بازتولید گفتمان مقاومت در زیست‌جهان سیاسی دیجیتال نسل جوان ایران پس از جنگ دوازده‌روزه ۱۴۰۴

The twelve-day war of America and Israel against Iran in 2025, in addition to being a military event, provided a ground for rereading and rearranging political, identity, and emotional meanings in Iranian society, especially in the digital space. In this context, concepts such as homeland, security, enemy, authority, martyrdom, and resistance were exposed to various representations and interpretations, and social networks became an arena for the production, redistribution, and circulation of political narratives. The aim of the research is to explain how the resistance discourse is reinterpreted and reproduced in the digital political lifeworld of Iran's young generation after the twelve-day war. Rather than focusing solely on young people's agreement or disagreement with the official resistance discourse, this research examines the semantic, emotional, identity-related, and communicative processes effective in its reconstruction in everyday experiences and networked interactions. The distinguishing feature of the research is the analysis of resistance as a social and interpretive process and the introduction of the concept of "lifeworldized resistance" to explain the linkage of political discourse, lived experience, and digital communicative culture. The main problem of the research is: how has the resistance discourse after the twelve-day war of 2025 been reinterpreted and reproduced in the digital political lifeworld of Iran's young generation? The importance of this problem arises from the fact that the continuity of political discourses cannot be explained merely by examining the production and transmission of official messages; because social actors, in confronting political events, reconstruct existing meanings through their lived experiences, emotions, social relations, and interpretive frameworks. Therefore, in this article, in addition to identifying themes related to resistance, we examine how concepts such as homeland, security, enemy, authority, and martyrdom are redefined, and the role of collective emotions, generational position, and networked interactions. In this framework, the young generation is considered not a homogeneous group with identical reactions, but a collection of actors with the possibility of different interpretations; therefore, examining the reproduction of the resistance discourse requires attention to the semantic patterns present in the studied content and avoidance of assuming that all young people uniformly accept the official narrative. This research was conducted with a qualitative approach, within the interpretive paradigm, and using the method of political netnography. The research field was Persian-language public content on Instagram, X, and Telegram from the beginning of the twelve-day war in July 2025 to the end of December of the same year. Purposive and theoretical sampling was carried out based on relevance to the research question, diversity of narratives, and the interpretive capacity of the data. Private content, mere news, advertisements, repetitive reposts lacking commentary, and material lacking interpretive capacity were set aside. Of the 90 initial content units, 70 remained after refinement, and 36 rich units—including 14 from Instagram, 12 from X, and 10 from Telegram—were selected for in-depth analysis. The data were analyzed using Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis method with MAXQDA software. Repeated review of the data, recording of analytical decisions, reflective notes, and comparison of the three platforms helped strengthen the coherence and transparency of the analysis. Due to limitations in verifying user identities, the findings are not a statistical representation of the attitudes of Iran's entire young generation. The data analysis led to the identification of six overarching themes. The first theme is "re-centering of the homeland," which refers to the return of the homeland and national belonging to the center of political meaning-making under conditions of external threat; in this formulation, defense of Iran can be distinguished from internal political disputes, without all disputes necessarily being eliminated. The second theme is "resistance-oriented realism," which shows that resistance in part of the examined content, in addition to its idealistic and ideological meaning, has been reinterpreted as a response to threat, a necessity of survival, deterrence, and the preservation of collective security. The third theme is "suspension of the cleavage in a state of threat"; according to it, the highlighting of an external threat can strengthen certain elements of shared identity and national solidarity and temporarily marginalize part of internal disputes, without this meaning the complete elimination of political and social cleavages. The fourth theme is the "emotional turn of resistance," which highlights the role of fear, anger, grief, pride, empathy, and hope in linking political concepts to personal and collective experiences; accordingly, resistance in part of the digital narratives transcends the level of an abstract concept and finds meaning in the form of emotional, familial, and national experiences. The fifth theme is the "generationalization of the heroic narrative," which shows the reinterpretation of the concepts of martyrdom and heroism in the everyday language, personal narratives, images, and cultural formats of the young generation. The sixth theme is "networked resistance from below," which emphasizes users' participation in the production and circulation of meaning through content creation, selective reposting, hashtags, images, political satire, and decentralized interactions. The combination of these six themes led to the formation of the central concept of "lifeworldized resistance"; a concept that expresses the retranslation of the resistance discourse from the official and institutional level to political, emotional, generational, and networked experiences; however, the digital space cannot be considered a uniform arena, for rival narratives may also highlight the human and economic costs of the war, the necessity of protecting the lives and welfare of citizens, or criticism of the performance of power institutions. The extent of the presence and importance of these narratives should be assessed on the basis of direct evidence from the data.
The findings of the research showed that the reproduction of the resistance discourse in the digital lifeworld of the young generation is not a one-way process, but is formed through the interaction among political events, lived experience, collective emotions, identity meanings, and networked communicative culture. The concept of "lifeworldized resistance" explains this transformation and emphasizes the ability of young actors to select, reinterpret, and reproduce elements of political discourse in everyday life; nevertheless, the existence of resistance themes does not mean a universal agreement of young people with a single narrative, because patriotism, security, resistance, and peace can find meaning within different interpretive frameworks; therefore, understanding the dynamics of this discourse requires simultaneous attention to dominant and rival narratives, generational experiences, and the mechanisms of meaning production in the digital space; also, given the qualitative nature of the research and the limitation of the data to the public content of three platforms, the findings are a context-bound explanation of the examined data, not an estimate of the attitudes of all of Iran's youth.