← History Uncensored
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Foreign.
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Has been governed by the Islamic Republic for more than four decades. The regime suppresses fundamental rights, including freedom of speech, press, assembly and religion, often using violent crackdowns, arbitrary detention, torture, as well as execution. Thousands of Iranian people have been killed by the regime over the last few months. Yet resistance to the system has repeatedly erupted, from student uprisings to reform movements, to mass protests led by young people and women. So if opposition runs so deep, how is the regime so stubborn? Why hasn't it fallen? That's the question I'm investigating tonight with my guest. And I came across this line when I was researching this. If you rule, rule with justice and hold fast to what is right, if. If not, the rule will not last. It's written by the Great 13th century Persian moral philosopher and poet Sa'di of Shiraz in the Bustan. And it's part of this long Persian tradition of advising rulers that power without justice cannot endure. But for millions of Iranians, that will read less like wisdom and more like wishful thinking. Because for centuries, Persian writers, scholars and poets have returned to this question, what makes authority legitimate? And what happens when it isn't? That question might be louder than ever in Iran today. Despite the state tightly controlling media, restricting Internet access and imprisoning critics, dissent still finds a way to surface. So to understand what is sustaining the regime and how resistance keeps emerging, I spoke to Professor Kevin Harris, who's an Iranian historical sociologist and and author of A Social Politics and the Welfare State in Iran, which is coming soon. And he is himself Iranian and was born in Nawaz, Iran. There have been reports over the last few days that the CIA is working to arm Kurdish militias to ferment a popular uprising in Iran. Based on your studies and what you know of the country, would that align with public sentiment? How would that go down?
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This is a very interesting turn of events. One can, one can kind of see almost as farcical in the sense that whenever the United States has a problem in the Middle east, it decides to arm the Kurds. And prior to that, it's also what the British had done in the World War I. So armed Kurdish organizations have come and gone in Central Asia from World War I onwards. And so it's actually very interesting because this was a part of what the United States decided to do in the 1970s when it was trying to basically see what was to be done about Ba' Athist Iraq in the 1970s. And then like many times, also like what just occurred in the Syrian civil war, the United States basically abandoned the Kurdish Organizations that had armed and supported. So it seems like it's happening again. That's on the kind of Kurdish US Side. You know, Iran is a nation state that came out of a large Asian empire. Like many Asian empires, the composition of the population lived in an empire was not a nation. It. It was not a horizontal set of people who were exactly the same. Lots of languages, there were religions and religious minorities. And the rulers of the empires themselves often came from the steppe and the path of Imam itself. Who was Reza Shah? Reza Khantra. And Reza Shah, he was from the Caspian. He grew up speaking Mazan Durrani or Caspian language, and then moved to Tehran. So he was kind of basically a bumpkin from the north. And many of the former dynasties of the Persian Empire were Turkish or Turkish speaking from the north. That's the case with the Giant, with Qing. That's the case with the Mughals. That's the case of the Ottomans. Okay, so that's imperial politics. And we have to be very cautious not to take modern nationalism and project it on the empires of the past. From moving to an empire to a nation state is actually a very complex process. Most of them ended up producing essentially like an expulsion of peoples that collapsed of the Ottoman Empire, went along with the Armenian genocide and the expulsion of Ottoman Christians, which later were called Greeks. And they moved to Greece. They never been to Greece their entire life. The collapse of empires can often cause a lot of violence. In the Iranian case, although we have lots of examples of famine and political chaos, there ever was a full expulsion of peoples from moving from empire to nature state. Most Iranians got their last names in the 1930s, people picked their last names. So people's identities were linked to all kinds of different categorical markers. Your geography, where you were in relation to other places, your language, your kinship networks, your kinship networks. Ethnicity was necessarily a concept that was widely used to do politics with or to see one's relationship to others. Basically it was often over these other markers. But as Iran modernized by that I mean, as Iran became more of a nation, people saw themselves as Iranian, but then also also other things. Ethnicity as a concept became more important. Right. This is kind of a way of how we get to the present where people assume that Iran, like they assume that it is in actually many parts of the world that it's not, is somehow a territory in which discrete ethnic or ethno linguistic or ethno religious communities somehow live next to each other. And that you can just draw a map and get different colored sections and, you know, the Mosaic of multi ethnic Iran. That's not accurate. It's not accurate, by the way, by almost any country in the world. I would say it's not by any country. But in the Orion case, it's often combined with this kind of geopolitical fantasy that when the center collapses, these areas of Iran and the periphery are ready made somehow to secede. Now, it's true that in crises in the center in 