Scylla and Charybdis

The recent wave of protests in Iran have generated an extraordinary volume of commentary, much of it framed through familiar but misleading scripts. Some cast the unrest as an imminent revolutionary rupture; others as exclusively the product of foreign destabilization; still others as the delayed reckoning of a society finally pushed beyond endurance. Each captures part of the picture, but none adequately explains the dynamics of the present conjuncture. What is unfolding is better understood as the convergence of accumulated social exhaustion, acute distributive shock and a crisis of governance which the Islamic Republic no longer possesses the ideological, bureaucratic or fiscal resources to manage.

The protests have been sustained by a form of negative solidarity: a cross-cutting social coalition that stretches from elements of the rural poor and borderlands to the downwardly mobile middle classes and urban precariat of Tehran and other major cities. What unites them is not so much a shared project as repudiation of the Islamic Republic, and with it decades of failed efforts at structural reform and transformation. Beyond this refusal, however, the contours of a viable alternative remain indeterminate.

The immediate trigger for the protests was fiscal. Budgetary measures advanced under President Masoud Pezeshkian, particularly those affecting exchange rates and import licensing, sharpened pressures within an already distorted currency regime. The impact was felt most immediately among electronics vendors in Tehran’s bazaars, whose livelihoods depend on access to foreign currency and predictable pricing. The new rules soon translated into higher costs, disrupted supply chains and material losses. What transformed this sectoral grievance into a political rupture was the wider economic context. Years of inflation exceeding 40 per cent, with food inflation surpassing 70 per cent, infrastructural decay, water mismanagement, electricity shortages and toxic air pollution had already pushed large sections of Iran’s working and lower-middle classes into chronic insecurity. Since the Twelve-Day War in June the rial has depreciated by roughly 40 percent, and government employees’ wages have fallen by more than 20 per cent in real terms. Long-term socio-economic deterioration has converged with more immediate episodes of fiscal mismanagement. The budget did not create these conditions, but it crystallized a perception that the state protects rent seekers while offloading adjustment costs onto those least able to absorb them. The government’s pledges to provide food vouchers have done little to placate public fury. For decades, the Islamic Republic has pursued a form of authoritarian neoliberalism that has deregulated and precariatized labour while transferring state assets to parastatal organisations – from so-called revolutionary foundations and pension funds to subsidiaries of the Revolutionary Guards – coupled with the imposition of austerity from above. This provided a recipe for mass discontent and recurrent revolt.

The protests that began in Tehran on 28 December spread with remarkable speed to provincial cities and towns such as Hamedan, Mashhad, Tabriz, Izeh, Qom, Marvdasht, Abdanan, Kerman, Arak, Isfahan and Malekshahi. This reflects a longer trajectory that has been evident since at least 2017 – the intensification of poverty and social marginalization in Iran’s rural areas, borderlands and provincial peripheries. During the winter of 2017–۱۸, protests that began in Mashhad spread swiftly across much of the country; the same pattern occurred during what came to be known as the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement. While that uprising was rightly understood as a revolt against mandatory veiling and patriarchal domination, its class and geographical dimensions received far less attention.

These localities occupy a distinct position within Iran’s political economy: unemployment is high, public services thin, environmental stress acute and the experience of state neglect deeply sedimented. One notable exception in the initial phase of the protests was found in Sunni-majority Kurdish and Baluch areas, where mobilization appeared more muted, likely due to the cumulative toll of earlier protest cycles in which these regions had often been at the forefront, as well as scepticism towards the increasingly pro-monarchical tilt of the mobilization. This too, however, would soon change. The digital circulation of images and testimonies helped synchronize local grievances, but it was the confluence of economic injury and deeper social exhaustion that gave the protests their national reach. Violence deployed by security forces against protesters in provincial cities such as Ilam and Marvdasht further inflamed public outrage, and even as Tehran initially remained relatively quiescent, demonstrations elsewhere had already begun to assume an explicitly anti-regime character.

