Afshin Matin-Asgari is a history professor at California State University, Los Angeles and author of Both Eastern and Western: An Intellectual History of Iranian Modernity.
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.
To understand today’s protests in Iran, we need to look at the history of the Islamic Republic since 1979. Iran has a tradition of popular mobilization with few parallels in the modern world, and that tradition underpins the current wave of discontent.