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Authoritarian Survival: Iran's Republic of Repression


 

In 2019, the Islamic Republic of Iran marked its fortieth anniversary in power. It proudly staged ceremonies to commemorate this milestone, but before the year was out it would face widespread, bitter protests of a sort that have become familiar, denying its legitimacy and demanding an end to undemocratic rule by Shia Muslim clerics. The early months of 2020 brought the regime more high-profile troubles. These included the accidental shootdown of a civilian airliner and now encompass Iranian society's suffering as part of the covid-19 pandemic—a suffering that has grown worse even as top officials have refused to acknowledge the true extent and severity of what the disease has wrought for the people of Iran.

The regime is hard: It has ample wealth even amid a pinched, sanctions-wracked national economy, and its brutal security forces show no lack of willingness to kill. The death toll that they have inflicted on Iranians since late 2019 is estimated at fifteen-hundred.1 Yet the regime also has features that make it perennially open to challenge. By its nature, it breeds conflicts and contradictions that a majority of Iranians will no longer overlook. They damn it and want it gone. Its situation might be summed up as being of a chronically "prerevolutionary" character, but with an actual revolution not a certainty because this kind of change will require both a type of national crisis and a type of leadership that—so far at least—have not materialized.

The regime is still standing, so let us begin by considering its persistence. Its capacity for holding on despite powerful external foes and considerable internal opposition and turmoil may tell us much about how highly authoritarian regimes survive in developing countries. The Islamic Republic began with revolutionary promises of political freedom [End Page 54] and economic prosperity, but the keys to its endurance do not lie in the fulfillment of those vows. Instead, students of the regime's staying power must look to its concentration of wealth within a small circle of regime officials and allies; their use of resources to breed dependence and political control; their purging of dissidents and internal challengers; the repression of all independent organizations; external conflicts that enhance internal cohesion; shifting ideological claims and deception; a brutal coercive apparatus that is master of much of the national economy; weaknesses within the opposition; and the ideological and political divisions that criss-cross Iranian society itself.

In 1979, Iranians rose up against rising inequality and authoritarianism by overthrowing the Pahlavi monarchy. Despite Iranians' demands for political freedom, however, they wound up being subjected to the highly authoritarian theocracy that has now endured for more than four decades, despite failing to make good on its own promises and generating many new fissures.

The 1979 revolt against the shah began with aspirations for greater freedom, prosperity, and equality, but it ended with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's rise as the revolution's undisputed leader and his construction of an authoritarian theocracy. Khomeini promised political freedom for all citizens. Once firmly in control, however, he handed vast political, economic, and cultural powers to his fellow Shia Muslim clerics—with himself as the first "supreme leader"—while creating organs of repression to crush dissidents. Huge clergy-run foundations (bonyads) were endowed with wealth expropriated from the former royal family and its associates, and Iran's key oil sector also came under Khomeini's control.

The seized assets and the oil revenues funded the creation of unelected, antidemocratic bodies such as the Guardian Council that vets all candidates for office. The money went to pay for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), whose mission was to eliminate remnants of the monarchy as well as leftist and liberal challengers. The IRGC expanded, and remains a key prop of the regime. Its leaders have claimed the task of safeguarding the Islamic revolution, and have continually intervened in political affairs. As the Islamic Republic's support base has shrunk, the IRGC's prominence has grown till it now controls an estimated 25 percent of Iran's GDP. This dominance gives the organization a huge economic stake in the regime's survival. With its own intelligence service and prison system, the Guard has interfered in every aspect of Iranian society to ensure the survival of the Islamic regime and clerical rule. The Guard is thought to number about 200,000 members, with commanders who live in heavily restricted enclaves.

The Revolutionary Guard and its paramilitary affiliate, the Basij, played a central role in securing Khomeini's grip on power and repressing his opponents. The Basij is a vast organization with an estimated [End Page 55] strength of 11 to 23 million (out of a total national population of 83 million). It stages public religious ceremonies and is active in internal security, meaning above all the repression of dissent. For years, the Islamic regime has been heavily involved in recruiting Basij members from all walks of life. Although some join out of ideological and religious commitment, others seem drawn to the Basij by perquisites such as university admissions, or even the small monthly payments that the government sends to members.

