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ABSTRACT
This article examines mobilizations and activism in authoritarian settings by considering the case of Iran. By focusing on the transformation of activism since the 1990s and the green movement, it advances an explanation of how oppositional political groups have been able to survive and produce forms of resistant subjectivity despite authoritarian constraints. In order to do so, the article brings together two scholarly traditions, namely Social Movement Theory (SMT) and the study of subjectivity and resistance as framed by Sari Hanafi. SMT explains how activists have been able to navigate repression and create opportunities for mobilization while shifting between formal and informal politics. The study of subjectivity helps conceptualize the type of subjects or political citizens that authoritarian environments generate. The article builds on field research with activists conducted in Iran and Turkey between 2007 and 2016. It argues that authoritarian constraints allow autonomous activism to flourish while emptying of meaning the regime-sanctioned political infrastructures.
Acknowledgement
A version of this essay was first presented at the annual conference of the British International Studies Association in 2016 and at the University of Manchester, Department of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies, in 2017. I am grateful for comments I received there. I wish to acknowledge the insightful remarks made by Francesco Cavatorta and Shirin Saeidi.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 In June 2009, protests erupted across Iran in reaction to the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who won the electoral race against other candidates among whom were the reformists Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi. The protests lasted into the winter and came to be known as the green movement. One of the most violently repressed protests was held on the day of Ashoura (27 December 2009). Ashoura coincided with the death of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, a prominent cleric critical of the regime and supportive of the protest movement, offering a further opportunity for mobilization.
2 Interview, male 36, November 2011, Eskişehir. The campaign was called soot-e èteraaz, sometimes also soot-e sabz (the protest whistle, the green whistle).
3 See Abdelrahman, Egypt’s Long Revolution.
4 Holliday and Rivetti, “Divided we Stand?”; Menoret, “Leaving Islamic Activism Behind”; Duboc, “Egyptian Leftist Intellectuals’ Activism.”
5 In total, more than 60 in-depth interviews have been conducted. Fifteen have been used for this article.
6 Specifically, activists expressed disillusion with Mohammad Khatami, former president and reformist leader par excellence, but also with Mousavi, Karoubi and Hasan Rouhani. On the relationship between the reformist elites and activists, see Holliday and Rivetti, “Divided we Stand?”
7 Bayat, Life as Politics.
8 Scott, “Two Cheers for Anarchism,” 20.
9 Hanafi, “The Arab Revolutions.”
10 See for instance Della Porta, Mobilizing for Democracy.
11 Escobar, “Imagining a Post-development Era?”
12 Bayat, “Capital Accumulation,” 205. Bayat refers here to Therborn, “Why Some Classes Are More Successful than Others.”
13 Ibid.
14 McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, Comparative Perspectives; Markoff, Waves of Democracy.
15 Goodwin and Jasper (1996), in Beinin and Vairel, Social Movements, 5.
16 Goldstone, “More Social Movements or Fewer?,” 356.
17 McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention.
18 Kurzman, “Structural Opportunity.”
19 Pearlman, “Emotions and the Microfoundations of the Arab Uprisings.”
20 Beinin and Vairel, Social Movements.
21 Ibid. Despite presenting significant variations in the way they are organized and operate, authoritarian systems share common traits when it comes to their “greater autonomy from society [than democratic systems], though not necessarily from economic elites” and the exclusion of “certain mobilized groups from any role in political decision making” (Goodwin, No Other Way Out, 13).
22 Menoret, “Leaving Islamic Activism Behind”; Duboc, “Egyptian Leftist Intellectuals’ Activism.”
23 Khatib and Lust, Taking to the Streets; Abdelrahman, “In Praise of Organization”; Bayat, “The Arab Spring.”
24 Abdelrahman, “In Praise of Organization”; Lust, “Why Now?”
25 Abdelrahman, Egypt’s Long Revolution, 49.
26 Khatib and Lust, Taking to the Streets, 5.
27 Gana, The Making of the Tunisian Revolution, 2
28 Both reformist parties, they were made illegal in 2010. The first was supportive of Mir Hussein Mousavi while the second supported Mehdi Karoubi at the 2009 presidential election.
29 Keshavarzian, “Contestation without Democracy.”
30 Hinnebusch, “Change and Continuity after the Arab Uprising.”
31 Saeidi, “Creating the Islamic Republic.”
32 Initially a pro-regime organization, later it moved towards a critical position face à the regime. Its leader, Heshmatollah Tabarzadi, has been in jail since December 2009. In the meantime, the organization has changed its name to Jebhe-ye democratik-e melli-e Iran and is also involved in extra-campus activities. It is part of the Hambastegi-ye bozorg coalition, which is a loose network of pro-democracy groups in Iran. The majority of its members, however, are today either jailed or abroad.
