There is broad agreement that any social movement can be understood as collective action: individuals and groups voluntarily coordinating to pursue shared values or demands, thereby placing themselves in confrontation with existing power structures. Typically, demands are first articulated by political figures or organizations—through a statement, a speech, or an interview—after which collective action mobilizes around realizing those demands.
What is striking about “Woman, Life, Freedom” is that it did not unfold in this way. It did not begin with a clearly stated demand, mobilize forces around it, bring supporters into the streets, and then wait for that demand to be met. In other words, the movement did not follow the conventional pattern of protest:
state the demand → act collectively → wait for its fulfillment
Prefigurative Politics
To understand this difference, it helps to compare “Woman, Life, Freedom” with the “One Million Signatures Campaign.”
That campaign was launched by women’s rights activists on August 27, 2006, following a protest earlier that summer in Tehran’s Haft-e Tir Square. Its goal was to collect at least one million signatures in support of ending legal discrimination against women. In that sense, it followed the conventional model: the present was the time to gather signatures, while the future was when those demands might—hopefully—be fulfilled. The logic was one of separation between present and future, between the path and the goal.
“Woman, Life, Freedom,” too, called for ending gender discrimination, but in continuity with the Kurdish movement it expanded into a broader demand to end all forms of discrimination. Its central slogan was not a demand in the narrow sense familiar from protest campaigns. It was an expression of nature and identity, not a program in itself but the basis of any future program—an orienting idea.
Rather than presenting demands in the hope they might one day be met, the movement brought the future into the present. When women removed their headscarves in public—or defiantly set them on fire while dancing—they were enacting the future here and now.
This defining feature is what scholars call prefigurative politics: carrying an image of the future and realizing it in the present—not only in words but in practice. Prefiguration is not new to social movements; in their counter-spaces, all movements offer glimpses of the desired future. What distinguishes today’s movements worldwide, however, is the way resistance is woven into everyday life, erupting at times into collective action and creating alternative futures meant to be lived immediately. Anti-war, anti-globalization, anti-racist, and environmental struggles all exemplify this tendency.
A Movement Rooted in “Non-Movements”
Yet the prefigurative character of women’s resistance in Iran did not begin with the Jina uprising. Without the daily acts of defiance, especially by younger women, since the very beginning of clerical rule, such an uprising would not have been possible.
Earlier I contrasted “Woman, Life, Freedom” with the “One Million Signatures” campaign, but even here the distinction is not absolute. As Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani, one of its feminist initiators, later wrote: in that campaign too, the path and the goal were not truly separate. In fact, she argued, “the path and method are more important than the destination we set before ourselves.”
“Woman, Life, Freedom” grew out of what Asef Bayat calls non-movements—and it has retained that character at its core. Bayat, whose work on Middle Eastern and North African social struggles introduced this concept, defines non-movements as:
the collective actions of non-collective actors; the shared practices of large numbers of ordinary people whose fragmented but similar activities trigger profound social change, even if they are not guided by an ideology, leadership, or formal organization.
He adds that while “non-movements” share much with social movements, they remain distinct. One key difference lies in their temporality. Unlike classical movements that chart a strategic roadmap—“do this now to achieve that in the future”—non-movements concentrate entirely on present resistance. The present itself makes the future, without being mapped in advance.
Continuity
The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement continues precisely because it is grounded in non-movements that cannot be controlled or eradicated. What Bayat calls “quiet encroachment”—daily forms of resistance, small incursions into spaces of power, disruptions of imposed order, and the circulation of alternative discourses—persist regardless of repression.
There is a strong tendency to idealize the Woman Life Freedom movement, and that tendency itself can be read as a form of resistance. No society is “pure”; if it were, it would not be subjected to domination. A social movement is always an image of society, and when it seeks liberation, it highlights the liberatory dimension of that society. Idealized descriptions of “Woman, Life, Freedom” should therefore be understood less as historical claims of “this is what it was,” than as normative appeals: “this is what it should be.”
If we judge by the number of people who sustained active participation in protests, then “Woman, Life, Freedom,” like any movement, encompassed only a portion of society. Exact figures are unknown, but compared with earlier collective mobilizations, the Jina uprising ranks among the largest since the revolution—both in the numbers it drew and in its spread across Iranian cities. Yet what truly sets it apart is not just this scale, but the depth of its non-movement character: its rootedness in everyday resistance, in the space where diverse forms of discontent, protest, and “quiet encroachment” interweave.
At this fundamental level, the issue extends far beyond compulsory veiling. Reactions to multiple forms of deprivation and discrimination, to lived experiences of exploitation and violence, form a molten mass—what Cornelius Castoriadis once called a magma—from which anything may emerge. There is no predetermined direction; in each period, outcomes depend on the opportunities and channels available. The magma is a reservoir of meanings, possibilities, and forms. At any time, new institutions, signifiers, actions, and uprisings may arise from it.