The IRGC's elite intelligence and unconventional-warfare unit, the perhaps 15,000-strong Quds Force, suffered a setback on 3 January 2020. That day in Baghdad, a U.S. drone assassinated the Force's commander, IRGC general Qasem Soleimani. The U.S. Defense Department maintained that Soleimani had been responsible for a rocket attack the week before on a U.S. base in northern Iraq, with one U.S. contractor killed. The United States also claimed that Iran and its proxies were planning further attacks on U.S. forces in the region.

The Soleimani assassination, along with U.S. sanctions and the generally troubled state of the Iranian economy, may have moved Iran to scale back its ambitions to become a greater regional power. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the current supreme leader, called for "forceful revenge," but Iran avoided a major confrontation with the United States. Tehran may have feared further U.S. attacks. Worries that the Islamic Republic lacked public support within Iran may have played a role as well. Despite the setback of losing Soleimani, the IRGC has continued to function as a repressive organ in the internal affairs of the country, claiming to defend the Islamic revolution.

In addition to establishing the IRGC to repress dissent, Khomeini used various other means to maintain control and establish an exclusive state run by the clergy. He shifted ideological stances, manipulated crises and conflicts such as the 1979–81 U.S. embassy takeover and the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War, and saw to it that the 1979 Constitution set up the Guardian Council and the Assembly of Experts (another unelected body) in order to ban candidates and veto laws not to the regime's liking. There were restrictions on personal and social freedoms, especially those of women. Khomeini declared dissidents "enemies of God" and kept repression going on a scale unknown under the shah.

Khomeini's June 1989 death at the age of 86 was followed by an intensification of repression, much of it linked to factional conflicts inside the regime. Khamenei, the new supreme leader, denounced democracy, liberalism, and the reformist camp within the regime. He warned against Western ideals, claimed that the supreme leader could make no mistakes, and used funding to tighten the regime's grip on once fairly autonomous religious institutions. A student protest movement was violently crushed in 1999. Reformists, who had been winning elections, found themselves so thoroughly blocked by unelected bodies such as [End Page 56] the Guardian Council that by the mid-2000s Iranians who previously backed reformist candidates had largely given up voting.

The Rise and Demise of the Green Movement

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the conservative layman who won the 2005 presidential election, set the stage for the next major challenge to the regime, the 2009 Green Movement. Ahmadinejad advocated greater egalitarianism within Iran and continuing confrontation abroad. He packed his cabinet with IRGC veterans, and replaced thousands of reformists and technocrats in the state bureaucracy with clerics and IRGC members. He unleashed restrictive measures against the press, cultural activities, and women's freedoms, and targeted human-rights and labor activists as well as universities. Corruption and cronyism grew. Anger at them was the context for the Green Movement.

The movement erupted after what the regime said was Ahmadinejad's overwhelming 63 percent victory in the 12 June 2009 presidential election. Popular suspicions of cheating led to mass protests. Mostly middle class, the Green Movement mobilized on behalf of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the former premier who had been running against Ahmadinejad. Mousavi, a reluctant standard-bearer, urged his followers to obey a ban on public demonstrating, but on June 15 they turned out for one of the biggest marches in Iranian history. Over the following days, several other cities saw large rallies. Protesters' slogans were entirely political and lacked any mention of economic issues. Khamenei ordered oppositionists off the streets and warned that he would hold their leaders responsible for any trouble. As the regime's threats and assaults mounted, dissidents went from asking "Where is my vote?" to chanting "Death to the dictator!"

The regime responded with intense repression. The most infamous incident was the June 20 shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan, an unarmed 26-year-old woman, on a Tehran street. Footage of her bleeding to death on the pavement went out on the internet and was seen all over the world. By August, at least four-thousand people had been arrested. At least 115 were executed in prison. Mousavi was eventually put under house arrest, where he remains today.

