When the internet went dark and the world outside narrowed to the walls of a single room, AmirAli Maleki kept writing. With reliable connectivity gone, the notes application on his phone became his means of defiance. Whenever everyday life pressed in on him, whether through a conversation or an image evoking fear or solidarity, he wrote it down before it could disappear.
A scholar of law and philosophy and JURIST’s Iran correspondent, Maleki focuses on the impact of international law and the theories that undergird it on the lives of those around him. He is the 2026 recipient of the David M. Crane Rule of Law Award, given by JURIST to a journalist who, in the face of formidable obstacles, shows extraordinary dedication and integrity in uncovering and scrutinizing rule-of-law issues. The award is named for David M. Crane, founding Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
Across his writing, Maleki has been developing a distinctive conceptual vocabulary—”political stuttering,” “floating norms,” “legal memory,” a “postmodern natural law”—drawn from thinkers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Kelsen and Al-Farabi, and tested against the lived realities of contemporary Iran. What unites these ideas is a conviction that thought must remain tethered to life, and that neither law nor language ever arrives at completion.
In this conversation, Maleki speaks about the duty of remembrance, the limits of political language, the “Iranianization” of legal thought, why he writes about football, and what he hopes a new generation of Iranian scholars can bring to international legal theory.
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This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
You have written prolifically since the start of the war, at times on a notes app without reliable internet. Can you describe what it was like to work under those conditions, and what drove you to continue your intellectual pursuits under such dire circumstances?
Before answering the question directly, I think we should first ask a more fundamental one: what is the role of an intellectual? And what do we actually mean when we use that word?
To me, being an intellectual is not a permanent identity attached to a particular person. It is a contingent role that anyone can assume at certain moments. An intellectual is not a special social class. Any individual, under particular circumstances, can generate illuminating ideas and help make sense of the world around them.
In my own case, I am first and foremost a student and a legal scholar who is still learning. Yet there are moments when I also become an intellectual in this broader sense. What gives rise to that role are all the other roles I inhabit: being a son, a partner, a brother, a teacher, a friend, and ultimately a citizen. The intellectual emerges when these lived experiences create a responsibility to remember, to reflect, and to bear witness.
For me, the central task of the intellectual is remembrance. We have a duty to recall and record the events, encounters, and images that pass through our social lives, especially when circumstances encourage forgetting. To remember is not merely an act of preserving the past; it is a form of resistance. It is a way of insisting that experiences matter and that they deserve to be articulated and shared.
This is why, during the war, I continued writing whenever I could. Internet access was often unreliable or unavailable, so my phone’s notes application became my workspace. Whenever everyday life pressed in on me, whether through a conversation or an image evoking fear or solidarity, I wrote it down before it could disappear.
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