After every revolution or major collapse, there is a moment that is usually overlooked: the moment when the old order has fallen, but the new order has not yet been built.
In Invisible Borders, I use the term “day zero of order” to refer to the moment when a new order replaces an established one. Day zero is not merely a political condition; it is also a mental one. Society is saturated with emotion: anger, hope, relief, fear. Everything appears possible, but precisely for that reason, everything can also slip out of control. At this moment, the desire for justice can very easily turn into a desire for elimination.
Those who were present in the previous system suddenly become enemies of the new order—not based on what they actually did, but simply on who they were. Complexity disappears, and the world is divided into two simple poles: us and them. This simplification soothes the mind, but it pushes society into a new cycle of violence.
In such an atmosphere, a significant portion of the leadership—and even the broader body—of the former system flees or seeks refuge abroad. Gradually, they turn into an external enemy: an enemy that both absorbs internal rage and allows the new order to preserve its internal cohesion through a permanent sense of threat. Elimination at home and enemy-making abroad are two complementary mechanisms that help reproduce the same old pattern of power.
But the cycle does not stop there. Over time, these exiled groups become not only carriers of the memory of exclusion, but also of humiliation, loss, and perceived injustice. Many of them—especially subsequent generations—shape their political identity not around a project for the future, but around revenge on the past. An opposition emerges that is oriented less toward building and more toward punishment; less fluent in the language of politics and more in the language of resentment.
This violent, vengeful opposition unintentionally becomes a mirror image of the very order it claims to fight. It reproduces the same simplifications, reinforces the same us-versus-them dichotomy, and reintroduces the same desire for elimination, merely under a different sign. In this way, the dominant order at home and the violent opposition abroad feed one another and ensure each other’s survival.
The 1979 revolution in Iran is a clear example of this pattern. The leaders and affiliates of the previous order were eliminated, exiled, or turned into refugees. Abroad, parts of the opposition gradually formed around nostalgia, anger, and a desire for revenge. At home, this image of an external enemy became a tool to justify repression and the concentration of power. The cycle was completed: elimination, exile, enemy construction, and the reproduction of domination.
On day zero, the central issue is not what to do with the past, but what to do with our anger. If anger is directly connected to power—whether in the form of a new state or a vengeful opposition—the outcome will not differ in substance. Elimination will simply change hands.
This is where tolerance acquires a different meaning—not as an invitation to forget or to compromise, but as a tool to break the cycle. Tolerance means separating justice from revenge, and politics from resentment. It means rejecting the assumption that the only way to move beyond the past is to punish it endlessly.
Within this framework, justice is no longer limited to traditional punishments. Long prison sentences and executions not only fail to contain violence; they export it into the future and even beyond borders. Rehabilitation, by contrast, is an attempt to break the intergenerational transmission of violence. Restricting access to power, accepting responsibility, and confronting the bitter experiences of victims are not acts of absolution, but measures to prevent the reproduction of the cycle of elimination.
Tolerance without acknowledging the victims’ suffering is meaningless. But tolerance without restraining the desire for revenge is equally incomplete. A society that merely relocates elimination will sooner or later encounter the same pattern again—only this time in a new guise.
If a new day zero arrives in Iran and this cycle is not broken, the danger is that once again there will be no true rupture, only a reversal of roles: yesterday’s excluded becoming tomorrow’s eliminators. Day zero is where the revolution ends, but responsibility begins—where society can decide whether it wants merely to repeat the past or to genuinely move beyond it.
If tolerance on day zero is managed wisely and society succeeds in severing the direct link between emotion, elimination, and power, then the most pressing issue ahead will be how to confront foreign intervention. Such intervention often enters under the language of assistance and stability, but in the absence of domestic management, it can internally undermine newly formed mechanisms of trust and transition. The experience of countries such as Iraq shows that even after escaping a repressive order, handing over the management of power to external actors turns political competition into proxy competition and reproduces cycles of instability. Whether Iran can avoid this trap depends not on the intentions of interveners, but on society’s capacity to manage intervention itself—a subject I will address in the next post.