The Green Movement went on for twenty months. It shook the foundations of the Islamic Republic. The Republic's leaders acknowledged the movement's gravity, as it succeeded in rapidly undermining the support base of the theocracy. It took the regime almost seven months to organize a rally in its own support in Tehran. Despite the provision of free food and the closure of schools, government offices, and public enterprises, the event failed to draw many participants. Aware of the situation, Khamenei said that what he called "the sedition" had been a great challenge, nearly driving the system off a cliff.

Yet the plunge off the cliff never happened: The Green Movement had [End Page 57] failed to generate a revolutionary situation that could bring down the Islamic Republic. The movement's leaders had never fundamentally disputed the Republic's legitimacy, and their base had been too narrow. The Green Movement had attracted students, intellectuals, and women, but not enough workers and bazaar merchants. Bazaaris (the term refers to merchants, shopkeepers, and artisans) would have contributed greatly to the Green Movement had they joined it. Structures of trust and exchange associated with the bazaar have historically provided bazaaris with ready-made networks and enabled them to mobilize for collective action.

Clustered along narrow covered alleyways in a single location, those who do business from within a bazaar can easily communicate among themselves. Each bazaar has alleys dedicated to specific merchandise categories. This breeds competition among bazaar merchants because everyone with a shop on the alley is selling more or less the same thing, yet it also fosters a "guild" mentality that enhances solidarity. Sharing a sense that they are "all in it together" during periods of crisis and conflict has traditionally enabled bazaar merchants to mobilize in defense of their common interests.

Bazaaris played important political roles in the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11, the nationalist stirrings of the early 1950s, and the revolt against the shah in 1979. Tehran's Grand Bazaar is the country's biggest. Before the revolution, it held more than ten linear kilometers of alleyways and controlled two-thirds of the domestic wholesale trade as well as nearly a third of Iran's imports. The Grand Bazaar had a major place in the 1979 revolution. Its workers, numbering more than a hundred thousand, formed a large pool of recruits for the merchants to mobilize. In addition to their economic power and numerical weight, the Tehran bazaar and its counterparts in other large cities retain the organizational qualities mentioned above that make them potential sources of mobilization against the state.

In the wake of the revolution, the Islamic regime lacked the support of the Tehran bazaar. The leading bazaari organization—the nationwide Society of Merchants, Shopkeepers, and Artisans—had played a crucial role in toppling the shah and was predominantly liberal rather than Islamist in orientation. The Islamic regime crushed this group. It was outlawed, some of its members were executed or killed extrajudicially, and its leaders fled the country. At the same time, the Islamic regime steered resources to its own bazaari supporters, enriching them as they moved bazaar politics in regime-friendly directions. [End Page 58]

Still, three decades of Islamic rule left many bazaaris unhappy. According to one report, 70 to 80 percent of Tehran bazaaris supported Mousavi against Ahmadinejad in the 2009 election.2 Not long after, bazaaris closed shop and joined the protests in Orumiyeh and Mahabad. Both cities saw merchants and shopkeepers arrested.

Yet on the whole, the Green Movement failed to recruit bazaaris. The discontent was there—both before and after the movement, bazaar merchants reacted to Ahmadinejad's higher taxes with shutdowns—but large-scale, active support for the Green Movement never materialized. State repression was partly responsible. In addition to arrests, one prominent Tehran bazaar merchant was murdered. The Green Movement had to go up against the repressive state without the bazaaris.

The working class also did not join the Green Movement. Industrial laborers, led by workers in the key oil sector, had played a major role in bringing down the monarchy. The country's economic decline under the Islamic Republic has hit working-class Iranians hard, driving an estimated nine-tenths of them below the poverty line. Employment is mostly temporary, and this lack of security has long undermined solidarity and the potential for mobilization. The regime's actions against free trade unions, including instances of naked repression, have damaged working-class political capabilities as well. Shortly after the revolution, the state dissolved the independent workers' councils that had spread throughout the country. On May Day 2009, with the presidential election less than six weeks away, security forces arrested 150 labor leaders in Tehran. The capital's workers thus found themselves deprived of the leaders who might have stirred them to action when the election protests broke out.