The state initially appeared to recognize the danger of escalation. Officials acknowledged the economic grievances of the protesters, while the governor of the central bank was replaced. This response followed a familiar ruling-class strategy: attempting to disaggregate ostensibly ‘economic’ demands from ‘political’ and ‘social’ ones, in the hope that the former might be contained without threatening the system. In practice, however, such distinctions rarely hold, and the protests rapidly coalesced into a broader anti-systemic mobilization. The elite response was further conditioned by the class character of the initial protests. Whereas previous working-class mobilizations have often been met with callous indifference, contempt or brute force, unrest emanating from the bazaar posed a particular challenge, given the traditional proximity of mercantile elites to the political leadership of the Islamic Republic – a relationship that initially encouraged attempts at accommodation rather than immediate repression.

The Pezeshkian government’s posture of limited tolerance evaporated within days, as effective control passed to the security apparatus: the various arms of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, alongside the military, judiciary and intelligence services. It will be the task of historians to reconstruct precisely what transpired between 8 and 10 January. In the midst of an almost total internet blackout and an abundance of misinformation, establishing a definitive chronology remains difficult. Nonetheless, an outline of events is beginning to come into focus.

Following the initial bazaar protests and their diffusion across multiple provinces, Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s deposed monarch, issued a public call for Iranians to take to the streets and overthrow the regime. According to numerous eyewitness accounts, the demonstrations on 8 January were exceptionally large and for the most part peaceful. Estimates of turnout vary widely, and reliable figures are unavailable, but many observers have suggested that these may have been the largest protests since the Green Movement of 2009, possibly larger. The visibility of pro-Pahlavi slogans was striking. In the aftermath of the night-time demonstrations, the state’s messaging hardened. Security forces sent warning text messages to millions of mobile phones and the Chief Justice, Gholamreza Mohseni-Ejei, issued a series of stern warnings, threatening severe consequences for anyone who joined further protests. This tactic appears to have deterred some participation the following day. Even so, on 9 January a substantial and highly committed core of protesters returned to the streets.

They were met with unprecedented violence. Videos circulated showing security units firing directly into crowds, storming hospitals, assaulting injured protesters and medical staff, and pursuing demonstrators into spaces that had previously retained a degree of informal immunity. At the same time, there is video evidence of armed protesters confronting security forces with knives, machetes and in some cases firearms, an indication of how years of repression has radicalized segments of the opposition. There were also multiple reports of arson attacks against government buildings, as well as mosques and state television and radio facilities, indicating the extent to which the protest had shifted into a more openly insurgent register in some localities. 

The geography of the repression that followed was markedly uneven. In some areas, brief but ferocious crackdowns left dozens dead within hours; in others, prolonged clashes unfolded over successive nights. These differences, however, do not detract from the overarching pattern. What took place was not a series of isolated excesses or lapses in discipline, but the systematic deployment of lethal force by the state against civilian protesters. Even the most cautious estimates place total fatalities – including security personnel – at no fewer than five thousand, with civilians constituting the overwhelming majority of the dead, while other assessments suggest a substantially higher toll.

The magnitude of the killing quickly overwhelmed hospitals and morgues. Footage from outside the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Centre in Tehran, showing rows of black body bags as families searched for missing relatives, circulated widely. In historical terms, comparison is possible only with the prison massacres of 1988 or perhaps the revolution itself, when the Islamic Republic was struggling to consolidate its grip on power. The circumstances differ profoundly, but the level of state violence does not.

This repression unfolded against a backdrop of unusually explicit external threats. During the early days of the protests, the Trump Administration signalled readiness to intervene should instability deepen. While Trump himself oscillated between bellicosity and restraint, the cumulative effect was to reinforce the Iranian regime’s claim that mass protest and foreign subversion are one and the same.

Well before the war last June, the Israelis demonstrated their capacity to operate clandestinely on Iranian territory, most notoriously with the assassination of Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July 2024. This has been enabled by the endemic corruption that permeates Iran’s political economy and security apparatuses. The fusion of political power, economic privilege and coercive authority weakens the state’s capacity to neutralize such threats, creating vulnerabilities that external actors have readily exploited.

