Iran’s mass movement of popular protest, sparked by the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the country’s notorious morality police, has now entered its fifth week. While many Western media outlets have focused on the feminist, women-led aspect of the demonstrations, the movement itself almost instantly jumped from a protest against the policy of forced hijab-wearing and the unequal treatment of women to an uncompromising demand that the regime itself must go.
Whereas previous uprisings eventually transitioned from protesting stolen elections (2009) and corrupt economic policy (2019) to expressing broad dissatisfaction with the Islamic Republic itself, the current movement adopted the slogan ‘Death to the Dictator’ from day one. While the deplorable situation of legally sanctioned ‘gender apartheid’ in Iran remains one of the core grievances of those protesting today, reflected in the rallying cry ‘women, life, freedom’, there is no prospect that disbanding the morality police or reforming to Iran’s family law code (however unrealistic) could placate those on the streets.
In short, Iran is experiencing a revolutionary moment. Whether that will translate into a revolutionary outcome is still uncertain. A lot would need to happen both inside and outside the country for the protesters to succeed in removing the regime, which would not go quietly or without significant bloodshed. The revolutionaries (for that is what they are) would need to expand their movement beyond the streets and act to disrupt the government’s grip on both security and the economy. The international community could play a decisive role in helping the protesters take that step, should Western nations choose to pivot their Iran policies away from the increasingly moribund nuclear deal (officially, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) and focus instead on the needs and demands of the Iranian people.
Read the article by Kylie Moore-Gilbert in The Strategist.