Burning United States Presidents Protest Effigies in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan

This essay deals with a specific form of political portraiture, namely effigies used in protests in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, United States politics, especially the wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, profoundly impacted the whole region, and protests against such interferences often took the form of burning the effigies of United States Presidents. In Iran this practice had been current during the Iranian Revolution too: effigies of President Carter were paraded and burned by demonstrators in the streets of Tehran in 1979. The photographs taken during these protests were distributed by the international media and reached large audiences. They stage the punishment of US leaders to vividly denounce the injustices that resulted from their decisions. The essay examines the effigies’ aesthetics, the relation to Western image culture, the strategic use that has been made of them, the nature of the performance, and its effectiveness as a form of communication.