The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in custody of Iranian authorities, last month, has led to the outbreak of widespread protests across the country, largely led by women, to challenge the ultra-conservative government’s authority, and more particularly its institutions such as the moral police that is responsible to regulate the population’s adherence towards the state-sanctioned version of conservative Islam in place since the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
Iran, of course, is not new to protests, despite strict state control. Tehran in the recent past saw protests in 2009, against what many called fraudulent elections; in 2017, against economic stresses; and in 2019, against a hike in fuel prices. It can be argued that none of those earlier events garnered the kind of interest and support, specifically on social media, as the women-led protests that is taking place today.
However, what these protests seek to gain from an Iranian context is a whole different ball game. Political change, coupled with an ideological reorientation of a state structure is easier said than done, despite popular mobilisation against it. The Arab Spring, from a West Asian context, perhaps remains a prime example a decade after it began to spread across the region. From Tahrir Square in Egypt to protests peppered across the Gulf region, what changed was arguably a little direction to mitigate future risk by the region’s monarchies, the political structures themselves survived. In Egypt, the ouster of Hosni Mubarak’s almost 30-year-long rule led to elections that brought a pro-Muslim Brotherhood candidate to power, alarming regional states, and the United States (US) alike. The Brotherhood government was dislodged via a coup in 2013, bringing the Egyptian Army Chief, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, into power.
The other challenge for such protests is the fact that geopolitics, in general, has a significant penchant to compromise with morals, ethics, and ideas in return for real-world gains. A lot of global capacity, and specifically the west, is today tied down with the Russia-Ukraine war and the protection of European borders. Whilst the strains of the West’s relations with Iran are as old as the Revolution itself, and despite the protests being independent in nature, the Iranian state’s claim that it is the US and Israel that are planning these uprisings, aiming to attach the protests as nefarious designs purported by foreign forces against Iranian interests. This is consistent with its response regarding other similar domestic upheavals in the past. Much like during the Arab Spring, when then-President Barack Obama had asked US-based social media companies like Twitter to keep their services online and defer any planned down maintenance, this time as well the US has looked to primarily try and give further, more open access to information and the internet to the protesters via technologies such as Starlink in an attempt to bypass Iranian state censors.
The challenge for any social protest in Iran today is like those faced by others during the Arab Spring, that of a lack of an off-ramp. The ascent of Ebrahim Raisi as Iran’s president in 2021 brought back into power the conservative section of Iranian polity, after Former President Hassan Rouhani, known to be a ‘moderate’ and ‘reformist’, spent most of his tenure trying to normalise Iran’s relations with the US and negotiated with the P5+1 group of states the nuclear deal (also known as the JCPOA) which was signed in 2015 despite pushback from the conservatives. While this would have been a watershed moment, the US unilaterally withdrawing from the deal under the presidency of Donald Trump in 2018 was a big blow to any future US–Iran rapprochement, and also to a certain extent, the Iranian moderate’s ecosystem, which did try to find its feet during previous protest movements but without much success. The failure of the JCPOA was seen by the conservatives as another example where the US proved that it could not be trusted and engaging with the same was a futile endeavour, even though negotiations to bring the deal back continue even today, albeit with much less optimism.
Over this period, the dominant clerical establishment, led by Ayatollah Khamenei, has strengthened itself to insulate itself and the state from western sanctions, and this has included closer relations with Russia and China, two countries that offer economic assistance and political partnership without strings attached in a world fast moving towards a new era of great power competition between Washington D.C. and Beijing. The current protests are taking place under these geopolitical realities, which make it hard for movements to translate into action by states that view most events through the lens of the existential threat posed by foreign interventionism. Furthermore, if the protests are largely inclined to one city or social strata and do not gain mass traction, much like before, the government can clamp down on them without significant local blowback. Domestic corruption and economic mismanagement have also played their own role in fermenting public discontent. According to a poll conducted in 2021 by the University of Maryland and IranPoll, a Canada-based research firm focusing on Iran, 63 percent of Iranians (out of a sample size of 1,000) blamed corruption and mismanagement more than international sanctions for economic distress.
The current protests have, in fact, gained a lot of traction, both within Iran, and internationally, with both schools and universities inside Iran seeing pushback. This is perhaps why, Ayatollah Khamenei, despite praising the police and security agencies, has not yet called for an all-encompassing hard national crackdown. Sixty percent of Iran’s population of 80 million is below the age of 30. The perception costs here may be significant for Iran if a large section of young women do not see their rights, privileges, and aspirations aligned with the state. Saudi Arabia, perhaps still most popularly known for its ultra-conservatism, arguably realised this, and ‘defanged’ its own moral police establishment, known as the Mutawa, to portray a more “moderate” polity heralding Riyadh towards a more stable economic future beyond oil money, and looking to make itself more palatable to the international community. After these protests, Tehran risks taking this unwanted mantle from Riyadh in eyes of the international community.
The kind of real-world effect these protests will bring to Iranian politics, if any, remains to be seen. The place to witness any potential change in political course would be to keep an eye on who succeeds the 83-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei in the future, and whether this particular transfer of power would bring any fundamental political and ideological reorientation in the country, or whether it will remain business as usual.
