A wave of protest with anti-regime slogans swept away Iranian cities in December 2017-January 2018. Scholars and observers offered different explanations for the emergence of this wave of protest. First hypothesis highlights the level of integration of a city in the political system related to their previous voting behavior. Second group of explanations stress economic hardship resulted from high inflation or unemployment rate. Third hypothesis echoes the youth bulge argument and contend that the new wave of protest should be explained with the introduction of a new cohort of youth into Iranian politics. Fourth explanation sees this wave of protest as a result of state’s policy to expand education throughout the country outside Tehran. Fifth explanation refers to the high level of draught in Iran and grievances generated by environmental problems. Sixth explanation considers this wave of protest as a natural sequence of daily protest in Iran by various social groups such as workers, teachers, retirees, and students. In late December 2017 a wave of anti-regime protest swept through Iranian dozens of Iranian counties. The geographic spread of protests was unprecedented in Modern Iranian history. We use the sub-national variation to develop and test main explanations about emergence of protest waves in developing countries. We consider six groups of explanations emphasizing economic adversity, climate change, higher education, political context, youth bulge, and diffusion through spatial proximity and internet. Based on original data on this cycle of protest and other new political and socioeconomic data, we present a discrete event history analysis of protests at the level of county for a 10 days period. Our results show robust support for the effect of higher education, internet, and spatial proximity to other sites of protest. The analysis also confirms that counties with higher portion of reformist vote were less likely to protest. This finding highlights the importance of the perceptions of political opportunities, and a contextual understand of the political configuration of protest. We find only partial support for the effects of economic deprivation, and no support for youth bulge and climate change.?

On the cusp of its fortieth anniversary, the Islamic Republic is embroiled in a significant crisis of representation. A few months after presidential and local council elections with high participation, widespread protests erupted across the country in early winter 2018, voicing discontent with the Islamic Republic itself. In this paper we investigate this apparent paradox between participation in formal institutions of representation, and the seeming rejection of the regime by the same voting population during protests. Why do Iranians continue to vote in an array of local and national elections when recurring popular protests (most spectacularly during the 2009 Green Movement, and the 2018 mainly provincial protests) seem to indicate that existing institutions are deemed unresponsive to popular needs and demands? Since 1979 Iranians have simultaneously engaged and worked through institutional fora that claim to represent the popular will and the ideals of the Revolution. This does not always mean that they are fully vested in the formal electoral politics and institutions or identify with politicians or parties. We outline the structural limits of the existing elected institutions - the presidency, the majlis, local councils; and juxtapose their performance against the popular expectations that animated the 1979 Revolution. Some of the same people who vote and even run for office, have used localized civil disobedience and claims-making to protest . We then investigate the causes and dynamics of the 2018 protests by placing them within a longer historical context as well as a broader repertoire of political practices in the post-revolution era. While scattered public protests against various grievances have become a routine recurrence, the scale and ferocity of the recent protests were unprecedented. They were widespread, mainly in provincial towns, and expressed a wide range of grievances. Given the systemic repression of autonomous political parties and associations, these grievances were articulated in fleeting slogans and short-lived acts of defiance, rather than expressed in formal demands. We will examine case studies to demonstrate that recent protests were not organized, univocal, or an extension of elite factionalism. Neither can the common thread in both these demonstrations and electoral choices be reduced to the conventional “society versus state” explanation. Rather, the motivating force behind both these political decisions to participate in elections, and express discontent through public demonstrations, is ongoing struggles by a postrevolutionary society to maintain the 1979 revolution’s promises of social justice, material well-being, and representative government.

The wave of protests in Iran that began December 28, 2017 and spread throughout to a number of cities surprised many people both inside and outside of the country. The fact that the recent protests took place at the same time in these different cities does not necessarily mean, however, that they were caused by the same reason, or that the protestors came from the same social class and group. This essay aims to analyze the demonstrations in Qom that emerged during this wave of protests through ethnographic framework primarily consisting of personal observations and conversations that occurred during a recent trip to Qom. It will argue that contradictory governmental policies, exacerbating discrimination and inequality at personal and social levels, have fueled unprecedented anger among people in Qom, particularly among the youth from middle-class families. By juxtaposing the increasing standard of living of clergymen with the decreasing standard of living of people, I argue that during the last decade, the Iranian government has functioned as a neoliberal state for individuals who are not a part of the clergy, but has developed policies that resemble a welfare state for clergymen. Furthermore, it is these developments that have led to an increase in anger and grievances among the middle class in Qom and resulted in significant discontent. We have witnessed the emergence of a multilayer welfare system improving the lives of clergymen through benefits that unattainable for others including free health insurance, low-interest loans, housing assistance, high wages, and so forth. On the other hand, neoliberal policies such as privatizing schools, deregulating labor laws, suppressing unions, cutting public subsidies, and the persistent unemployment and inflation have devastated the lives of ordinary people. I argue that this growing disparity has exacerbated long-standing grievances regarding these perceived injustices and has contributed to the recent unrests in Qom.

The eruption of widespread protests in Iran in January 2018 had material causes which have been enumerated by various scholars. Unemployment, inflation, financial insecurity of the workers as a result of the privatization of state-owned factories are among the factors that have been commonly alluded to in the discussions around the grievances of the protestors. Moreover, many studies of the economic policies of the post Iran-Iraq war administrations deem these as neoliberal, and some scholars argue neoliberalism to be the source of the aforementioned grievances. Nevertheless, attention is rarely paid to how this shift towards neoliberalism has transformed the ideology of the Islamic Republic. The pseudo-leftist literature of Ayatollah Khomeini, with its emphasis on the "disinherited" and the "dispossessed" had probably an important role in popularizing his discourse and the rise of the Islamic Republic to power. The Islamic Republic retained these notions within its official discourse, and even a decade after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini the claim of representing and defending the "disenfranchised" against the "pain-alien rich" was still an important constituent of the ideology of the Islamic Republic. Such claims have faded out for a long time, however, and it seems that the American Dream has become a more important source of inspiration in the more contemporary manifestations of the ideology of the regime. While the ideal figure of the propaganda apparatus of the Islamic Republic used to be an ascetic pious person ready to sacrifice his life and belongings for his beliefs and country, the new ideal figure is a wealthy entrepreneur relying on nothing but his own hard work and entitled to his wealth as well as the praise of the society. Through content analysis of TV programs and other cultural products, this paper will offer an image of this recent version of the ideology of the Islamic Republic and discuss how it represents neoliberal ideals. Moreover, it will investigate the implications of this ideological shift for the relation between the Islamic Republic and the lower classes, and the possible role of this transformed relations in the protests of January 2018.