My writings and commentary about the "Mahsa Amini" anti-hijab protests in Iran 2022-23
[Updated Feb 2023]
Given the evolving and fluid situation in Iran I am posting a list of key recent commentary and writings I have done in the past three months. I have also included earlier writings relevant to the current protests and crisis in Iran. I will keep this updated. [Updated September 2023]
ESSAYS & ARTICLES
The Women’s Movement in Iran One Year after the Death of Mahsa Amini: A fragile triumph [Sept 12, 2023]
https://publicseminar.org/2023/09/after-amini-iran-womens-movement/
Iran’s First Feminist Uprising [Sept 28, 2022]
https://publicseminar.org/essays/irans-first-feminist-uprising/
(Widely citied; Almost 2,000 views, translated into Turkish, Greek, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, several eurozine.com languages)
The Atlantic: Inside Iran’s Evin Prison: What I learned about the challenge of resisting a regime that locks up thousands of political prisoners-
Cited:
https://www.fdd.org/overnight-brief/november-2-2022/
Kian Tajbakhsh writes: Even as this new wave of dissenters faces detention in prisons like Evin, it has achieved something of lasting value: a new language of civic courage and individual dignity. Many protesters today put themselves at physical risk from the regime’s reprisals in ways far beyond anything I experienced. I do not know if the society that they and I dream of can come into being. But I do know that only with this language of liberty can the democratic citizenship on which a better society depends be built. – The Atlantic
Wall St Journal (Saturday Essay) - The Culture War Behind Iran’s Protests
cited:
https://www.fdd.org/overnight-brief/november-14-2022/
Kian Tajbakhsh writes: The protesters have thrown down a moral as well as a civic challenge that calls on all Iranians to start a new conversation about what, collectively, they can and should envision for their future—a future in which all Iranians can feel at home. – Wall Street Journal
A longer earlier version of the WSJ essay is here:
Ø “What Are Iranians Dreaming about Today? Reflections on the Islamic Revolution at 40.” Social Research Journal: An International Quarterly Volume 86, Number 1, Spring 2019, pp. 305-335 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/725998
Washington Post Comment “The 3.5% Rule: Size of Protests Matter.”
The following is my comment in the Washington Post to Kurzman's article https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/19/iran-protests-revolution-islamic-republic/?commentID=d7e8ef86-abd1-4945-9ccf-38088f92c3d4
There are two additional factors that make the success of the protests in Iran less probable. First, incidents of successful people power, the ability of mass protests to topple a regime and install a more democratic government, have declined worldwide over the last two decades. Second, studies of revolutions point to the 3.5% or 5% rule: namely, no mass protest mobilizing that proportion of the pop has failed to replace a regime. Conversely below 2% no protest has succeeded. (These points I take from research by Harvard's Erica Chenoweth). The pop in Iran ages 15-64 is about 60 million. Based on this rule, this would mean we would need to see between 2-3 million in the streets to reach that critical threshold. (The 2009 Green movement by all accounts drew much bigger crowds even if more concentrated in major cities than the recent protests.) From most reports, over the last three months there have been nowhere near that level of mass participation. In 1986 Philippines crowds were 3.6% of the population. On the other hand, the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests that drew perhaps 4% of the population failed. This means that the 3.5% rule is a necessary but not sufficient condition for revolutionary success.
Three factors could explain the significance of this numerical threshold. First, there is a limit to the capacity of security forces to repress opposition in the streets. 3-5% probably over-stretches most police and security forces. Second, it is very difficult to mobilize more than 5% even when a large majority sympathize with protesters as most people will free ride. Third, a regime that sees 3-5% of the population in the streets assesses that a very large portion of the population are indeed sympathetic and so reckon the costs of repression will be too high in the medium to long term. (Iran's 1979 revolution drew almost 10%.) If the protests grow that large, a regime would have to either compromise or resort to severe repression or collapse.
I discussed these points with NPR's Deborah Amos on Dec 15th. My remarks are collected in this Twitter thread.
LIVE INTERVIEWS, RADIO and ONLINE
Chatham House Middle East and North Africa Programme. Feb 3, 2023 Video online here.
Interviewed by Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The World Today @ 16.45 mins. “Iran’s execution of protesters and the future of the protests.” Jan 5, 2023. https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/worldtoday/kimberley-flooding-worst-on-record/14127246
NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Columbia Global Senior Advisor Kian Tajbakhsh about the protests in Iran, which have continued for more than 100 days. A look at where Iran demonstrations are headed after over 100 days of public protests. December 28, 2022.
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs & NPR (Debra Amos) December 15, 2022, Iran's Uprising and the Fight for Women's Rights. https://globalaffairs.org/events/irans-uprising-and-fight-womens-rights
(Click on image below to follow Twitter thread with some of my remarks.)