To acknowledge this is not to credit the regime’s claim that the mobilization was foreign-engineered. A nationwide uprising, rooted in years of social and economic degradation, cannot be reduced to the machinations of external intelligence services, even if there is little doubt that Israeli and US intelligence agencies have sought to hijack the protests. What they accomplished above all was to provide a legitimating alibi for repression, recasting protest as an extension of the June war and thereby justifying a state of exception in the name of national security. The result is visible in footage from across the country: the effective imposition of martial law and the accelerated militarisation of everyday life in Iranian cities, a direction of travel many critical observers have warned of for years.

To understand what distinguishes the present mobilization, it must be situated against Iran’s recent history of mass protest. The Green Movement of 2009 represented the most serious challenge to the Islamic Republic from within its own constitutional framework. Millions of Iranians took to the streets in largely silent, disciplined demonstrations to contest the controversial re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, demanding free and fair elections and a new constitutional settlement. It was a movement rooted in urban middle-class constituencies, oriented toward gradualist reform rather than a decisive rupture. Its crushing at the hands of the political establishment and Revolutionary Guards foreclosed the possibility of a negotiated democratic transition. Reformism was discredited and a generation of activists imprisoned or silenced.

The ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ uprising of 2022 was sociologically and politically distinct. Triggered by the death in state custody of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, it did not centre on elections or elite contestation, but instead foregrounded bodily autonomy and gender equality in the face of heavy-handed authoritarian rule. In this sense, it directly confronted the ideological foundations of the Islamic Republic while also bringing patterns of ethno-national repression – particularly against Kurdish communities – into relief. The movement thus articulated the most emancipatory political horizon to emerge in decades. Its defeat required high levels of violence, including mass arrests and the use of metal pellets that blinded protesters. Yet it also extracted tangible concessions, most notably a partial retreat by the state in the enforcement of compulsory veiling in public space. The present movement differs from both. It lacks the procedural clarity of the Green Movement and the emancipatory coherence of the 2022 protests. It is broader in social composition, more diffuse in demands and far more deeply shaped by economic exhaustion and geopolitical siege. What unites participants is not a political programme, but a shared sense that the existing order is unreformable. It is within this vacuum that monarchist currents have gained renewed visibility. Pahlavi’s call for immediate normalization with Israel exemplifies the orientation of an externally anchored project that prioritizes geopolitical realignment over questions of social justice or popular sovereignty.

This orientation is reinforced by a powerful propaganda ecosystem. Persian-language satellite outlets such as Manoto TV and Iran International, both based in London, are widely understood to rely on foreign funding, though their financing structures remain opaque. Together, these news networks have promoted a deeply revisionist account of the pre-1979 Pahlavi era, universalizing the lifestyles of a narrow elite while systematically erasing the regime’s pervasive political repression and inequality. This narrative has found a receptive audience among younger generations who have known no political order other than the Islamic Republic, and who are attracted to accounts of a lost Pahlavi ‘golden age’ in which Iran was allegedly on the path to becoming the ‘Japan of West Asia’, derailed by an international conspiracy that installed clerical rule. In this context, ‘۵۷’er’  – a shorthand for those who participated in the 1979 revolution – has re-emerged as a term of abuse, expressing a generational politics of blame in which an earlier revolutionary cohort is blamed for Iran’s present situation.

Pahlavi’s meetings with Netanyahu and reported Israeli cyber operations amplifying monarchist messages further underscore his reliance on external backing. In the absence of rigorous polling or independent empirical research, the actual depth of support for a Pahlavi restoration remains difficult to gauge. What is nevertheless striking is the shift in the discursive terrain of oppositional politics. In 2009, the proposition that Reza Pahlavi might constitute a political alternative to the Islamic Republic would have been widely dismissed. Today, the claim circulates at far greater frequency and volume, particularly in diaspora media and Western political discourse. This shift tells us less about the intrinsic strength of monarchism than about the erosion of alternative pathways for political transformation, which has generated a psychic investment in an imperial deus ex machina: the idea that Iran’s political salvation can only arrive from without.

