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The Emergence of Collective Identity in the Green Movement
Abstract
The Iranian ‘Green Movement’ emerged in June 2009 from the context in which most of reformist parties and socio-political NGOs were drastically circumscribed by Islamist hard-liners. In contrast to some analyses which explained this movement as a sudden emotional reaction to the result of the controversial presidential election by North Tehran upper-class, the paper addresses the foundational origins of the Green Movement that were comprised of a cross-class of multiple and seemingly divergent socio-political forces both religious and secular. Considering this diverse base, the formation of collective identity among mosaic identities seemed highly unlikely. The paper, however, attempts to track down its formation through the concept of ‘fragmented collective action’ that points to the dispersion of a social movement’s political energies and the fragmentation of its constitutive movement groups. Additionally, the paper spotlights the importance of disparate spaces and crucial networks, i.e. reshaped student university associations and kinship-friendship networks that underlie the Green Movement as a collective action, before, during, and after the special phases. The article, also, delves in the production of alternative cultural models and symbolic challenges within those spaces to unmask the dominant codes constructed around ‘Islam’ as a central, nodal point. The article, furthermore, points to the pivotal role of widespread use of modern virtual space and information technology to bring together protestors and to crystallize a new collective identity. This collective identity shaped the Green Movement’s strategies and was, in turn, shaped at various points over the course of the Green Movement’s evolution. Furthermore, the paper argues that the inter-subjectively constructed collective identity was relational in that it is shaped by the Green Movement’s interactions with other social forces, principally the Islamic regime, and with the movement’s interlocutors. This means that Green Movement’s collective actors never acted in a void. Conversely, their submerged resistances in quotidian life in these scattered spaces found the possibility for emergence as a protest and then morphed into a movement, when the institutional context, particularly the institution of election, shifted.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
Iranian Studies