1945, in 1978, 79, and now that political organizations that speak in ethnic claims, that have kinship networks or linkages over the borders become active and make political claims, that's certainly the case. That was the case with Kurdish organizations in 79, and it's been the case over the last decade. But we actually have to be cautious to say that because of that all of the Kurds in Iran are somehow allied with that or see those organizations as representing them. So I've run surveys in Iran and one of the things we did in these surveys is we asked questions that separated out people's linguistic identities and the languages their parents spoke from, basically using Iranian terminology, which is still a relatively unsettled terminology for ethnicity. And we found in these surveys that there certainly are Iranians who say I am a Kurd or I am a Turk, Azeri Turk, or I am Arab, right? Some of them still don't actually speak those languages anymore. They become ethnicized. They believe themselves as that ethnicity. But actually they moved to Tehran when they were a kid or they moved to another place. They speak Persian. We found other people who had multi ethnic identities. So I am both, you know, a kind of Persian, although that term is still a bit weird when you speak Persian and a Turk. In fact, the president of Iran, Pezeshkian, is like Turkish and Kurdish. The former leader and supreme jurist, recently assassinated Ali Khamenei, is from Mashhad and actually is half Turkish. He speaks Ozm Turkish. So and that's the elite, that's the elites, that's the leaders of the Islamic Republic. So this mixture is not homogeneity of all Iranians or all Persians. That's also, I think, quite kind of a way of projecting maybe some kind of version of Iranian nationalism onto the periphery. And people don't like that. People don't like to be told that it's true. But actually there's been a lot of mixture. So the question is not what is the actual demographic composition of Iran. The question is what are the political organizations that are making claims about politics? How do they present themselves and to what extent is that effective in mobilizing others. If you're living in Iranian Kurdistan and you've protested against the central government, you said that we've been ignored by the state, or we want to have more autonomy over schools, et cetera, et cetera, and the state represses you, then the state is also ethnicizing your politics. But similar demands for provincial development have occurred in lots of provinces and areas of Iran that wouldn't be seen by analysts with a map as somehow ethnic minority places. So we have to be cautious in claiming all politics in Iran is ethnic politics.
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After many waves of demonstrations, protests, acts of resistance, how is the Iranian regime still standing?
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There's been protests against the Islamic Republic ever since the founding of the Islamic Republic. For the first two to three years after the 1979 revolution, there was massive contention between the winners of the revolution, different parties and actors who wanted to take control over the state. And a kind of civil war existed in reality between different militant groups and other actors from 1979 all the way to 1983. Many of the political prisoners from that period underwent execution in jails. In the late 1980s during the Iran Iraq War, and then in the 1990s, although we often remember it as a relatively peaceful time in Iran, that that was a period in which civil society opened up and many new social actors formed organizations and protested that included students, women workers, and different civil society actors in the various provinces of Iran. So actually, Even in the 1990s, there was a lot of street politics. And protest was one of the types of social actions that we saw. What's really happened really since about the 2000 and tens, is the closure of institutionalized political competition in Iran. There were elections somewhat free, although the candidates were a bit limited, but that was one channel for a lot of politics in Iran to occur. And since the 2010s, largely because of government closure of political space, but also because of international pressure on Iran, kind of both feeding each other the space where that types of politics has been closed down. And that has contributed to when protests do occur, they end up more extreme and they end up repressed. So it's a combination of increased repression. And every time a new wave of protest has occurred in Iran over the last 10, 15 years, we've seen that's become more extreme in the demands different types of actors glom onto that. That's why we see increasing cycles of protests and protests actually been relatively common in Iran since the revolution. Why don't states collapse under the pressure of social unrest? Well, sociologists would generally say that states don't tend to collapse or be overthrown simply due to social pressure or public protest. There has to be a breakdown in the state and most importantly, a schism in the elites, especially between the military and the party, the party state. This schism tends to not occur in revolutionary regimes that are born in war and social conflict, in which the repressive and security organs of the state are deeply tied to the century. The party elite. Of course, the Islamic Republic doesn't have a single party like many socialist states, but it has a core set of elites that are attached to each other. And so, you know, most political science and sociologists would say that even with protest, even with mass discontent, even with economic crises, these types of states last a lot longer than your petty despots, your tin can dictators, which actually don't have an institutionalized state where the security and military parts of the state are deeply tied to, to the government.
