A compact way to read the last decade of Iranian protest waves is to treat them as the political expression of a specific accumulation regime: oil-rent revenues and a centralized state enable a “market” that is formally capitalist but substantively exclusive—opportunities, contracts, and property security flow through proximity to power, and “privatization” often means selective transfer to state-adjacent networks rather than open competition. In Vahabi’s vocabulary, this is not an accidental deviation from the economy; coercion, exclusion, and rule-making are part of how the system reproduces itself [1].
That political economy leads to the following social landscape: multiple marginalized groups whose injuries overlap (class, gender, ethnic/religious status, center–periphery), plus a recurring logic of repression that tries to prevent durable internal organization from stabilizing. The result is not the absence of opposition but opposition that reappears in waves—what contentious-politics scholarship calls a cycle of contention which consists of rapid diffusion, tactical innovation, then repression, then reactivation when new shocks hit [2, 3]. However, it has to be mentioned that this cycle is uneven. Some localized traditions of sustained organization persist between peaks, or during them—most visibly in Kurdish regions, where coordinated shutdowns and strike repertoires have repeatedly been mobilized even when nationwide synchronization is structurally difficult under repression.
The diaspora then operates as a parallel arena with different incentives and legitimacy tests—media visibility, institutional recognition, donor ecosystems, ideological inheritance—so its factional conflicts often fail to reorganize what happens inside. In that setting, alignment is sometimes co-produced: diaspora actors may seek foreign recognition as political capital, and foreign states’ interventions—likely and often in line with their own interests—often favor partners whose agendas appear compatible with external strategic interests. In this transnational arena, “legible actors” get selected and amplified (sometimes by foreign media and institutions) precisely because internal figures have been systematically eliminated; the external field gravitates toward names and faces even when domestic contention remains decentralized.
Here, there is a risk: an elite-led transition that changes the surface (symbols, selective social liberalization, diplomatic style) while keeping the core distributional system intact—because that system is extremely useful for any centralizing project and extremely reassuring to entrenched wealth. Fatourehchi’s older “Gorbachev vs. Yeltsin” analogy is useful here as a warning that “reform” can function as a managed pathway to a new elite settlement rather than a democratic breakthrough [4]. If a transition is structured around continuity of property, contracts, and insider access, then it becomes rational for parts of the former ‘reformist’ managerial layer—and the state-adjacent bourgeoisie—to align with monarchist-centered transition projects that promise international reintegration while protecting domestic exclusivity. In other words: inclusive for global capital, exclusive at home.
In this condition, anti-discrimination as the keyword can bridge class suffering, gender coercion, and center–periphery fractures into a shared justice language with everyday legitimacy. Here, Nikfar’s analysis is useful because it treats discrimination not as a side-issue but as a system that is produced across layers—programmatic/legal discrimination and deeper, project-based discrimination that reorganizes society while making equality structurally impossible [5]. That’s why unions, professional associations, and rights-based movements (even when repressed) matter so much. They’re among the few formations capable of contesting not only symbols and leaders, but the underlying distributional system.
Nevertheless, even amid all the noise and factional struggle in the diaspora arena—and regardless of how external actors try to frame “transition”—people inside Iran keep producing a historically grounded political awareness that is social, lived, and cumulative. Some groups already carry it in organized form (unions, rights networks, local civic circles, families of victims), and others reach it through the repeated experience of crisis, repression, and collective action. That is why the struggle reappears as a continuity rather than a single episode—from 2009, to 2017–18, to 2019, to Woman, Life, Freedom in 2022–23, and into the current cycle—even as externally recognizable transition narratives, including monarchist ones, compete to define its meaning from the outside. If a future outcome is not fully emancipatory and a new arrangement reproduces forms of exclusion or installs a “surface” liberalization while keeping deeper hierarchies, this still does not automatically end the movement’s history. People who have been in the streets, and the infrastructures that sustain them, do not disappear at the moment of institutional change; they monitor, contest, and keep voicing demands, especially around discrimination as a central issue and organizing principle in the Iranian context. In that sense, the political horizon is not exhausted by any single transition design, nor by any externally legible figurehead or elite bargain.
In a society where discrimination is systemic and power has long been organized through exclusion, the struggle for a more equal governance system is likely to remain iterative: advances, disappointments, renewed contention—yet with cumulative learning, deeper coalitions, and a growing capacity to articulate anti-discriminatory politics as the measure of legitimacy.
References:
- Mehrdad Vahabi, The Political Economy of Destructive Power (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2004).
- Sidney G. Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- Charles Tilly and Sidney G. Tarrow, Contentious Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- Nader Fatourehchi (نادر فتورهچی), post on X, December 8, 2018.
- Mohammad Reza Nikfar (محمدرضا نیکفر), “توسعه، تبعیض و چندپارگی” [Development, Discrimination, and Fragmentation], interview by Babak Mina, republished May 5, 2013.