It is important to note that the Green Movement protests did draw the participation of individual entrepreneurs and workers. Some even gave their lives when the forces of the Islamic regime violently put down the demonstrations. Available data on the occupations of those slain while protesting indicate that nationwide, about a tenth of the protestors killed during the Green Movement were self-employed entrepreneurs. At the same time, workers made up more than 18 percent of those killed during the protests.3

But repression and organizational weaknesses prevented either class from participating as a united front in the Green Movement. As a result, the movement failed to assume a national character. More important still, it failed to disrupt the social and economic processes of the Islamic Republic. In the absence of merchants' and workers' participation and their disruptive capacity, the movement remained susceptible to repression and ultimately failed to transform the political system.

In addition, the Green Movement never took hold outside large cities such as Tehran, Tabriz, Orumiyeh, Sanandaj, Ahvaz, Shiraz, Isfahan, Zanjan, and Qazvin. Significantly, most small and medium-sized cities saw few or no demonstrations. With protests limited to about ten [End Page 59] big cities and no nationwide strikes, the regime was able to send Basij members from smaller cities to help repress protesters.

In the wake of the Green Movement, authorities outlawed the two major reformist organizations. Ahmadinejad served out his second term, leaving office in 2013, but the regime then pushed him aside as a liability: In 2017, the Guardian Council disqualified him from running for president. Ideological claims became even more grandiose following the movement's suppression, with some regime figures declaring the supreme leader infallible and claiming direct divine legitimacy for the Islamic Republic. This contradicts the constitution of the Islamic Republic, which attributes sovereignty to the people.

Protests, Shootdown, Cover-Up

Although the regime survived the Green Movement, the authorities could not banish the discontents that had underlain it. In fact, protests have widened in almost every respect—in their number, in their locations, and in the demands that prompt them. As 2017 gave way to 2018, a protest over high prices in Mashhad, Iran's second-largest city, touched off demonstrations in more than a hundred cities. The internet played a role in spreading the word, and demands swiftly became political as well as economic, with demonstrators denouncing the regime reformists no less than the regime hard-liners.

Most protesters were between 18 and 35 and came from the sector that Iran's public prosecutor labeled "working classes."4 University students, many of them middle class, also took part. A crowd in Zanjan tore down a billboard bearing Khamenei's image.5 In Bandar Abbas, portraits of Khomeini and Khamenei were removed. Shouts of "Death to the dictator!" were heard. The initial and most intense wave of protests lasted for two weeks and ended only after authorities shut down the internet and security forces killed scores of demonstrators. Arrests numbered in the thousands.

On 15 November 2019, unrest exploded again when the government tripled fuel prices. The decision hurt both the middle class and workers—really, any Iranian who needed a motor vehicle to make a living. As had been the case just a few years earlier, a hundred or more cities saw demonstrations. Denunciations of the Islamic regime's very foundations were common. Government repression was even more intense than it had been in 2017-18. A December 23 report by Reuters, citing "three sources close to the supreme leader's inner circle and a fourth official," said that in a November 17 meeting Khamenei told President Hassan Rouhani and other senior figures: "The Islamic Republic is in danger. Do whatever it takes to end it. You have my order."6

Khamenei threatened to hold officials responsible if protests were not immediately stopped. The same Reuters report said that in less than two [End Page 60] weeks following November 15, some fifteen-hundred people had been killed, including seventeen teenagers and four-hundred women. Arrestees could face heavy sentences. The Revolutionary Court in Tehran sentenced three young men in their twenties to, respectively, 222 lashes, 38 years in prison, and execution.7

Although the Islamic Republic's rulers seemed confident of the repression's efficacy, protests erupted again in early 2020. In the predawn darkness of January 8, just hours after Iran had launched ballistic missiles at two U.S. bases in Iraq in retaliation for the killing of Soleimani, the IRGC Aerospace Force fired two short-range missiles at a Ukrainian jetliner that had a few minutes earlier taken off on a scheduled flight from Tehran's Khomeini Airport. All 176 people aboard the plane died; 146 of them had Iranian passports. For three days, officials of the Islamic Republic denied any responsibility. Videos revealing the missiles' launch point and trajectory forced the authorities to drop the lie: On January 11, the government said that "human error" had caused what President Rouhani in a tweet called a "disastrous mistake."8 The admission sparked days of protests in cities across Iran as demonstrators condemned the authorities and confronted their shifting explanations.