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Let's look a bit closer at the earliest part of that period that you just outlined. So the 1979 revolution to overthrow an absolutist monarch and authoritarianism was a pluralistic endeavor. The groups came from many different areas of society. At what point after that did the regime decide it would not tolerate dissent?
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Well, it's pretty common truism that the individuals who carry out revolutions are not the ones who tend to take power afterwards. And the 1979 revolution is sort of like that. And that there was certainly a kind of growing coalition of actors and individuals. Remember, the revolution started if we back there to the beginning and maybe the middle of 1978, if not late 1977. So it grew over time. Even if we go to the summer of 1978, it was kind of a lull in Iran at the time, and many people thought that that protest cycle was over. But as the cycles of contention against the Papua monarchy grew, especially in late 1978, new actors came on the scene. In fact, workers came relatively late in the revolution, but once they did, they shut down the oil sector. They had mass strikes in the public sector, by the way, which we had never seen, we have never seen in these last waves in Iranian protests over the last five, six years. And then finally in the early 1979, the military itself decided to go back to the barracks. After three, four days of street battles, the monarchy fell. So there were many different actors contending for the state. That's very common in revolutions, in real revolutions, not where it's just a replacement of a segment of elite at the top and a kind of managed coup or ato Golpe in the Latin American sense. So, and then for about a period of a year, you know, this huge mobilization of different individuals who thought that nothing was going to change, you know, for their entire lives, all of a sudden had a relatively open political field. Publications came out. All kinds of leftist and Islamist books were published in that year, new newspapers were started. It was an open sphere, uncertain, and everybody who thought that they had a chance to express power got involved in politics. So for about a year and a half, or really about a year, there was a lot going on. It was very difficult to tell where things were going. In essence, when we asked, why did the regime shut it down? There was no regime yet. There was basically a process, a contentious process to take command of the state. And this involved all kinds of routes, both repressive and also incorporating workers. For example, on the one hand, autonomously were repressed and trying to start independent labor unions. They were kidnapping bosses. They were making all kinds of demands. On the other hand, the new Islamic Republic established worker councils and tried to make sure that at least some type of representation was possible. And we saw this in many different avenues of Iranian society. So over the 1980s, actually, the state expanded and it incorporated many people who had basically never had any contact with the government under the monarchy, incorporated them into different avenues and organs of the state in the countryside, with women, with students, and, of course, many people who fought in the war with veterans. So at the same time, we have repression, repression of actors and parties and organizations that tried to compete with the Khomeini, the individuals who aligned with Ayatollah Khomeini. On the other hand, many actors took advantage of this new political order, rewrote their biographies, fought in the war, came back with credentials. So it was a big mixture of the status order, unevenness of the status order. And that's why today and for the last 20, 30 years, many individuals have brandished their revolutionary credentials when making critiques of the state, critiques of the Islamic Republic, especially inside of Iran, as more and more dissidents kind of got kicked out of this closing political circle that ended up becoming the political elite of the Islamic Republic, or as many journalists like to call it, the regime.
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How important was the Iran Iraq war in entrenching the regime and freezing the efficacy of any kind of domestic opposition?
