This penultimate chapter is based on nearly three years of fieldwork at various Hezbollah cultural institutions in Tehran (2012–2014). Here, I examine acts of citizenship among another group touched by the legacies of the Iran–Iraq war. However, these women ascribe to a notion of democratic politics which deviates from the Western sensibilities of popular sovereignty. Contrary to acts of citizenship performed by female relatives of war martyrs, post-2009 Hezbollah–affiliated cultural activists view rights to be only one pillar of the state’s structure, and not necessarily the most important element of statecraft to be protected. They engage with the tensions which exist between the state’s Islamic and Republic elements, and the entanglement of religion and politics, but without necessarily intending to resolve or undo them in the interest of the people. In this chapter, I move into the ambit of citizenship and politics among pro-state Hezbollah affiliates in post-2009 Iran to make this counterintuitive argument: the legislation of religion is not necessarily a fruitless effort for the state even when it fails to uniformly produce its ideal religious citizen. Indeed, hybrid regimes’ contradictions and ambiguities work in different ways to produce particular types of citizens.

The legacy of war is a neglected area of research, particularly among political scientists. This chapter thus explores the legacies of violence that occurred during the first decade of the Islamic Republic through case studies of wives and daughters of war martyrs. With a focus on tensions between the tenses, I begin by illustrating how compliance with the post-revolutionary state’s political regime can nevertheless engender act of citizenship that challenge state narratives from this inaccessible temporal site where the past and present compete and inspirations arise. Next, the chapter demonstrates how individualised memorialisations of the past are more explicitly and intentionally deployed by wives and daughters to encounter gender and familial cultures today. This section illustrates the state’s transformation through a discussion of how individual memories of the Islamic Republic’s first decade are specifically utilised by women to resist and consequently remake contemporary structures of the family. Interviewees identify personal participation during the revolution and war, and the death of husbands and fathers as central to shaping their contemporary acts of citizenship. These acts bolster their pursuit of autonomy in thought and action, particularly within and through the family.