Iran’s Rulers Have Contained the Protest Movement, but the System Is Far From Stable
The Iranian leadership has managed to contain the biggest protest wave since the 1979 revolution. De-escalation of geopolitical tensions with the US would help the protesters, making it harder to depict domestic dissent as the product of foreign interference.
Students at Amirkabir University in Tehran, Iran protesting, September 20, 2022. (Darafsh / Wikimedia Commons)
At the height of Iran’s countrywide protest movement last fall, the Islamic Republic’s all-powerful supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, called it a “hybrid war” fomented by foreign enemies — particularly the United States — through their local agents, taking advantage of the grievances of misguided Iranians.
Blaming domestic dissent on foreign conspiracies has been the official narrative of Iran’s ruling clerics ever since they took over after a popular revolution toppled the shah’s US-backed dictatorship in 1979. In what follows, I will focus on the role of this narrative to understand how the Islamic Republic has so far managed to contain Iran’s most recent wave of popular protests.
State of Siege
Iran’s 1979 revolution had a powerful anti-imperialist thrust, a reaction to a quarter century of US support for the unpopular shah, who had been restored to his throne in 1953 through a CIA coup. After the shah’s fall, the caretaker government appointed by the revolution’s charismatic leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, initially maintained relations, however tense, with Washington, which went as far as intelligence-sharing with the CIA.
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