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It's a great question, and it falls into a common pattern of revolutions that seem threatening to the kind of geopolitical order of the time. Think about the French Revolution of 1798, the Russian Revolution of 1917. These revolutions caused a counter effect from the established political orders of their time. The British, the Austrians and the Russians basically formed multiple attempts, multiple coalitions to shut down Revolutionary France and eventually Napoleonic France. It was seen as basically a threat the entire European and global order. And so a war followed from a revolution. And the war and the revolution often are seen in tandem. And we can't understand the effects of the French Revolution without understanding effects of the Napoleonic wars both on France and on the rest of Europe. Well, same with the Russian Revolution. The Russian Revolution, of course, which was a product of World War I, induced an attempt to collapse the revolution from the outside and from within. Even though an exhausted Europe had just ended World War I, they continued to send troops to support the anti Bolshevik White Russians that it ended up this, the, the Russian Soviet Revolution and the war itself, where Trotsky was the, you know, the, the commander of the Red army that shaped the structure of the Soviet Union and basically put it on a, you know, put on a particular path. And one can make the same argument for the Iranian revolution that the 1970 revolution was perceived as, maybe really wasn't true, but was perceived as a challenge to a whole geopolitical order, US Led order in the Middle East. If you listen to Donald Trump's speech right after the war began with Iran a few days ago, he actually elicited a litany of complaints that Iran had done to challenge the United States power in the region. So the Iran Iraq war was not just a war between two states, although it's in the name, but Iraq. Although Saddam Hussein had seen himself as the leader of the radical Arab states of that period, he also thought that the Iranian revolution presented an opportunity for him to continue to lead the Arab Middle East. And so his opportunity was also taken advantage of by more conservative Arab states like the Gulf states and of course the United States. This is why Islamic Republic sees itself actually as a kind of state that is always challenging the United States. Whether or not that's actually true or not is a separate issue. So this process linked the revolution and the war together. And of course, war is different than revolution. War brings people into political and public life that revolutions don't necessarily do. So. So many of the individuals who became politicians, not just generals, but politicians, intellectuals, ministers, and took part in government life. Like in many places that have wars, including the United States, they rose up through the war. They came largely from lower middle class backgrounds. They were not the oppositional intelligentsia of the 1970s. And this generation, this war generation, are the people who are in their 60s, who are actually leading the Revolutionary Guards and now dying in the US Israeli led war against Iran.
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One of the biggest questions that outsiders seem to have at the moment about Iran is whether or not this is a religious society being governed by an Islamic system, or if it is a predominantly secular society now under a theocratic state. What does the evidence actually show?
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It's a great question. It's one that Iranian social scientists and actually Iranian politicians themselves have been talking about since the 1990s, since the end of the Iran Iraq war and since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini and his replacement by Ayatollah Khamenei, the leader and supreme jurist. Up until very recently of Iran, there's been internally a huge discussion over a revolution that was supposed to instill and inspire a new moral social order. Instead, one has seen the rejection of that order and behaviors among people which were seen as improper or taboo, and of course, the attempt to regulate that social order. Now, every government regulates public order to some extent. We should exceptionalize Iran. This is of course, both the regulation of private life, of how people address in public all kinds of social behaviors. The state had something, the government had something to say about it. If you grow up in that system and you see that as kind of patriarchal, as oppressive, as authoritarian, it's some authority telling you what to do that's illegitimate. It does cause a reaction. And we have lots of evidence that there's been a widespread rejection of at least the state as the arbiter of what is religious and moral and ethical. That doesn't necessarily mean that people are becoming Spinoza type secularists, Enlightenment secularists reject God. We know that public religiosity, which is difficult to measure, I mean, how do we know if someone's religious? But, you know, in sociologist surveys inside of Iran themselves, by the way, the government has also paid for many of these surveys. We've tracked over the years since the 1990s, 2000s onwards, the declining religiosity in public of many individuals. That means how often are they going to mosque, Are they taking part in the rituals related to Shi'? Ism? So that would be evidence of secularization in that sense. We have to be cautious, however, to say that because public religiosity has declined, and I think there's nobody that disagrees with that, that this therefore means that other types of behaviors will change, including, by the way, the necessary lengthening of religion and the state. Many Iranians, of course, are nationalists. Like many people in the world, Iranians are no more and probably no less nationalist than Mexicans and Koreans and Brazilians and New Zealanders. So nationalism is also a kind of civic religion. It's a state religion. It's an idea that I am linked to this nation state. It's part of me. And in the cases of war like now, we see the response is that, well, I'm not defending the government, I'm defending the territory and this timeless essence that links me to individuals and societies of the past. And that's of course, by the way, that many oppositional Iranians also speak of Iran that way, with this very deep sense of a we, you know, which is a relatively recent construction as you noted in an earlier video. Nevertheless, it's very, very important. And that's one of the things, I think that the, that the planners, if you want to call them that, of the, of the current war against Iran really didn't take into account that the, they assume that all we have to do is bomb a country and we will change the calculation, change the cost benefit analysis of not only leaders, but the expectation that somehow this is going to induce a popular revolution. And instead what these things tend to induce, I mean, I'm not in Iran right now, it's hard to tell. But what it tends to induce is a kind of linking of one's identity and one's sense of existence with the status quo ante. So I think that also this sense of this secularization idea of rejecting the government because one's religious proclivities have changed should not therefore be interpreted as that means that we have a ready made opposition to overthrow the government relevant?
