A post-war currency shock sparked bazaar shutdowns in Tehran, then spread through cities and universities, becoming a broader confrontation over inequality, repression, and life.
What began as an eruption of economic panic became a political confrontation over the past five days (this report covers the first four). After the 12-Day War, the exchange-rate crisis accelerated sharply: the US dollar, which had been around 830,000 rials, reportedly climbed to about 1,440,000 rials on the night the protests began—triggering instant “crazy inflation” in everything priced through currency expectations, from imports to everyday goods.
The shadow of war over society—the horizon of a second Israeli attack—deeply destabilized the market, pushing many to channel savings into dollars, gold, and other monetary shelters.
The crisis, however, is not experienced equally. The same sanctions regime that devastates wage labourers and small businesses also reproduces a privileged layer: those with access to hard currency through oil-revenue channels and sanction-circumvention networks accumulate, while the broader society absorbs the shock. In that sense, the exchange rate becomes more than an economic index: it becomes a daily, visible verdict on corruption, exclusion, and the state’s inability (or refusal) to govern for society.
Where it began and how it spread
The first spark came from Tehran’s mobile-phone commercial hubs—especially the Alaeddin mobile market and the Charsu complex—then moved outward into the streets around Hafez Bridge and the Jomhouri–Hafez intersection. From the first hours, the protest carried a strike logic: shutters down, collective chanting, and direct calls for other shopkeepers to close and join. Within days it widened along Tehran’s commercial arteries, diffused to other cities through street gatherings and nighttime chants, and—decisively—entered universities, where student mobilization synchronized with market shutdowns and pushed slogans further into openly anti-government territory.
Sunday, December 28, 2025
The protests began with closures and gatherings inside Alaeddin and Charsu and quickly spilled into the surrounding streets in central Tehran. Chants emphasized unity and urged wider participation. The movement was still anchored in market-space and livelihood anxiety, but it already looked like a public demonstration rather than a contained dispute: shop closures became a political gesture, and the street became the stage.
Monday, December 29, 2025
By the second day, the protest began to detach from its original “mobile market” geography and widen into bazaar-linked districts and commercial corridors. Shutdowns reportedly expanded beyond the initial hubs, and the chants sharpened: anger that had started with pricing chaos increasingly named the political order as the source of the crisis. This was also the day the protests began to feel contagious—less a single event and more a repeatable pattern: close the shop, step into the street, pull others into a collective shutdown.
A second dynamic emerged Monday night: diffusion beyond Tehran through neighborhood-style protest. Reports described gatherings and nighttime chanting in multiple places, including Hamadan, Kerman, Qeshm (Dargahan), Malard, Pardis, and Zanjan. In Tehran itself, protest chanting was also reported in public transit spaces, including at Saadi metro station. The form mattered as much as the locations: when protest moves from daytime marketplaces to nighttime neighborhoods, what began as a “merchant issue” is translated into a broader social language—one that can travel from shopfronts to streets to homes.
Tuesday, December 30, 2025
Day three was the turning point, because it linked three arenas at once: markets, streets, and universities. In Tehran, shutdowns continued while security pressure escalated, with reports of dispersal tactics in some areas and gatherings expanding to more visible public nodes. The bazaar-strike logic also deepened: the protest was not only a crowd—it was an interruption of circulation, a refusal to keep economic life “normal” while daily life collapses. Reports also noted expansion into major economic nodes such as the Shadabad iron market, as well as gatherings in central areas including Ferdowsi Square.
At the same time, the protest map widened across cities in ways that made it harder to narrate the unrest as “Tehran only.” Reports described protest activity and/or shutdowns in cities including Kermanshah, Shiraz, and Isfahan, alongside the earlier spread to places such as Hamadan and other towns. Politically, Tuesday also exposed elite anxiety: economic reshuffles and public messaging were read as attempts to contain the exchange-rate panic, but the street read them differently—as proof that the system’s steering mechanisms are exhausted.
Most importantly, universities entered the scene in a coordinated way. Reported campus mobilizations included the University of Tehran, Shahid Beheshti University, Sharif University of Technology, Amirkabir University of Technology, Khaje Nasir Toosi University of Technology (KNTU), Iran University of Science and Technology (Elm-o-Sanat), and the University of Science and Culture. Student actions were also reported outside Tehran, including at Isfahan University of Technology and in Yazd. Once campuses joined, the protest’s meaning shifted: it stopped being only about currency and turned into a struggle over the commodification of public services, political freedom, legitimacy, repression, and the right to public life—especially in the post–“Woman, Life, Freedom” landscape, where the boundary between economic grievance and political refusal is already thin.
