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 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 an independent media platform. We aggregate independently produced content: podcasts, interviews, articles, documentaries, books, and research reports on Iran's political landscape. Everything in Context is cross-referenced with Evidence. A podcast that mentions a killed protester links to that person's profile. An article about a specific protest links to the archived footage and casualty records. The two sections talk to each other.

This structure connects independent analysis with primary documentation.

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 section aggregates and curates content from independent creators; 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.

Our scope is intentionally narrow to maintain methodological consistency and depth. Nabard focuses on event-based political violence and state-citizen interactions within Iran. We do not currently document:

These exclusions are structural limitations, not denials of importance.

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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