There was no talk of economic complaints. Protesters took to the streets to condemn a regime that they said had discredited itself, and which seemed vulnerable. Students were among the leaders; on the plane had been 23 recent graduates of Iranian universities bound for further study in Canada. As has now become usual, protesters targeted the clergy and called openly for an end to their rule. From his house arrest, leading Green Movement figure Mehdi Karroubi called on the supreme leader to step down.9 The protests went on for a few days until black-uniformed riot police from the Interior Ministry's "special units" put them down.

Although as of this writing in late April 2020 the coronavirus has not caused large protests, the spread of the disease and the government's mishandling of it have added to popular grievances and brought down new criticisms on the Islamic Republic's rulers. Critics charge that the authorities knew about the virus but delayed action so as not to disrupt turnout for the February 11 national day and the February 21 parliamentary elections. As the virus spread, physicians, medical-school academics, and journalists complained about inaccurate official tallies only to face demotions, dismissals, and prosecutions.

Critics have also asked why the supreme leader needs such huge assets. Amid rising poverty, cleric Masih Mohajeri, the executive editor of the influential newspaper Jomhuri Eslami, declared that the leader's foundations should step forward to help the people in their hour of need. Lawmaker Gholamreza Haidari echoed Mohajeri. Abbas Abdi, a dissident journalist, called for a state takeover of Khamenei's resources. Such challenges add economic grievances to calls for sweeping political change such as the June 2019 open letters demanding Khamenei's [End Page 61] resignation and a new constitution. The combination of economic and political grievances has revolutionary potential.

Khomeini and his allies seized power and maintained the Islamic Republic through deception, purges, the seizure of wealth, the instigation and manipulation of external conflicts, shifting ideological claims, financial control of religious entities, and above all, unprecedented and unending repression. As Khomeini's successors, Khamenei and his allies have continued all these tactics. During Khamenei's three decades as supreme leader, Iran's economy and society have become more unequal, and moreover they are awash in corruption and cronyism to a degree never before seen in Iranian history.

Controlling massive economic resources, the government, the IRGC, and the supreme leader have rendered substantial parts of the populace dependent and hence less likely to mobilize against the regime. After the revolution, the government remained an important economic actor. The number of public enterprises grew, and the state was the country's largest single employer. Despite some privatization, the state has remained an important economic actor with control over the key oil and gas sectors. Public-sector employment expanded after the revolution so much that by 2014, the state provided income for half the country's households.

The Revolutionary Guards' Empire

The Islamic Republic's rulers, seeing their support base wane, have relied increasingly on the IRGC to maintain their power. The Guard's economic reach has grown along with this expanding political and security role. With a business empire worth billions and comprising hundreds of firms, the IRGC has become the first armed bourgeoisie in Iranian history. Guard-controlled companies operate free of taxes and duties, wielding their privileges to shut out rivals. The mammoth IRGC construction conglomerate known as Khatam al-Anbiya or GHORB has hundreds of subsidiaries in Iran and abroad, and employs 135,000 people.

Then there is the vast wealth of Ayatollah Khamenei. He controls the greatest assets in the country, pays no taxes, and is not accountable to anyone. Organized as giant foundations, the entities under his control rank among the largest enterprises in the Middle East. In 2013, one was reported to be worth US$95 billion.10 It has investments in every economic sector. Various organs under Khamenei's control are slated to receive about a quarter of the state budget in 2020. In addition, Khamenei receives an undisclosed annual budget from the state. He uses such resources to buy the allegiance of people and institutions, including mosques and other Islamic religious entities. Fairly autonomous before the revolution, these now act as arms of the regime. Khamenei and his colleagues are well aware of how mosques were used for political organizing [End Page 62] against the shah, and are resolved that mosques will not be similarly employed against them.

