A new collaboration for The Public Source examines how war, sanctions and attacks on scientific infrastructure turn access to medicine into a struggle for national survival
A new graphic collaboration between artist and graphic journalist Gianluca Costantini and Iranian writer and scholar Maziyar Ghiabi explores the relationship between medicine, political sovereignty and survival in contemporary Iran.
Published by The Public Source on 18 August 2026, Manufacturing Survival combines drawings by Costantini with a script by Ghiabi. The work is part of A War on Sovereignty and appears within Comictern, The Public Source’s platform for politically engaged fiction and nonfiction comics.
Across two densely constructed black-and-white pages, the comic connects military conflict with a longer history of pressure on Iranian science, healthcare and pharmaceutical production. Laboratories, medicines and research institutions are not treated as secondary elements of war. They appear as part of the infrastructure through which a society protects life, preserves knowledge and maintains a degree of independence.
The first page considers the damage caused when war reaches scientific and medical institutions. The destruction of a laboratory or research centre represents more than the loss of a building: it can interrupt decades of accumulated knowledge, professional training and public-health work. Scientists, doctors and patients are placed inside the same political geography as military targets, sanctions and diplomatic confrontation.
The second page turns to Iran’s pharmaceutical sector and the consequences of prolonged economic sanctions. Although medicines are often formally described as exempt from sanctions, restrictions on banking, payments, insurance, transportation and access to raw materials can still obstruct their production and distribution. The ability to manufacture generic medicines domestically therefore becomes both a public-health necessity and an expression of sovereignty.
This is the central tension of the collaboration: pharmaceutical independence is presented neither as an abstract industrial ambition nor as a simple celebration of national self-sufficiency. It is a strategy developed under pressure. Producing medicines inside the country can reduce dependence on supply chains vulnerable to political decisions made elsewhere, but domestic production continues to rely on scientific exchange, specialised equipment, chemical ingredients and international networks.
Related project
My Drawings for the Iranian Protests
An extensive visual archive of drawings created in solidarity with the Iranian uprising and the global movement for “Woman, Life, Freedom”.
The comic asks what sovereignty means when access to treatment can be restricted without a hospital being directly attacked. Economic measures, border controls and financial prohibitions may appear less visible than bombs, yet their effects can enter pharmacies, clinics and individual bodies. The shortage of a medicine transforms geopolitical power into an intimate experience.
Maziyar Ghiabi brings to the project a long engagement with the politics of medicine, drugs and governance in Iran. He is associate professor of social sciences and medical humanities at the University of Exeter, where he directs the Centre for Persian and Iranian Studies.
The Centre was established to connect research on Iran and the Persianate world across the social sciences, humanities, health and environmental studies. This interdisciplinary approach is central to Manufacturing Survival, where medicine cannot be separated from history, economics, state power and international relations.
Ghiabi is the author of Drugs Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran and co-author, with Billie Jeanne Brownlee, of States without People: Revolt and Defeat in the Middle East. His script situates pharmaceutical production within a wider history of revolution, war, sanctions and state formation.
Costantini translates this analysis into a visual narrative in which institutions and political forces are connected to human consequences. His drawings move between documentary detail and symbolic compression, making visible relationships that are often separated in conventional reporting: a research laboratory and a battlefield, a pharmaceutical factory and an international sanction, scientific memory and the immediate needs of a patient.
Related article
Iran’s Women-Led Revolution Inspires Italian Cartoonist Gianluca Costantini
How drawing became a form of solidarity with the women-led uprising that followed the death of Mahsa Jina Amini and carried the demand for “Woman, Life, Freedom” around the world.
The collaboration continues Costantini’s use of drawing as a form of political documentation. His earlier work on Iran followed the women-led uprising that emerged after the death of Mahsa Jina Amini and the continuing demand for “Woman, Life, Freedom,” documented in Iran’s Women-Led Revolution Inspires Italian Cartoonist Gianluca Costantini and in the visual archive My Drawings for the Iranian Protests.
It also belongs to a broader exploration of how graphic narratives can make structures of power visible. In Zodiac, created with Ai Weiwei and Elettra Stamboulis, drawing becomes a means of connecting personal memory, state authority and freedom of expression. In Manufacturing Survival, the same visual language turns toward the politics of healthcare and the infrastructures required to sustain collective life.
The Public Source describes Comictern as a space for politically charged comics grounded in personal experience, journalistic investigation and critical social questions. This collaboration embodies that approach: scholarship becomes script, research becomes sequential art, and pharmaceutical production becomes a story about bodies, knowledge and power.
At its core, Manufacturing Survival asks a direct question: who controls the conditions necessary for people to remain alive? By placing medicine at the centre of the debate over war and sovereignty, Costantini and Ghiabi show that the defence of a society does not take place only at its borders. It also takes place in laboratories, universities, factories, hospitals and pharmacies—where scientific knowledge is transformed into the material possibility of survival.
Read the complete comic on The Public Source.
ChannelDraw is independent and reader-supported. Your support helps us continue documenting artists, journalists and activists whose voices are threatened or censored.
Other ways to support ChannelDraw
You can also support our independent work by joining us on Patreon or Substack, or by purchasing a ChannelDraw Yearbook. Every contribution helps us keep ChannelDraw independent and continue documenting stories that need to be seen.