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I think, I'm guessing to what you just said. Are some of the public opinion surveys that you sent me before this interview, which I really appreciate, guess brownie points. Anytime somebody sends me data, an extra article. So thank you for that. But there was one part in particular which showed this is after the 12 day war of 2025, that support for Iran's missile program hit record highs and for the first time a slim majority of Iranians favored a nuclear deterrent. And I suppose outsiders might be thinking why would a population that often protests its own government support something like that? The answer perhaps is similar to what you were just describing.
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Yeah, I think that polls, one you're mentioning is about kind of an annual or every other year poll done by the University of Maryland at their International Studies Center. So basically people who study international relations, not Iranians. And certainly these are polls designed like a barometer to capture public opinion on particular Questions over long periods of time. And it's done in a kind of gold standard method of randomly calling households around Iran. I didn't run the survey, but I am familiar with the method. And I think as long as one interprets the survey over time, I think the data tells us something important. In that survey we see that there's high discontent with the state of the economy and that's been pretty stable over the last several years. There's high discontent with individual political figures in Iran. When somebody recently gets elected president, they kind of get a bump but then over time they get less popular like in many countries. So there's lots of seemingly public opinion critique of the status quo in Iran. But on the other hand, this poll and prior polls from the same organization show a pretty steady trend, as you noted, of what we could call nationalistic defense of the country. Not necessarily a tie, that they are so called hardline supporters of the Islamic Republic as it exists today. But we see that over time with increasing pressure from the United States led sanctions and then certainly since the war last summer, that there even increased support for the very same policies that the United States and Israel are claiming to and the attempting to end in Iran right now. So support for nuclear energy for the purpose of enrichment has gone up. Support for nuclear development for the purpose of possibly building a nuclear weapon is actually, according to the poll, has a majority support in Iran among the public and development of missiles for the purpose of defending Iran's interest. And along with that there are a few other questions about trusting the United States. And I mean one should not be surprised. I mean, if you had to pretend like a Martian came down and read that poll, the Martian, well, if they understood geopolitics would not be surprised. And that distrust of the United States has gone up because the United States was negotiating with Iran and then Israel attacked Iran in the process of negotiation. And now that has occurred not once but twice. So we have to be realistic about this. Whatever comes out of the ongoing war against the Iranian government and people right now, what kind of public opinion is going to emerge from the survivors if we don't turn to a civil war with mass migration out of Iran? What kind of public opinion is going to be held by the individuals in Iran in the next one or two or really more, three, four, five years?
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What role does state media and propaganda play at the moment in shaping public opinion? Because obviously any of that is going to be balanced with what people are actually seeing on the streets and knowing that their families are going through and executions and so on. Is that particularly persuasive to the population? Is it a powerful tool of the state?
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There's a lot of discussion inside of Iran of how bad state television actually is. Bad in two senses. Bad in the sense that it really tends to carry the voice of a kind of conservative political spectrum of Iranian politics. The head of the main state television is appointed by the leader in Supreme Jurist's office. And it has some kids TV shows in the morning, but other than that, basically it's pretty much the same all day. And along with that, there's been increasing access first to satellite opposition television and satellite television broadly from the Arab world, as well as from Europe and the United States, and at the same time increasing access to media online. So, you know, for those who are interested, and of course, remember, not everybody's interested in politics. Not everybody is like the watchers of your show. So many people are not interested. You know, they're not also watching TV for news, they're watching satellite television for videos, pop videos and music videos. And people just leave it on in the background or, or they go online. Because the main channels that many Iranians follow are Instagram influencers, celebrities, not pundit and talking heads, no matter their politics. That's actually normal behavior. That's not like abnormal behavior. That's the case in most countries. So I think we should also not overestimate the power of oppositional political media to permeate all of Orion society. I think that many people have a folk wisdom in Iran, like elsewhere, about politics and about to the extent to which politics in the center affects their daily lives or not. But it certainly is true that grievances on lots of things going wrong, or at least perceived going wrong, are going to be associated with those in power. It's also not surprising