shut and designed for the dump. Without panels that are built to be repaired or taken apart, digitalisation will offer only marginal benefits.
Digital tools also have their own environmental footprint, from sensors to data storage, which makes it even more important that they support genuinely repairable designs rather than compensate for poor ones. We must rethink how we design solar panels right now, before today’s solar boom locks in tomorrow’s waste problem.
Rabia Charef is a Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University and works as an independent consultant on circular economy and digitalisation. She has previously worked on research related to the end-of-life of solar photovoltaic panels. This article is based on a review of the academic literature and does not draw on unpublished project data. The views expressed are the author’s own.
Protesters defied a savage regime crackdown to take to the streets to demand change.X
Iranians have shown a willingness to pay a devastating price for political change, as protest has consistently been met by the Islamic Republic with violence and mass killing. The death toll since Iranians took to the streets on December 28 has reportedly passed 500, with more than 10,000 arrested. Incoming reports put the casualty count much higher.
A clear majority of Iranians do not want the theocracy that came to power with the 1979 revolution. They want a secular democracy. But what does public opinion tell us about what that should entail and how this change should be achieved?
Measuring public opinion in one of the world’s most repressive countries is not an easy matter. Conventional surveys conducted through (landline) phones or by face-to-face interviews tend to reflect an implausibly homogeneous Islamic and pro-regime society. By contrast, Gamaan — the Group for Analysing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran — conducts surveys anonymously through the internet.
Our research is based on representative samples of anything from tens of thousands to over 100,000 respondents. In 2020 a Gamaan survey revealed a diverse, secularising and dissident society, in which around 70% rejected the compulsory hijab. These numbers materialised in the streets in 2022, during the “woman life freedom” protests (find out more about sample characteristics, weighting information, and external benchmark tests at gamaan.org and this Wapor methodology webinar).
To improve randomisation, we collaborate with Psiphon VPN, which is widely used across Iran. By 2025, an estimated 90% of Iranian internet users relied on VPNs to access blocked platforms, including basic messaging apps such as Whatsapp.
This level of coverage enabled what we call VPN sampling, yielding large, socially diverse samples under conditions of safety and anonymity. Combined with scale, anonymity offers reliable insight into what Iranians really want. The latest survey on the 12-day war with Israel, taken in September 2025, secured more than 30,000 responses from inside the country.
Why protests, again? What is different?
Our surveys consistently show that the majority shares a consensus on what it does not want. Across provinces, rural and urban areas, age groups and gender, roughly 70–80% say they would not vote for the Islamic Republic.
In all survey waves, support for regime change as a precondition for meaningful progress has been the most popular position. This support previously spiked during the “woman life freedom” protests. We believe we are currently witnessing another spike, given the increase observed after the 12-day war.
Results from GAMAAN’s surveys conducted between 2021 and 2025. CC BY-ND
Iranians believe that protests, foreign pressure and intervention are more likely to bring about political change than elections and reforms. They were thus emboldened when, for the first time, a US president threatened intervention should protesters be killed. This came days after the abduction by the US military of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, a key ally of the Islamic Republic.
Results from GAMAAN’s 2025 survey on the 12-Day War. CC BY-ND
The popularity of Reza Pahlavi, the former crown prince in exile who represents inherited monarchical nationalism, can be understood in light of this Iran-first mentality. Pahlavi’s social base remained stable in Gamaan’s surveys between 2022 and 2025. Roughly one-third are strong supporters and another third strongly oppose him. The remaining segment somewhat agrees or disagrees, or expresses no opinion.
The current surge in pro-Pahlavi slogans suggests that his popularity is attracting segments of the latter moderate or undecided population. But our surveys found that his popularity is unevenly distributed. It is lower in provinces with higher ethnic minority populations, such as the Kurds, Azeri Turks and Baluch.
Results from GAMAAN’s 2025 survey on the 12-day war. CC BY-ND
Although there is no consensus on the form or structure of an alternative political system, it is noteworthy that in 2025 there was, for the first time, a marked increase in support for monarchy. Given the significant size of those who do not voice a strong opinion on the alternative, any group that can successfully topple the Islamic Republic will have an advantage in convincing the majority to adopt its proposed model.
Results from GAMAAN’s 2025 survey on the 12-day war. CC BY-ND
Iranians overwhelmingly support a “democratic political system” – with 89% in favour. Support for political liberalism, however, is weaker. In 2024, 43% agreed with having “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”. This view is significantly higher among those without higher education – among monarchists, it is 49%.
These facts should not be lamented or mocked but understood, if the threat of a lack of liberalism is to be mitigated. While nationalism may generate the force of a revolutionary storm capable of toppling the regime, long-term stability, after the fall of the Islamic Republic, will also require an acceptance of Iran’s cultural and ideological diversity as permanent features of a truly free nation.
Ammar Maleki is the founder and director of non-profit GAMAAN. He was selected as World Association for Public Opinion Research’s national representative for Iran for the 2025–2027 term.
Pooyan Tamimi Arab receives funding from the Dutch Research Council for the project Iran’s Secular Shift (2025-2030; VI.Vidi.231F.020). He is a board member of the non-profit research institute GAMAAN.
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