Nabard is an archival infrastructure project focused on documenting political violence and civic resistance in Iran.

Nabard is built and maintained by an anonymous collective of individuals spread across multiple continents. Our team includes technologists, social scientists, data analysts, security specialists, and people with deep knowledge of Iran. For security reasons, we do not disclose personal identities or credentials. The platform itself is our proof of work: its architecture, data quality, and methodological rigor are open for anyone to evaluate.

We deliberately choose anonymity to protect ourselves, our families, and everyone who collaborates with this project in any capacity. Internally, team members operate through compartmentalized anonymous identities. This is not secrecy for its own sake; it is a structural safeguard against a regime with a documented record of targeting, threatening, and harming those who expose its actions.

Distinct roles handle labeling, independent review, and community reports. These roles are separated by design to reduce individual bias and maintain archival quality.

Nabard is structured to minimize concentrated authority. Editorial and operational decisions are resolved through anonymous collective vote, one person one vote. The design aims to resist capture by any individual or faction.

Although Nabard operates as a distributed and role-separated collective, we recognize that technical control, language fluency, and infrastructure access create informal power asymmetries. Governance design is treated as an ongoing process, not a fixed solution. Documentation is not neutral; classification shapes interpretation. We therefore distinguish between documenting events and interpreting them: the former is our mandate; the latter remains open.

Nabard operates within a contested political environment. Documentation does not occur outside power; it is shaped by classification, scope definition, verification thresholds, and interface design.

We do not claim neutrality in the sense of standing outside these dynamics. Instead, we design our systems to make them visible, traceable, and revisable.

Classification produces visibility. Scope produces exclusion. Verification produces hierarchies of evidentiary confidence. Searchability produces legibility, and legibility can produce risk.

For this reason, Nabard treats its own architecture (taxonomy, verification categories, ingestion pipelines, publication thresholds, and interface design) as objects of documentation. Methodological changes are versioned. Revisions are archived. Uncertainty is labeled rather than concealed.

Authority in Nabard does not derive from institutional status or political alignment. It derives from traceability, version history, and contestability. Records are structured so that users can independently assess confidence levels, revision histories, and reporting metadata.

Nabard is designed to preserve events. It is also designed to make visible the conditions under which those events become knowable.

Nabard (نبرد) means "battle" or "struggle" in Farsi. The project started in January 2026 (Dey 1404), during a wave of state violence that became known as Bloody Dey. Existing tools were not designed to capture events at that scale and velocity. A dedicated infrastructure became necessary.

The problem is larger than one regime's violence. Inside Iran, the state controls the entire information ecosystem: broadcast, print, and increasingly digital platforms. Independent reporting is criminalized. Outside Iran, the most visible opposition media outlets are well-funded with undisclosed sources and run editorial agendas that amplify certain factions while sidelining others. Ordinary people lack durable media infrastructure that reliably represents them. The regime narrates one reality; opposition outlets narrate another. Both operate within constraints set by their funding sources and political alignments.

Primary documentation by ordinary Iranians is scattered across thousands of social media accounts. A teacher in Isfahan posts a video. A student in Tehran writes a thread. A family in Zahedan shares a photo. None of it is searchable. None of it is connected. Most of it disappears within days. No infrastructure exists to collect, verify, or make this material findable as primary source evidence.

Nabard provides a structured, independent platform where evidence is preserved and contextual material is sourced from independent creators, without centralized editorial control over inclusion. Nabard does not claim to be the definitive record of Iran's political history. It is one infrastructure among many that may emerge. The archive is built for durability beyond any single political moment.

Nabard exists to reduce loss: loss of evidence, loss of context, loss of trace.

Nabard aims to build a structured, durable archive of political events and public expression in Iran.

Existing coverage is fragmented and uneven. Actors with greater media reach shape what remains visible. Others fade quickly or never enter the record. Nabard collects and organizes material across this spectrum, including material that is less amplified or harder to retain, so that positions, statements, and events can be examined in context, rather than through the lens of a single outlet or narrative. The goal is not balance for its own sake, but the conditions for informed judgment.

Classification and inclusion involve judgment. These decisions are documented, versioned, and open to scrutiny. For details on how inclusion and classification decisions are made, see our Methodology page.

A significant portion of documentation is produced by individuals. A video on X, a statement on Telegram, an image on Instagram. This material is short-lived, shaped by platforms optimized for visibility rather than retention, often detached from context, and difficult to retrieve over time. Nabard preserves these records, links them to related events and entities, makes them searchable, and maintains attribution to original sources. What is fleeting becomes traceable.

Nabard does not assume completeness. It is designed to reduce structural omission.