that the environmental crisis in Iran, the economic crises, the inability of the state to deal with increasing crises over social inequality, and the fact that since the revolution, society has become more educated, healthier, living standards went up in the 1990s and 2000s, new types of social classes were produced in this kind of post revolutionary order. And many individuals in these groups then turned around and started to critique the state. I think that's the one thing that we should really understand is that the time didn't stop in 1979, that the idea that the monarchy was this rapidly developing and modernizing social period is true. But the same is also true of the Islamic Republic, not because necessarily of the intentions of the post revolutionary state, but often despite those intentions, but with policies that expanded Education that increased the reach of the government, both to incorporate people and to tell them what to do, also generated new types of politics that when the space for contestation, the space for political competition closed down in the 2000s, really generated a kind of system where protests became more and more and more common. But this is not necessarily something that leads to a popular revolution. And there are other. There were other possibilities, rare. I mean, you know, difficult to see how they would become likely given. Given the pressure from the outside inside. But nevertheless, that was the hope that many of us had for this remnant of politics inside of Iran. Democratization doesn't necessarily mean pro Western. One of the great fears of the Arab Spring, of the protests all around the Middle east, of course, Iran had protests about at the same time, was that the governments that would come out of these popular uprisings would actually be less inclined to support U.S. foreign policy, you know, U.S. policies and interest in the Middle East. So democratization is a dangerous game. And one wonders now maybe only a thought experiment about what would a democratization process in Iran that had space to make demands on the state and to cleave some portion of the political elite over to its side, which is a long process. It's a contentious process, and it could also be a bloody process. But it's a different process than the. But regime change is basically a 21st century word for coup d'. Etat. A coup d' etat from an outside
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power over the last four decades, Kevin, which have been the most significant moments of resistance, and what damage, if any, did they inflict on the regime's grip on Iran?
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A
Like in China in the 1990s and 2000s, Iran had a kind of regular local protests over all types of issues. Farmers and students and workers. So we shouldn't think that there was no protest in Iranian society. That's a big mistake. So when we see when protests hit the media in the west, those are really large protests. Those are protests that kind of concatenate and different people get involved to get mobilized. Right. And those are also important because what they tended to do was to shake up the political elite of Iran. It would cause repression initially, but then afterwards there would be usually some kind of coalitional shift. Now, from very far away, it seems like nothing changed. But we usually saw in Iran after big protest waves, often marked by years, late 1990s, 1999 was a kind of wave in 2009 after a presidential election, and then increasingly in the 2000 and tens and 2000 and twenties, like more and more types of protests that those did Cause responses in the political elite, especially when they were internal and couldn't be pinned on foreign powers, couldn't be pinned on so called the enemies of the revolution. I mean, Iranian political elite, like a lot of post revolutionary politicians, are paranoid. I will leave it to the viewers to judge how right their paranoia is. Nevertheless, there's a paranoid style of Iranian politics. Internal protests that can legitimate their grievances are much harder to pin as somehow stooges of the outside powers. And this makes actually revolutionary elites uncomfortable because revolutions give people a language to do politics with, even though they also often have unintended consequences and they destroy as much as they create, but they also create a language. What most actors in Iranian protests tended to do is they said that you're not following the dictates of the revolution. I'm a revolutionary than you. Now, of course, at some point that exhausts itself. And if the state is constantly telling you what is and what is not revolutionary, you probably don't want to use that language at all. You're sick of it. But still it has and had a power in the post revolutionary political sphere. That's where these calls for, let's say, returning the monarchy to Iran also probably are less efficacious than many see from the outside. I think many people inside Iran use these slogans because they want something that is, they want to project them that what to them seems like the exact opposite of the status quo. I mean, if I'm in a protest where I might actually get shot, then am I going to say like I want 50% change? You're probably going to say something as radical as possible or the next person next is going to be as radical as possible. So there is a radicalizing effect in the rhetoric in these protests that don't have political outlets. That's totally understandable. But nevertheless, I think it's probably a step too far to therefore take from that slogans from the rhetoric that really this is a movement for the restoration of the Palmy monarchy. It means a lot of different things. Like in politics we hear a lot of slogans, but it might not mean exactly what we project onto it from the outside.
