Billboard murals as adversarial public diplomacy: Remediation and sacred typology in Iran’s “True Promise” campaigns

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.