New York Institute for the Humanities. December 9, 2022. Panel discussion (with Azadeh Moaveni), Moderated by Laura Secor, http://nyihumanities.org/#content
BBC World Service Newshour (with Tim Franks) Oct 12, 2022. about Iran Protests
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w172yfc6f2wkylh, (Iran segment @ 32m–38m)
[Tim Franks, BBC]. Iran has seen major protests in recent years, but always the authorities have managed to reassert control. So what are the chances now? Kian Tajbakhsh is a former Iranian prisoner. He's been incarcerated twice. He now teaches political science at Columbia University in the US. How significant does he think the unrest is?
[Kian Tajbakhsh] I would say the most significant thing about this protest is that it really has highlighted a kind of cultural war between profoundly contradictory views of what is the good life, what is a good society and what it means to have individual freedom in relation to communal norms. So I think that what these young people have done is that they've thrown down a challenge to the regime about how to deal with this profound culture clash within the society.
[Tim Franks, BBC]. Is the fact that it's not necessarily principally a demonstration or a series of demonstrations that are driven by economic grievances as you put it, you know, culture wars and the fact that it's this sort of up swelling of young people apparently leaderless. Is that a source of strength or do you think actually, it's a potential weakness? Because in a sense, it means that the authorities don't have anybody to negotiate with and anything directly to negotiate over?
[Kian Tajbakhsh] Yes, in short, I would say it's mostly a weakness. If we step back and see what has gone on in the political context in Iran over the last two decades, the reality is that the only real organized force that has provided some alternative to the very fundamentalist group ruling Iran are the moderate Islamic reformists. But unfortunately, after 2009, when the Green Movement protests were crushed by the regime, those forces - and those were organized forces, they had political parties, they had newspapers, they had branches of their party in different cities around the country – they have been banned. And so those political parties that could have provided a platform for some kind of moderate reform have been completely marginalized. The leaders of those groups are either in prison in exile or they've been banned from public life and are completely silenced. So there is really very little organized support to take these protests forward. However important and significant they [protests] are and I really do believe they are in adding an important ingredient to the conversation of what the future of Iran should be. Unfortunately, I think it is a weakness that they are leaderless and they're sort of politically inchoate. And currently, you know, most of the protests until maybe a few days ago really have been restricted to a group of young men and women in their late teens and 20s. So unless there is a willingness of the regime to allow the reformist parties to grow again, I think that it'll be hard to leverage the gains of these protests into something long lasting.
[Tim Franks, BBC].Could that change if it spreads in terms of there's been some industrial action in some of the oil plants, industrial plants in Iran, you sort of get sporadic hints that maybe business people and shop owners and so forth are pretty fed up about the internet being cut off, which is obviously a tool of social control. I mean, do you think there could be further fuel added to the fire?
[Kian Tajbakhsh] One of the things that is striking about the governmental system in Iran is its robust consolidation over the last 43 years. This is a regime that has relatively successfully combined an ability to provide basic goods and services to much of the population combined that with a kind of coercive authoritarian power and a relatively closed political system. So I would say past experience suggests that they will ride this out. So I think there's a long way to go. And I think that the state has the resources to prevail in the short and medium term.
[Tim Franks, BBC]. That was Kian Tajbakhsh, former Iranian prisoner now teaches political science at Columbia University in the US.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
QUOTED IN MEDIA
NY Times: Iranian Protesters Attack Khomeini’s Childhood Home as Unrest Spreads
Iran’s women on freedom: ‘This cause won’t die’
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2022/1013/Iran-s-women-on-freedom-This-cause-won-t-die
The protests “are a plea and cry for a type of personal autonomy that many of the young generation have come to see as normal ... being able to walk in the street without being either harassed, or being arrested,” said Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian American political scientist at Columbia University in New York, who has twice been detained in Iran for lengthy periods.
Iran’s mandatory hijab laws make Iran “utterly exceptional,” matched only by the Taliban’s Afghanistan, said Dr. Tajbakhsh, the analyst, speaking during a webinar on Tuesday. Today, in a sophisticated nation such as Iran, the laws are “such an anachronism that it has almost become like an embarrassment,” he added.
“This is a [young] generation that has grown up only within the confines of the ideological parameters of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said. “So the idea that this generation is turning its back on the values that it grew up in – that it was indoctrinated in, so to speak – must rattle the leadership of the regime.”
Iran protests: Dissident who founded Ayatollah’s Revolutionary Guard reveals why the regime will fall
By Michael Day, Chief Foreign Commentator
November 6, 2022 6:00 am (Updated November 7, 2022 9:55 am)
Some opponents of the regime think, however, that key requirements for regime change are still missing.
Kian Tajbakhsh, a former inmate of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, and now a political scientist at Columbia University in New York, took part in the 2009 uprising. Those demonstrations, unlike the current ones, were protests for political reform organised by the urban middle classes. Ten years on, unrest in 2019 was fuelled by economic discontent. “What’s different now is that you have a young generation that has simply had enough. And that’s fantastic, Tajbakhsh says. “The protests are very widespread and very deeply felt.”
But crucially, he thinks, the current protests have yet to morph into a “social movement”. He says that without leaders and structure and aims, this anger can’t make this transition and bring about political change.