The vast resources strengthen the Islamic Republic's rulers, but open them up to challenges and attacks, too. A state that intervenes little in the economy is unlikely to become a direct target of political attack, which may ease a reformist path to democratization. An interventionist state such as the Islamic Republic, by contrast, will always be the focus of popular criticism. Hyperactive states that control massive resources and often intervene in the economy replace the abstractions of the market with a visible, concrete entity. When things go badly, angry citizens will blame the state. By claiming so much control, in other words, the Islamic regime "owns" the outcome.

The economy, one should add, is far from the only part of society in which the Islamic Republic involves itself. Unlike authoritarian regimes that focus their control on the public sphere and political dissent, the Islamic Republic interferes heavily in personal and private life. Citizens not only face economic and political restrictions, but also have lost cultural, social, and personal freedoms that Iranians commonly enjoyed before the revolution. State controls generate multiple, irreconcilable contradictions and conflicts. On the ground, these tensions cross-cut and interact in complex ways that can make them hard to sort out. But the regime is their common source, and hence the first target attacked when stresses mount.

The Islamic Republic's rulers are aware that free and fair elections, held without a Guardian Council excluding candidates, would spell an end to the power and privileges of regime clerics and the IRGC. So the rulers dig in, tolerating no challenges and accepting no reforms, claiming that the system is divine and immutable while tirelessly purging or repressing critics.

The Islamic Republic is vulnerable, as I have described (and I have not even said much about the formidable external foes and challenges that it faces). Yet it survives. Its career in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries serves as an example of how a corrupt regime can hang on to power if it has economic resources at its beck and remains ever willing to bring down the hammer of violent repression.

To understand more fully how the Islamic Republic has endured for more than four decades requires us to compare the dynamics of authoritarian stability with those facing challengers or revolutionaries. Here, authoritarians have a structural edge. The key distinction is that a highly authoritarian regime can get by with a narrower base, using money and coercion to demobilize and repress opponents. In contrast, challengers need a very wide base, the kind that in most cases only a crisis can give them. A crisis impinges on broad segments of the public in ways that they cannot avoid, prodding them to mobilize with a view to reshaping social, economic, and political structures. But crises do not emerge [End Page 63] easily or regularly. Revolutionary challengers cannot will them into being. If and when a crisis comes, challengers must seize chances to form broader coalitions and disrupt economic and political processes. Such disruptions can isolate the state, generate instability within the coercive apparatus, increase the likelihood of defections, and ultimately deprive the rulers of their capacity to rule.

In practice, however, serious obstacles will likely confront revolutionary challengers. Aside from the state's organs of repression, a society's political, ideological, and class divisions can make it hard to form wider coalitions for change. After Iran's monarchy was overthrown in 1979, numerous leftist organizations (not just secular but Islamic as well) and liberal groups emerged. They looked as if they could compete for hegemony, but in fact they never coalesced on a large scale.

Rising class conflict can also hamper coalition-widening. A common pattern, certainly seen in Iran, is capitalists (and perhaps the broader middle class) becoming alarmed by rising worker militancy and turning to the state for protection. In the histories of Nicaragua and the Philippines as well, there have been cases of a rising left-wing movement making a coming-together of radical students and workers with the capitalist class impossible. As a consequence, chances to form a broad revolutionary coalition were missed.11 In Iran during the years following the 1979 revolution, rising worker militancy and the expanding power of the left (secular and Islamic) may be among the reasons why so many bazaaris stayed aloof from the coalition opposing the Islamic Republic's ruling elite.

The Green Movement, the Islamic Republic's largest protest movement in terms of raw numbers of people, appeared at a time of crisis, but its leaders were not revolutionaries. Calls to replace the Islamic Republic root and branch came from demonstrators in the street, not the movement's upper ranks. Without bazaaris and workers and people outside the big cities, there was little prospect of decisively disrupting the productive and distributive systems on which the Islamic Republic depends.

