The seeds of the so-called “Arab Spring” reached Iran in 2011 with a demonstration on February 14. Unlike in other countries of the Middle East where protesters were able to uproot a number of autocratic rulers, in Iran swift repressive measures and restrictions on public spaces prevented the protests from growing into a revolution. Twelve years later, everything is different: Demonstrators across the country have been defying security forces for months. Their popular uprising challenges the foundations of the Iranian Republic, forty-four years after the Revolution of 1979.

This exceptional revolutionary moment was the focus of a panel discussion at Freie Universität on Tuesday, February 14, 2023 – twelve years to the day after the demonstrations in 2011. In the panel “Revolutions in Iran and Beyond: Transnational Feminist, Kurdish, and Social Mobilization,” Jannis Grimm and Mariam Salehi from the INTERACT Center discussed these ongoing revolts in and beyond Iran’s borders with Sanaz Azimipour from the Woman* Life Freedom Collective Berlin, Tareq Sydiq from the Center for Conflict Studies at the University of Marburg, and Rosa Burç, a doctoral student at the Center on Social Movement Studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence/Italy who is currently a visiting scholar at INTERACT.

A record of this event is available on YouTube and can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2Z8l8Cw93s

A conversation with Rosa Burç and Jannis Grimm about the current situation in Iran and why protest movements proceed in a non-linear way.

Ms. Burç, where is the protest movement in Iran today, six months after the death of Mahsa Jina Amini, the twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman who died in Iranian police custody on September 16, 2022?

Rosa Burç: The peak of the protests was in November and December 2022, when the media published articles about it every day, and the protests were visible in many cities. Since the beginning of this year, it may feel like the protest movement has weakened, but this impression is mistaken: people are still protesting. Just last week, several protesters were released from prison; the first thing they did was chant “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî,” meaning “Woman, Life, Freedom.”

In my opinion, most of the participants in the protest movement are still as determined and convinced as they were six months ago, even though by now many are quite exhausted.

So it is not accurate to state that movement’s energy has faded away, or that the movement is almost over?

Rosa Burç: No, absolutely not. Protest movements don’t work like that either; they don’t always proceed in a linear fashion. There are always episodes in which large numbers of people take to the streets, where mobilization is strong and visible. But then there are also moments in revolutionary phases of uprisings or protest movements in which the protest becomes invisible, where it appears to have died down, but in fact continues. People gather, strategize, draw new strength, and at some point, it comes to the surface again.

I would say that today’s protests are part of a long-term uprising that has been going on for years – perhaps even since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979.

Who are the most important actors in this movement?

Rosa Burç: They are oppositional and highly multifaceted groups in society – workers, students, Kurds, Balochis, Azerbaijanis, monarchists, and so on. In the past, these groups have also initiated protests, but usually separately from each other. Today, some of these groups manage to interact more and connect better with each other.

That’s what’s new about the current revolutionary episode, and that’s also what makes the regime so afraid: it’s much more difficult to repress a population in which the different groups see each other’s oppression and recognize each other’s subjectivities, in which joint action is taken and joint visions of the future are negotiated.

This can be seen, for example, in how the Kurdish opposition has played a crucial role in shaping the current protest episode: not only has the movement adopted the slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî,” which has its roots in the Kurdish resistance movement in Turkey, but also large parts of society followed the strike called by Kurdish activists.

These alliances are an expression of cross-group, transnational learning processes between social and political movements. Of course, all this does not mean that there are no conflicts and challenges in the processes of negotiating what a new society should look like.

Now an amnesty has followed the phase of bloody repression with several death sentences for demonstrators: What is this all about?

Rosa Burç: The executions have not stopped; hundreds of people were executed in January alone. It’s just that you hear less about it in the media. This amnesty is part of a common tradition to pardon imprisoned people on anniversaries, this time it was the forty-fourth anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.

But this kind of pardoning does not mean that people are released into freedom; it means they must sign a statement stating that they repent of the crime they are charged with and will not commit it again. For protesters, for example, this means that even worse punishment will await them should they protest again. All of this shows that the regime is not becoming any gentler.