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B
Taking part in these protests, of course in Iran can be mortally dangerous in terms of what people are fighting for. Has that shifted over the years with generational change? Has it been more about democracy, women's rights, the economy? What shifts do you see if any
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A
One of the ways that people often try to sense this is of course through slogans because we have to be cautious, like I just said, about slogans. But I think there's protests that are driven by grievances over political rights were common in the period in which political contestation was more of an opportunity. Banning politicians running in elections often would generate protests or eventually perceptions of fraud in elections generated a lot of protests. However, lots of other protests were over social or economic grievances that we also be cautious to either cleave them off. Oh, economic grievances are one thing, political grievances are another. We also often hear this in the kind of pundit class that the economic ones can be easily smoothed over, but the political ones are more difficult. That's not necessarily the case. It's also not the case that we should cleave that people themselves are somehow compartmentalizing their grievances. That's more of an outside analyst move. So I think that the grievance package has just been being added onto over the last decade and they fall into all kinds of things that from a protesters perspective could easily be seen as all of the same things now, which is, you know, I don't have the autonomy to, you know, wear what I want in public. But it's more than that. I mean, as many Iranian feminists would tell us, the issue over the hijab is an important issue, but it's also not the only issue. It's the fact that the state is acting like a patriarchal body and telling people what to do, not just something everyone wants to do. So that's the kind of social and political grievance over rights and the autonomy of individuals vis a vis the state. But also, I think we should be more, I don't know, materialist about this. Many of the protesters in Iran protest over so called material issues, bread and butter issues, that the prices went up or that the prices or that there was a policy that was going to supposedly happen but that didn't happen or vice versa. And these cause kind of people to go out and protest over rapid economic changes or perceptions of unfairness. So we also, I think this is very important that we should not put all of these individuals in the basket of upper middle class democrats. Right? That protests happen for lots of different reasons around the world. And I think many people have said, especially in the last few years that all they want to happen in Iran is a normal society. It's a common thing. I've read a lot of journalists repeating this, okay, but for many people, normal. For many protesters, when you ask them what normal is, they basically, I want to live a middle class life like I see going on In Paris. That's actually not attainable for most people in the world, especially in the middle income parts of the world. Right? I mean, Iran is a nation state with 90 million people. It's not a Dubai where a small percentage of the citizenry, well, the citizenry sits on a huge floating population of labor. So I think that these are important and we should take the grievances seriously. But political outcomes generally don't flow from grievances.
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B
If you're thinking about the last 46 years of how the Islamic regime has changed or not changed, what do you think are the most plausible pathways forward now in the short term for the country?
- [43:07]
A
I mean, it seems to me just judging by the internal critiques from political elites themselves inside of Iran. And I'm not talking about dissidents in jail in Iran, I'm talking about politicians, generals, former ministers inside of Iran. They themselves express that the kind of project of the Islamic Republic is basically exhausted. There's been all kinds of discussions about the refoundation or renewal or transformation of this post revolutionary order and a change in the social compact. This has been discussed internally inside of Iran for 20 years. I totally can understand the frustration. Imagine that you are 17 years old and as long as you have been interested in Iranian politics, you've been hearing these critiques and nothing's changed, at least from your perspective. So no matter what happens, I think even if it's seen as a return to the status quo ante, that it would be interesting to see how the political order is reconstructed. It does seem that with a war, another war, that it would be easier. I don't mean easier in many senses, but I do see more likely that this reconstruction would actually be more conservative in the sense of projecting continuity, even though it might actually be a bit different. Less likely that some type of social democratic republic in that sense of the term, like the republic side of the post revolutionary political order, somehow can handle the reconstruction of the social contract and the demand. So of course, in that sense, even though many Iranians would not want to admit it, Iran is in the Middle east. And the Middle east has all kinds of states in which attempts to reconstruct political orders produce hardened, often more conservative, in a political sense, states rather than ones that pay attention to the demands of their citizens. That seems to be, especially with the war, the likely outcome in the short term. In the short term, if we have an Iranian state which has control over the territory. So I think that's the more likely scenario if the Israelis and the United States governments want to continue to essentially degrade the capacity of the state to govern the territory, so called mowing the lawn every six months. And, you know, Trump administration is not over at the end of this year in foreign policy. It will continue for at least, you know, two to three years. Then it's also, you know, possible to picture a scenario where the capacity of the state to govern, it's a very large country. We should look always look at Iran on the map, as the old imperial planners and the old empires used to do when they were in that region, and take a look at how difficult it will be to maintain state capacity in those areas. That doesn't mean that some kind of rump revolutionary republic will occur like in the World War I era, but it does raise the likelihood of the breakdown of governance in those areas and the higher likelihood of essentially some kind of armed conflict. And basically these things can spin into civil wars.
- [46:47]
B
Kevin Harris, thank you so much for that discussion. That was sobering and fascinating and I learned a lot. Thank you.
- [46:55]
A
Thanks for having me.