Nabard is designed as infrastructure. It is not tied to a person, organization, or political current. Records are structured, linked, and designed to remain accessible independent of any single interface. The goal is continuity: to maintain a record that remains usable over time, independent of shifts in media attention or political conditions.

Nabard has two sides. Evidence is a structured, bilingual archive of events, people, organizations, and media related to political life in Iran: those killed, detained, disappeared, and executed; protest slogans and their origins; acts of repression; and attributed media evidence spanning decades.

Context is the layer that connects the dots. Evidence often arrives as fragments: an image, a short video, a brief statement found online. Context places those fragments in time and space: where it happened, when, and what came before and after. A video of a street clash becomes part of a documented event, with casualties, location, and aftermath attached. An image of an arrest links to the person's profile and the wider wave of repression it belongs to. Evidence records what happened; Context explains how it fits together.

Together, the two sides turn scattered records into a navigable history.

Our approach combines automated data collection from social media with a structured human labeling and review process. For full details on how we collect, verify, and publish information, see our Methodology page.

Nabard is not a news outlet in the traditional sense. We do not employ reporters, break stories, or publish editorial opinions on current events. Our Context layer connects and interprets material that is already documented; it does not produce original reporting. We are not a court of law, a legal authority, or an authenticity guarantor. We do not claim that every resource on the platform is verified beyond doubt.

Nabard is not affiliated with any political party, opposition faction, or government. Our role is not to prescribe political outcomes, but to preserve verifiable records of events that shape Iran’s public life. Documentation exists within political realities.

Nabard is deliberately not incorporated as a legal entity in any jurisdiction. Formal registration would create a paper trail that could be used to identify core members and expose them to retaliation. This is a conscious tradeoff: we accept the tradeoff between institutional credibility and operational safety to protect the people who make the project possible. This position may change if conditions allow safe and accountable formalization.

For a full account of how we handle the tradeoff between archival coverage and verification certainty, see our Methodology page.

Nabard's scope has expanded since its original design. Cross-border conflict, geopolitical events directly affecting Iran, and cultural repression are now documented where they intersect with political life. The war made the original exclusions untenable: foreign state interventions and domestic political conditions are not separable categories.

Some areas remain outside systematic coverage: the long-term structural effects of international sanctions, the full ecology of foreign policy decisions that shape conditions inside Iran, and forms of slow institutional repression that do not register as discrete events. These are not neutral exclusions. They are framing choices that shape what the archive can represent and what it cannot.

An archive centered on state-citizen interactions within Iran necessarily abstracts domestic political violence from the international conditions that co-produce it. Sanctions regimes, foreign military operations, and diplomatic alignments are not backdrop; they are part of the political landscape the archive claims to document. Excluding them, even partially, produces a bounded portrait that should be read with that boundary in mind.

We do not frame these choices as structural limitations. They are operational decisions with interpretive consequences. Where scope constrains what the archive can show, that constraint is stated rather than concealed.

Nabard serves people directly affected by events, their families, researchers, journalists, civil society actors, and future generations.

Representation is an ethical responsibility. Records are structured for clarity and durability, but no data entry captures the fullness of lived experience.

Individuals directly affected by a record, or their immediate family members, may request review, correction, or removal. Requests are evaluated based on safety considerations, verification integrity, and the public interest in maintaining an accurate record.

Nabard has no external funding. No grants, no sponsors, no revenue. Infrastructure costs (servers, domains, and tools) are paid out of pocket by volunteers. Every hour spent building, reviewing, labeling, and maintaining this platform is unpaid. This is not a funded project operating anonymously; it is an unfunded one sustained entirely by voluntary work.

We may open anonymous donations in the future using privacy-preserving methods. Donations, if enabled, will support infrastructure costs only and will not be used to compensate contributors.

Financial independence is not a principle we declare; it is a structural requirement for the kind of work we do.

Automated collection pipelines run hourly, scanning monitored channels across Telegram, Instagram, X, and YouTube for new content. Ingested material enters a processing queue where it is reviewed, labeled, and classified by the team on a daily basis.

Verification continues after publication. A resource published today may be reclassified, corroborated, or flagged for re-review tomorrow based on new information. The archive is not a snapshot. It grows, self-corrects, and gets more reliable over time.

All data published on Nabard is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license for academic research, journalism, human rights documentation, and civic use. Every resource can be individually downloaded and shared via its unique link. Bulk data exports are available on request. Licensing under CC BY 4.0 does not constitute endorsement of any derivative work, interpretation, or use made of the data. Users are responsible for complying with applicable laws in their jurisdiction when reusing data.

For full licensing terms, attribution requirements, and details on how our aggregator model affects source rights, see the Data use and attribution section of our Methodology page.

Nabard is not sustained by funding. It is sustained by people.

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