33 Mahdi, “The Student Movement,” 11.
34 Rivetti, “Student Movements in the Islamic Republic.”
35 Ghamari-Tabrizi, Islam and Dissent.
36 Adelkhah, “The Political Economy of the Green Movement”; Reisinezhad, “The Iranian Green Movement”; Pourmokhtari, “Understanding Iran’s Green Movement.”
37 Interview with M.M., a student activist in political science, previously member of the student branch of the Mosharekat Front, Tehran University (male, 27, August 2016, Tehran).
38 JK, a Yazd-based student group, was established on campus as an alternative to the local Islamic Association present on campus which, by the mid-2000s, fell into the hands of conservative students. JK is a non-affiliated democratic and liberal organization.
39 Personal interview, male, 30, April 2012, Nevşehir.
40 The name of Mousavi’s electoral committee, which originally formed to support Khatami’s candidacy. For an account of the activities of the committee, see Ghafouri, “Setad 88.”
41 Interview, male, 35, April 2012, Niğde.
42 Interview, July 2016, Tehran. J.J. was a student activist when she was part of Khatami’s campaign. After that, she joined a feminist NGO, Hastia Andish, before moving to the One Million Signatures Campaign and other smaller initiatives after that. She was jailed twice.
43 Hashemi, “Renegotiating Iran’s Post-revolutionary Social Contract,” 207.
44 Interview, male, 32, June 2013, Kayseri.
45 Interview, male, 27, December 2011, Niğde. A. collaborates with the online newspaper Rah-e sabz.
46 A similar example is the involvement of grassroots student associations under the sponsorship of DTV in Khatami’s electoral campaign in 1996 and in the Dovvom-e Khordad Front, an electoral coalition established for the 2000 parliamentary election. After multiple electoral successes, the repression of the 1999 student protests and other episodes of violence, disillusion spread among the students who distanced themselves from institutional politics and eventually took refuge in informal activism (Malekzadeh, “Education as a Public Good or Private Resource,” 119). Currently, the DTV does not legally exist as the majority of the on-campus Islamic Associations that composed it are either closed or dominated by conservative students. However, pro-democracy students are in the process of reorganizing, with the goal of advancing students’ demands. According to M.M., students’ activism has dramatically changed. It left behind broad and political demands such as democratization or constitutional reform to focus on issues that are immediately relevant to the students, such as the privatization of higher education, increasing tuition fees and academic curricula (personal interview, male, 27, August 2016, Tehran).
47 He was born in 1980, so he entered university in 2000.
48 Interview, male, 36, November 2011, Eskişehir.
49 Name to indicate the modernist, nationalist and moderately secular forces in Iran. Here, M. refers to them during the revolution.
50 Interview, male, 36, November 2011, Eskişehir.
51 Interview, male, 26, May 2013, Kayseri.
52 Interview, male, 36, November 2011, Eskişehir.
53 Ibid.
54 Khatib and Lust, Taking to the Streets; Chalcraft, Popular Politics; Clarke, “Saying ‘Enough’.”
55 “The collaborative work [that] emerges as […] the by-product of the collective actions of non-collective actors,” as defined by Gana (The Making of the Tunisian Revolution, 2).
56 Hambastegi is a coalition coordinating various pro-democracy political groups/individuals. It has been off and on. Currently, most of its members are either jailed or outside of Iran. The latest spokesperson was Heshmatollah Tabarzadi.
57 Interview with R.M., male, 37, April 2013, Eskişehir.
58 Interview, male, 31, November 2011, Eskişehir.
59 Interview, male, 27, December 2011, Niğde.
60 Bøe, Family Law in Contemporary Iran, 162–169.
61 See http://www.women4parliament.org/ (accessed 4 July 2016).
62 See https://twitter.com/openstadiums?lang=en (accessed 4 July 2016). “Open Stadiums” demands the end of the exclusion of women from stadiums and sport events. Meydan-e Zanan was a feminist independent group. It emerged from the campaign to stop stoning in 2006 organized by the feminist NGO Rahi Institute, led by Shadi Sadr and Mahboube Abbasgholizadeh.
63 Interview, female, 33, June 2016, Tehran.
64 Hanafi, “The Arab Revolutions,” 203.
65 Hardt and Negri, Empire.
66 Hanafi, “The Arab Revolutions,” 203.
67 Interview, male, 32, June 2012, Istanbul.
68 Interview, male, 36, April 2013, Eskişehir.
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Paola Rivetti
Paola Rivetti is a lecturer in the Politics of the Middle East and International Relations at Dublin City University, Ireland.