”For this to happen the protest will have to grow to include the other groups – the urban middle classes, major sectors of the economy, such as energy, transport and the urban merchants, and we haven’t seen that yet.” In addition, he says the security forces would have to step aside.
Currently, there are no viable opposition political structures to take up the reins. Tajbakhsh says that the reform movement is marginalised and as reviled by the Generation Z protesters (who dismiss it as craven and cowardly), as it is by the authorities.
He predicts, however, that while regime change is not imminent, the current protests will lead to opposition forces from different sections of society coalescing into an effective social/political movement over the next five to 10 years.
What can the West do to help? Here there seems to be more consensus.
Tajbakhsh is blunter: “I think the JCPOA should be junked. I think that Tehran sending drones to Russian for use in Ukraine should be a wake up call to Europe about what this regime really is: indecent and utterly hostile to all liberal democracies. The idea that the West can negotiate with Iran while it is doing this to its own people is ridiculous.”
Quoted in Christian Science Monitor: ‘Women, life, freedom.’ Inside the protests shocking Iran.
“Even if there is a change of regime, this culture war is not going to go away,” says Kian Tajbakhsh, a political scientist now at Columbia University, whose work in Iran led to two long periods of incarceration.
“On the motivational side, these kids are really fired up and angry – it’s a complete anachronism, this [hijab] situation, and they’ve had it,” Dr. Tajbakhsh says. And though the authorities might ease the pressure by limiting the enforcement of hijab rules, or reducing punishments, Dr. Tajbakhsh sees a clash of colliding worldviews preventing that.
“The Islamists don’t feel they coexist with other citizens who are equally citizens like they are, but simply have very different points of view,” he says. “They see them as kafir, as infidels, [and] foreign in that they don’t belong to this revolutionary belief.”
The protesters are despised as “unfortunate leftovers” of the idolatrous, deposed monarchy, he says, or “products of a global culture that is so powerful that even a righteous Islamist revolution can’t prevent it ... influencing this young generation with the wrong ideas.”
“They’ve always thought, ‘We will never ... get rid of these kinds of disturbances, or alien elements, so we’ll just have to manage them,’” adds Dr. Tajbakhsh. “They are not citizens to be assuaged, to be entered into dialogue with.”
PODCASTS
Women, Life, Freedom: Iran's Movement for Women's Rights (Webinar Participant, Columbia University)
https://universitylife.columbia.edu/content/women-life-freedom-irans-movement-womens-rights
Iran Protests: A Feminist Social Movement. “Vis a Vis” is a new podcast brought to you by the Alliance Program at Columbia University.
https://visavis.podcasts.library.columbia.edu/podcast/iran-protests-a-feminist-social-movement/
WRITINGS RELATED TO PERSONAL BACKGROUND AS POLITICAL PRISONER IN IRAN
My Prison Reading. The New York Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/09/06/my-prison-reading/
An Iranian Dissident’s Tale by Eric Randolph. The New York Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/07/30/an-iranian-dissidents-tale/
"Reading Rorty in Tehran, or What Happened When I Road-Tested Rorty’s Philosophy of Life Inside an Iranian Prison” in The Ethics of Richard Rorty, by Susan Dieleman, David E. McClean, and Paul Showler, (New York: Routledge, 2022),
RELATED ARTICLES ON IRANIAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY
¬ “What Are Iranians Dreaming about Today? Reflections on the Islamic Revolution at 40.” Social Research Journal: An International Quarterly Volume 86, Number 1, Spring 2019, pp. 305-335 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/725998
¬ “Hind Swaraj: Reading Gandhi’s Critique of Modernity in Tehran.” Social Change (Sage) Vol 48, Issue 1, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049085717743831
ON FOREIGN POLICY
¬ “Getting Real About Iran” Foreign Affairs, March 2019. https://fam.ag/2FjMVMR
Excerpt
U.S. retrenchment from democracy promotion worldwide may be bad news for those Iranian democrats, both inside and outside the country, who are striving for a more liberal society open to the Western world. But given the democracy agenda’s current defeat in Iran—along with many others, I was arrested and detained in Iran for years for advocating democratic reforms—the United States has little choice other than to play the long game and hope a new vision will emerge from a future generation that embraces both normalization and human rights.
There is no guarantee that successfully pushing back against Iran’s regional advances will lend support to such a new vision, but for now a regional containment strategy occupies the space of greatest overlap between Western capabilities and realities on the ground.
¬ Foreign Affairs Experts Poll: Iran & U.S. interests in the Middle East https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ask-the-experts/2019-08-13/does-iran-pos…
¬ "Can the U.S. and Iran Avert a Military Confrontation?" Op-ed Columbia News July 2019. https://news.columbia.edu/news/us-and-iran-confrontation
¬ “Who Wants What from Iran Now? The Post-Nuclear Deal U.S. Policy Debate.” The Washington Quarterly2018, 41:3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0163660X.2018.1519347
TELEVISION
¬ Interviewed by PBS national TV program The Open Mind, “Academics in the Crosshairs”
April 2019.