You talk about the protest movement being very multifaceted: it’s a freedom revolution, a feminist revolution, a Kurdish revolution, anti-authoritarian, social, secular – it’s many revolutions. But in the debate about what form of society should follow the Islamic Republic, it is then often simply assumed that the most obvious alternative might be some kind of secular monarchy, that is, a return to the status quo before the 1979 revolution.

Is there any agreement in Iran about which political institutions and visions would best suit the movement in all its diversity? Can the various groups agree on a common vision?

Rosa Burç: Yes, there is such a debate, although the dominant discourse is actually between these two options: secular-nationalist or Islamist-nationalist.

From the perspective of the Kurds, neither option is a solution. In both models, they would still be oppressed because of their identity. For example, half of all those imprisoned in Iran are of Kurdish origin, although Kurds make up only about ten percent of the entire population. Moreover, their oppression did not begin with the founding of the Islamic Republic but was already pronounced in the times of the Pahlavi monarchy.

Today there is an alternative discourse, especially in university circles, among the younger generation, which does not want to have to decide between imposed dichotomies and limited imaginaries of the future. They are looking for new ways to improve coexistence for all, especially for those marginalized and oppressed by the status quo. Diaspora societies are also important in this context. They have become spaces in which new conceptions of society are freely negotiated.

Mr. Grimm, how important was and is international solidarity for the protest movement in Iran?

Jannis Grimm: International solidarity plays a very important role during times of mass mobilization in autocracies, especially in maintaining a media presence and generating attention. In the aftermath of mobilization peaks, diaspora communities can in turn use the fact that mass protests occurred and were suppressed as leverage vis-à-vis policymakers abroad to push for changes in foreign policy toward their home countries, and to demand accountability.

Diaspora communities and solidarity initiatives are also important in raising awareness abroad that popular uprisings are first and foremost a symptom of sociopolitical instability, not the cause of it. They thus play a crucial role in pushing back against the normalization of politics with autocrats after phases of contention.

It seems to me that there was a certain helplessness also on the part of government policy in Europe, namely that it wasn’t clear what they could actually do to support the movement?

Jannis Grimm: Supporting revolutionary uprisings from abroad is always a double-edged sword because it often also provides a pretext for regimes to discredit social movements as puppets of foreign patrons, and to defame demonstrators as foreign agents.

This can explain part of the hesitation that you pointed out, but another reason for it was the concern that stronger pressure could permanently close off all paths to further negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program or a return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)

In any case, it can be said that the role of foreign countries was and is not decisive for the success of these protests. After all, international pressure is taken into consideration by regime elites only in so far as it does not compete with other more vital interests. In the case of mass protests, we implicitly assume that the way a regime is perceived internationally will naturally influence how it is able to respond to protest. But what if regime elites have little to lose on this front? In the case of Iran specifically, there is not much potential for loss of face. The regime was considered a pariah even before it started to crack down on the protests. The situation was similar in Syria in 2011. When a regime perceives social mobilization as an existential threat, pressure from abroad is often not decisive for its course of action.

You talk about transnational effects, social movements that have taken place elsewhere in the region and to which the protest movement in Iran has responded or with which it communicates. Can you tell us more about how this happens?

Jannis Grimm: The experience of repression and marginalization is something that connects people worldwide. Solidarity and learning effects across borders unfold at the grassroots level, often long before we even see or talk about public protest. People learn strategies from each other. Symbols, slogans, tactics, but also concrete behavioral advice, such as how to behave at demonstrations and how to fend off security forces are shared and refined in transnational interaction. This also extends to individual hashtags and slogans which are often recycled or adapted in order to link particular struggles to a longer trajectory of resistance.

It is thus no coincidence that you can currently see expressions of solidarity with the protest in Iran or the Kurdish movement in sites of contention across the globe, from Spain and France to Peru – even in the climate justice protests against coal mining in Lützerath in Germany. And, of course, movements in a given country also learn from their own history and from past mistakes or successes.

Pepe Egger conducted this interview.

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This article originally appeared in German in campus.leben, the online magazine of Freie Universität Berlin.