This paper considers the ongoing conflict between Iran's rulers and the supporters of Green Movement as a result of a head-on collision between two contradictory forces. In recent years, public attitudes in Iran have become more liberal. At the same time, power has shifted from conservative pragmatism toward a much more militant fundamentalism. Thirty years after the Islamic revolution, Iranians are growing demonstrably less religious and more liberal. Two face-to-face surveys of more than 2,500 Iranian adults, conducted in 2000 and 2005, clearly show the trend. But, while this was reflected in reformist trends in the country's wider political life, a movement toward militant fundamentalism took shape within the regime's power structure. To describe and explain how the conflicts between these two opposing forces are developed into protest movement, this paper analyzes the periodic occurrences since the disputed elections on June 12, 2009. This paper argues that these occurrences are diverse; some are political and reflected in protest demonstrations, while other are more cultural and symbolic that use poetry, music, and songs. It also argues that these occurrences are not randomly distributed. Rather, they are clustered together in time and each cluster forms a wave. The strength and the innovativeness of each wave decide the strength and the character of the following. The sequence of the concatenated waves decides the effectiveness of the Green Movement in changing the structure and/or policies of the Islamic regime in Iran.

Iran's Student Movement: A Sixty-year Retrospective Iran's post-2009 presidential election "Green" opposition movement has already become the subject of considerable scholarly and political controversy. A central issue of controversy concerns the movement's social base. Both opponents and supporters of the Green Movement often refer to its "middle class" character (Dabashi, 2010 forthcoming). Meanwhile, it is clear that university students are in the forefront of both campus and street protests throughout the country. This conforms to a historical pattern whereby students arguably have been the main social base of radical opposition to the Shah's regime and the Islamic Republic. This paper will offer a historical retrospective on about sixty years of student political activism in Iran. It will build on the author's previous major study of the Iranian student movement during the 1950s-1970s, adding a similar overview of the three post-revolutionary decades. Despite its significance to the history of modern Iran, student political activism remains vastly understudied. In English, it is the subject only of one book (Matin, 2001), partially noted in another (Parsa 1989) and covered in a few articles (Mahdi 1999). Nor can one find major studies of this topic in Persian (Baghi 2001). This is ironic, since abundant evidence points to students as Iran's most politically active social group throughout the post-revolutionary decades, just as they were under the monarchy. The first half of my paper therefore will document the above claim by tracing it in post-revolutionary primary sources, which I have gathered during twelve annual visits to Iran since the mid-1990s. These include the publications of Iran's major student organization, The Bureau of Unity Consolidation (Daftar-e tahkim-e vahdat), daily newspapers (Salam, Hamshahri, Tus, Neshat, Jame'eh, Sharq, Etemad-e Melli), and weekly, monthly or quarterly periodicals (Iran-e Farda, Shahrvand, Payam-e emruz, Cheshmandaz-e Iran, Kian, Adineh, Gozaresh, Rah-e no, Goft-o-gu). Building on this data, the second part of my paper will address several analytical questions regarding the sixty-year span of Iran's student opposition movement. Here, the most obvious approach would be a comparison of the movement during the 1950s-70s with that of the 1980s to 2010. Here, some preliminary generalizations are possible. For example, there is sufficient data to allow a comparison of the social and class background of student activists (or at least their leading members), the movement's dominant strands of political ideology, its organizational structure, and its links to various political trends outside the universities, before and after the revolution.

The clerical establishment and the Islamic Revolution Guards Corp (IRGC) have been two powerful but non-democratic political actors in post-revolutionary Iranian politics. Their relationship over the last three decades has been both fluid and multi-faceted. During the first decade of the revolution, the IRGC was a "political factor" but not a major "political player" independent of the clerical establishment. This was to a large extent due to two main factors: Ayatollah Khomeini's formal stricture forbidding the military personnel from becoming involved in partisan politics and the preoccupation of the military with the Iran-Iraq War. With the end of the war, the IRGC commanders -- who see the Guards as a Praetorian force and themselves as the self-appointed guardians of the revolution -- began to flex their muscle in the economic as well as the political domain. Today it is impossible to present a panoptic view of the Iranian state or evaluate the degree of its stability without considering the role of the IRGC. This fact became obvious in the aftermath of the June 2009 election turmoil which demonstrated that the IRGC has inveigled itself into the elite structure in such a way that it cannot be eliminated. Neither the Supreme Leader nor the president is able to ignore their demands, overlook their power, repudiate their actions or refuse to curry favor with them in Iran's increasingly muscular politics. Furthermore, while the IRGC commanders still constitute a minority of Iran's political elites, their increasing power base and game of musical chairs is causing more consternation among the clerical elite. This paper will examine the following two hypothesis: (a) The clerics' declining electoral success in particular and the overall process of declericalization has paved the way for individuals with IRGC credentials to enter the political scene en mass thereby leading to the militarization of the Iranian political landscape; (b) As it is becoming an increasingly more powerful player in Iranian politics and economy, the IRGC is beginning to act less like an ideological army and more like a rational actor trying to safeguard its institutional interests. By drawing heavily on the literature of "civil-military relations," the paper will also try to address the following questions: (a) Are the Iranian military leaders following in the footsteps of their counterparts in Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Turkey by opting for the policy of ruling but not governing (b) What are the prospects of "praetorianism," in Irane

When the protests against the election results first occurred in the summer of 2009, some outside commentators derided them as the petty expression of the North Tehran upper class. Subsequently, as the protests morphed into a movement, it became eminently clear that its social base was large, consisted of an array of social forces, and included disaffected low-income and religious citizens as well as various strands of the middle class and members of the secularized elite. Reports indicate that women, men, youth, older citizens, workers, professionals, and clergy have taken part in the protests. Ideologically, the Green protests include "reformist Islamists", leftists/Marxists, liberals, and feminists. While on one level such a broad base of support for "contentious politics" may be advantageous, it also raises questions about the capacity of such a broad base to cohere around a common agenda for political change. How does a social movement craft a collective identity from such disparate and apparently divergent elementse To what extent do the diverse slogans of the protests represent the diversity of the opposition, and to what extent do they raise challenges for the building of a cohesive movementm The paper will describe the diverse social forces that have constituted, and continue to constitute, the Green Movement, with a focus on the contradictory identities, objectives, and discourses that may impede unity of purpose. In an authoritarian political context, coherence and cohesiveness in identity formation and movement frames may be critical to the movement's advancement. Research methods and sources of data include the authors' participant-observations, close reading of opposition literature, involvement in "cyber-activism", and application of social movement theorizing to the Iranian case.