Dissent Without Coordination

Recent protests by the urban poor and the middle class have certainly been revolutionary in intent, openly attacking the very foundation of the Islamic Republic and calling for the overthrow of the clergy and all the Islamic Republic's elites, reformists included. Even though the Green Movement involved more people in total, these recent protests have spread to places where the earlier movement never reached. The spontaneous, internet-enabled nature of these outbreaks, appearing in reaction to immediate economic hardships, signals a problem for the opposition, however: There is no stable force coordinating discontent and working to bring more of Iranian society into the struggle. The protests flare up [End Page 64] with the aid of online communication, but their very leaderless, "distributed" quality makes them hard to sustain. The regime, meanwhile, has the ability to turn off (or at least seriously slow) the internet, and that has proven a potent weapon in the government arsenal.

History shows that prolonged exclusion and repression tend to radicalize the public and generate revolutionary conflicts and movements. A survey taken in Tehran in late 2019 and early 2020 by pollster Abbas Abdi, head of Tehran Province's Association of Journalists, found that only 11 percent of respondents defined themselves as fundamentalists (in Iranian parlance, "principlists"), with 14 percent self-identifying as reformists and the rest—a huge 75 percent majority—refusing to identify with either category.12

Iran under the Islamic Republic is of course not an open society, and this is a sampling of opinion only in the capital and largest city. Yet the poll—and especially its finding that a mere 14 percent are willing to call themselves "reformists"—hints at the pent-up demand for major social, economic, and political change, and further suggests that the vast bulk of the populace is looking for it to come from outside the current system. The Green Movement and the more recent protests have signaled to Iran's rulers that a majority of Iranians favor transition to a secular, democratic system. To be effective, however, this majority will have to find a way to mobilize on a national scale in a coordinated way. Even when protests are widespread, as the recent ones have been, if they remain intermittent flares backed by little more than social-media updates, the regime will win out.

Is coordination achievable? Prospects for coalitions between leftists and liberals are improving. The global decline of radical leftism has made its effects felt in Iran as elsewhere. Leftist currents still run through college campuses and parts of the working class, but the Islamic regime's extremely repressive nature has led oppositionists generally—including leftists—to focus above all on freedom and democratic institutions. The left's desire for socialist institutions has taken a back seat. This creates better conditions for coalition formation across classes and between liberals and leftists. Socialism as a goal divides; the pursuit of democracy unites.

The ruling clergy and their IRGC allies know that democratic institutions (starting with free and fair elections) would strip away clerical and IRGC wealth, power, and ideological hegemony. The clerics and the IRGC remain on guard and ready to disrupt any coalitions they think might form between the regime's internal dissidents and those excluded from the system. Endless repression, moreover, is meant to demobilize not only radical challengers but also the general public, which has shown itself ready over and over again to turn out for widespread protests that take direct aim at the Islamic regime and deny its very legitimacy.

The relationship between the Iranian state and Iranian society is antagonistic and polarized. On the one hand, the Islamic Republic generates [End Page 65] multiple, irreconcilable contradictions and conflicts; insists on exclusive rule, purges, and repression; and seeks to preserve highly unequal social, economic, and political structures. On the other hand, the vast majority of Iranians are engaged in active and passive resistance; reject the highly unequal distribution of wealth and power; and refuse to live by the standards of the Islamic regime. As early as 2000, an official survey revealed that 75 percent of the public and 86 percent of youth did not say their obligatory prayers. More recently, an IRGC commander declared that only 5 percent of the country's 57,000 mosques were fully operational. Alcohol use has now spread to high schools and even grade schools.