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
On the fourth day, containment became more explicit. Reports described tighter security around Tehran’s bazaar and restrictions on gathering—or even lingering—near key commercial areas, alongside continued shutdowns. Protest activity continued in other cities. The most detailed escalation reported for this day was in Fasa (Fars province), where protesters gathered outside the governor’s office; clashes followed, with reports of direct firing toward protesters and the breaking of the governorate’s door amid intense confrontation. Shutdowns and protest activity were also reported in places including Isfahan (including a reported gathering around Naqsh-e Jahan Square), Kermanshah, Asadabad (Hamadan province), Shiraz, and Dehloran.
The clearest example of political containment was the government’s announcement of province-wide official closures in 23 provinces, officially framed as winter conditions (and, in some messaging, energy shortages). In political timing, however, it functioned as a maneuver: reduce street density, disrupt workplace and campus coordination, and fragment momentum by turning public life into a dispersed, semi-private condition. Moves toward shifting universities online reinforced the same logic: cut the connective tissue that allows protests to synchronize across sectors.
The role of students
Students were not merely “supporters” of a bazaar protest; they transformed the wave’s social composition and its political horizon. Universities can move fast because they already contain dense networks, shared spaces, and modes of organization such as student councils and student unions, alongside a learned repertoire of slogans and tactics. Once students mobilize, a protest stops being legible as a single-sector economic reaction and becomes a struggle over futures: dignity, freedom, and the distribution of risk. In this wave, students also acted as a bridge between the market and the street—especially when campus protests spilled into major avenues—linking economic shutdown with public confrontation. Reports also indicate that student mobilization continued into dormitory space: after arrests on Wednesday night, protests formed in dorms, lasting into the early hours, with chants demanding the release of detained students and directly targeting the political system.
Arrests and repression
Alongside dispersal and intimidation, arrests became a key tool to break coordination—targeting market participants, students, and local protest figures. According to the human rights organization Hengaw, at least 15 people were arrested across six cities—Dehloran, Yasuj, Nahavand, Asadabad, Shiraz, and Tehran—during the crackdown on protest gatherings on Wednesday, December 31, 2025. Reported detainees include: Hamzeh Imani (Asadabad); Farhad Khodarahmi (Nahavand); Saleh Arjomand, Qasem Arjomand, Hossein Arjomand, and Milad Masoumi (Yasuj); Abolfazl Shadfar, Ehsan Maleki, and Ali-Asghar Salehi (Dehloran). In Shiraz, arrests reportedly included Zaker Amini, Rouhollah Mohseni, Mohammadkarim Fazeli, and two teachers identified as Hejberi and Niroomand (surname unclear). In Tehran, Hengaw reported the arrest of Serira Karimi, secretary of the student council of the Faculty of Law and Political Science and a member of the central student council at the University of Tehran.
Separate student reporting (including student media) also described a wave of nighttime detentions in Tehran on Wednesday, including Hassan Mousavi (a 2023-entry sociology student at Shahid Beheshti University, arrested at home and later reported released), and the reported arrests of Ali Hassan-Bikian (PR secretary of the University of Tehran student council) and Alireza Hamami (head of the dormitory student council). In response, students in Shahid Beheshti dormitories held protests lasting into the early hours of Thursday, January 1, 2026. Hengaw reported that some of the detained teachers in Shiraz were released after several hours, while at least 10 detainees remained in custody, with no clear information on their condition or place of detention.
Longer context since the Dey 2017–2018 uprising
This four-day sequence across 22 cities in Iran is best understood as a chapter in a longer cycle that begins with the Dey 2017–2018 uprising (late December 2017–January 2018). That moment restored a template of nationwide protest ignited by livelihood collapse, but rapidly politicized because material crisis is felt as governance. November 2019—with the tripling of fuel prices overnight—showed how quickly an economic trigger could escalate into mass unrest, and how violently the state would respond. The 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising expanded the horizon of revolt from redistribution to dignity and bodily autonomy, normalizing a language of refusal that does not retreat back into “economic demands.” The current wave returns to Dey 2017–2018’s ignition point—when social reproduction at a general societal level enters crisis—but it unfolds in a post-2022 atmosphere where campuses can reappear quickly, slogans radicalize faster, and the social imagination of protest is already enlarged.