The recent turn toward monarchism – marked by ethno-supremacist and chauvinist currents – should therefore be understood primarily as a symptom rather than a cause. It is driven less by conviction than by desperation, produced over decades in which the Islamic Republic has systematically quashed peaceful efforts to bring about change from within. Iranian civil society groupings persist, but have been profoundly weakened by years of disorganization and repression. In this respect, the present moment bears a resemblance to the late 1970s, when the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, had debilitated Iran’s once-formidable organized left, leaving it ill-prepared to contend with a far more cohesive and disciplined Islamist coalition.

What this conjuncture also reveals is the entanglement between US-Israeli threats and state repression. The two are analytically distinct and politically irreducible to one another, yet they operate in ways that mutually condition outcomes. Under conditions of sustained external pressure, dissent is more readily curbed, compromise is redefined as vulnerability and dissident currents are discredited as conduits of foreign penetration. The repertoire of state response contracts, with coercion elevated from last resort to the default mode of governance.

Nevertheless, Iran’s political field remains crowded and contested. Trade unionists, Kurdish social movements, women organisers, students, journalists, lawyers and civic networks persist not because repression has failed, but because political pluralism in Iran has deep historical roots. At the same time, the idea that the Islamic Republic is on the verge of being overthrown risks misreading the domestic balance of forces. Any serious assessment must reckon with the centrality of the security apparatus, above all the Revolutionary Guards. An institution born of revolution, forged in the violence of internal consolidation and entrenched during the eight-year war with Baʿthist Iraq, the Revolutionary Guards has since expanded far beyond its original remit. In the post-1988 period it became involved in the reconstruction of Iran’s devastated economy, gradually transforming itself into a sprawling politico-economic conglomerate alongside a formidable military force with regionally unparalleled experience of asymmetric warfare. As the effective imposition of martial law across Iranian cities makes clear, this is not an institution that will simply melt away in the face of mass protest, nor one that will shy away from extreme violence.

It is against this backdrop that the most plausible scenarios now being discussed begin to take shape. One is a variant of elite-led consolidation, increasingly framed within Iran through the language of Bonapartism. The speculation that such a role might once have been played by Major-General Qassem Soleimani before his assassination by the Trump administration in January 2020 captures the logic at work: the hope that a powerful insider might ‘save’ the system by overhauling parts of it from above, restoring discipline and reaching an accommodation with Washington. Whether any figure today could command comparable authority or reconstitute a popular constituency behind such a project remains uncertain. Yet given Trump’s preference for rapid and spectacular demonstrations of imperial might, some within and beyond Iran continue to view this option as a plausible one.

The alternative, and in many respects darker, trajectory is the continuation and intensification of a long-standing US-Israeli hybrid war against the Islamic Republic and its population. Under this scenario, sustained economic siege, covert action and episodic military force are deployed to erode the regime’s internal cohesion until fissures emerge within the elite and security apparatus, weakening its monopoly of violence. Mass protests would almost certainly recur as conditions deteriorate further, intersecting with calls for major powers to support armed groups or dissident factions, possibly including elements within the regime itself. The danger is not sudden regime collapse, but a drawn-out descent into instability and, potentially, even balkanization. This outcome is widely believed to be the preferred strategic horizon of the Israeli state, particularly if the emplacement of Pahlavi as a compliant client proves too fantastical to realise.

Other alternatives may yet emerge. But given the present internal and external balance of forces, the outlook is bleak. The emancipatory social movements that have periodically erupted over the past two decades have not disappeared, but they remain hobbled by repression at home and instrumentalization from abroad. Their survival – let alone their capacity to shape Iran’s future on their own terms – will depend on whether they can endure the combined pressures of authoritarian consolidation, imperial aggression and a rapidly narrowing space for political agency.