Billboard murals as adversarial public diplomacy

Remediation and sacred typology in Iran’s “True Promise” campaigns

Bibliographic Data

ID21788514
AuthorsLiora Hendelman-Baavur (0000-0002-4058-7745, Tel Aviv University, corresponding author)
Year2026
Publication date2026-07-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMedia War & Conflict (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1750-6352 • E-ISSN: 1750-6360
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/17506352261456630
OpenAlexW7167051983
LanguageCA
References cited15

This article examines Iran’s 2024–2025 military confrontations with Israel by analyzing Tehran’s billboard murals, platform-ready graphics, and official statements as outputs of an institutional apparatus. It traces three mechanisms through which the system operates: multilingual address cues, crisis-time synchronization between operation naming and billboard turnover, and remediation whereby street installations are reformatted as circulating digital objects across platforms. The analysis situates Iran’s actions within a regional conflict environment, with references to allied fronts such as Hezbollah and the Houthi Red Sea campaign, while translating escalation into a sacred register of promise, punishment, divinely sanctioned victory, and scriptural citation. The author argues that Iran’s wartime visual system constitutes a form of adversarial public diplomacy: an outward-facing mode of address that treats counter-framing and adversarial uptake in cross-platform circulation as legible components of its signaling logic

Adversarial system · Digital media · Negotiation · Typology · Global Security and Public Health · Public Spaces through Art · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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