Despite heavy fines and the threat of jail, women remove their head scarves at every opportunity. Even with the Islamization of all educational institutions, 80 percent of high-school girls have boyfriends. In the religious city of Qom many women refuse to marry clerics. In spite of severe repression, increasing numbers of Iranians have been converting to other religions, especially Christianity.13 The new Christian converts have established house churches throughout the country, including in the religious centers of Qom and Mashhad. Most Iranians seem interested in moving beyond the Islamic regime and establishing at last the democratic institutions for which they have fought for more than a century.

Stability and Vulnerability

At present, the Islamic regime appears stable. It has repressed or purged any internal factions that could challenge it. During the Green Movement, the people lined up behind the regime's reformist faction—a losing strategy because the reformists were only that and not revolutionaries—but now that option is closed. There are no elite divisions that challengers can exploit. Inside the regime, only the hard-liners are still standing, and they are resolute. They will swiftly and severely repress any threat from the people. The IRGC and the Basij remain the regime's ready instruments.

The Islamic Republic is nevertheless extremely vulnerable. Its very structures constantly give rise to many irreconcilable contradictions and conflicts that converge and focus on the state. The trajectory of revolutionary conflicts and transformations is difficult to predict. It is possible to say that if Iranians want to pursue democracy through revolution, they must accomplish certain key tasks. Iranian democratic forces must coalesce around a contender or coalition of contenders capable of asserting an exclusive claim to state power or, at a minimum, offering a transition to an alternative political structure. Such a contending force must be able to generate a revolutionary situation by marshaling support and commitment from broad segments of the population. The contenders must disrupt the economy with general strikes and business closures, halting production and distribution.

Large, disruptive coalitions may produce crucial defections from [End Page 66] within the state's coercive apparatus, especially if that apparatus includes a conscript force. Iran's coercive forces, at their lower levels, are sown with conscripts. The country has national service: Males are draft-eligible at age 18, and may be sent into the police, the IRGC, or the regular military. The required term of active service is 21 months.14 While in uniform, conscripts tend to maintain strong ties with friends and relatives back home. The ground forces of the Artesh (the Iranian regular military, which includes not only the land army but the regular navy and air force as well as an air-defense force) number about 350,000. The various police forces number perhaps another half-million, including conscripts and reserves. The IRGC takes conscripts into its enlisted ranks, but gives preference to Basij members among the draftees.

Does there lurk somewhere in this complex of various armed forces the potential for splits? Are there parts of it where, in critical situations, rebellions against and defections from the regime might arise? Iranian military conscripts defected by the hundreds each day in late 1978, paralyzing the system. In Tunisia in early 2011, that country's regular army never applied deadly force against people protesting the dictatorship of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, while security police were firing live rounds and killing civilians. There were reports of the army refusing to intervene against protests, and of troops interposing themselves between police and demonstrators to protect the latter from regime aggression.15 Before long, Ben Ali went peacefully into permanent exile while soldiers who had been posted with their tanks to preserve calm posed for photographs with pedestrians.16 Such a quiet end for Iran's Islamic Republic seems unlikely, but Tunisia during the Arab Spring does provide an example of how a split within the ranks of an authoritarian regime can facilitate a revolutionary outcome.

In sum, over the past several decades the Islamic Republic has succeeded in maintaining power through deception and purges; promotion of national cohesion by instigating external conflicts; concentration of substantial assets within the ruling circle; increasing dependence of ever larger portions of the population on the state; and endless repression. At the same time, the theocracy has generated multiple, irreconcilable contradictions and conflicts. These conflicts in turn have rendered the regime vulnerable to challenge and revolution.

The regime's survival is prolonged by the absence of an alternative, unifying revolutionary contender or coalition, not to mention the ideological and political splits that divide the opposition. To be effective, democratic challengers will have to forge a broad coalition of classes that can disrupt the regime's productive and distributive systems through nationwide strikes, thereby generating a revolutionary situation. At present, such a challenging force is missing. Yet the very structures of the Islamic Republic and its conflicts have set the stage for more clashes and protests, and the covid-19 pandemic can only add to those pressures. [End Page 67]

Misagh Parsa

Misagh Parsa is professor of sociology at Dartmouth College. His latest book is Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed (2016).

Source: Journal of Democracy

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