In the past two decades, there has been a notable surge in bottom-up ethnic rights activism among various minority groups in Iran. This trend has significantly shaped the motivations for mobilization in peripheral regions and influenced their strategies of (dis)engagement during nationwide protests. This paper delves into the examination of local factors that played a role in determining the participation levels of Kurds and Azerbaijani Turks in recent waves of nationwide protests in Iran, with a specific emphasis on the "woman, life, freedom" movement that commenced in September 2022. The central question revolves around understanding why Kurds demonstrated a comparatively higher participation rate in these protests, while Azerbaijani Turks remained relatively passive. Methodologically, the study draws from 40 online interviews conducted with 20 Azeri Turks and 20 Kurds residing in various cities of Western Iran, supplemented by the analysis of locally produced magazines, newspapers, and digital ethnography. The paper argues that the decline of unifying ideologies in Iran over the last two decades, such as Shi’ism, or primordial and civic-territorial Iranian nationalism, has paved the way for the rise of grassroots mobilizations among ethnic minorities. Consequently, the perception of "local" and "national" has, at times, converged and diverged during politically charged moments, shaped by local ethnopolitical entrepreneurs. In the recent waves of protests, while Mahsa/Jina Amini's Kurdish origin united local and national elements among the Kurds, Azerbaijani Turks showed relative hesitancy in viewing the movement as encompassing their ethnocultural demands. The paper concludes that prioritizing "local" over "national" demands signifies a shift in envisioning the future of the governing system in Iran, emphasizing the growing voices that call for reconsidering Iran from a "multi-ethnic state" with a centralized political system to a "multi-nation state" that requires a local governing system.

In 2022 amid the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests, videos portraying schoolgirls’ defiance and schools as vibrant sites of political dissent circulated widely. Mainstream interpretations of these images in the diaspora and Western media tended to exceptionalise these schoolgirls, erasing the broader context of intergenerational defiance within schools and educational system and the continuity of the struggles and resistance. Over the last decades, teachers strikes have been expanded around the country and faced severe repression by the Iranian state, resulting in the imprisonment of over one hundred teachers and activists solely in Tehran. In this paper I will look at the broader landscape of schooling, the everyday activism of many teachers, and the ongoing teachers' movement and unionization efforts in Iran. While numerous forms of teacher strikes and mobilizations have emerged in Iran over the past century; they often lacked continuity and were frequently disrupted. The current wave of movement and unionization efforts began around 1999 and continued its mobilizations despite various forms of suppressions. Over the last twenty five years, three major groups have been at the forefront of these unionizing and mobilizing efforts; کانون صنفی معلمان ایران (تهران) ، سازمان معلمان ایران ، شورای هماهنگی تشکل های صنفی فرهنگیان. By reviewing the existing literature on the teachers movement in both Farsi and English, study of the statements (بیانیه ها) published by these groups and interviews with active teachers, I map out a genealogy of this movement and also center the experiences of women teachers in these endeavors. In her recent work on Women and Education in the MENA region, Mojab (2022) draws attention to the dearth of scholarly research pertaining to the roles of women as educators and teachers, their involvement in teachers' unions, and their experiences with academic freedom within the Iranian context. She criticizes the tendency in the study of education in the region to render the patriarchal state and capitalism invisible. In this research, I argue that in the Iranian social and political context marked by widespread imprisonment , the teachers movement and everyday form of activisms by teachers are significant examples of indigenous, decolonial, dynamic and systematic political activism. Furthermore, using the interviews, I argue for the centrality of women teachers in ongoing formal protests, unionizing efforts as well as everyday political dissent in classrooms and schools in Iran.

On January 26th, 2014, the globally televised constitution ratification ceremony featuring predominantly Tunisian Islamist men and women as promoters of progressive gender policies in Tunisia and the Muslim world painted with a distortive Islamist brush every legal step towards democratization and gender equality desperately fought for by the non-Islamist women’s rights activists since the rise of the so-called “moderate Islamists” to power in 2011. What the global media offered as pure facts, actually obliterated a saga of non-violent nationwide grassroots activism channeled by the majority of non-Islamist women’s rights activists to salvage the historical legal gains of Tunisian women from a ravaging constitutional and societal Islamization project. This paper studies the pivotal role that the bourgeoning women’s rights grassroots counter-movements played in promoting a culture of counter-violence in Tunisia after 2011. Relying on a core of verifiable facts embedded in the Tunisian collaborative narrativity, it attempts to reconstitute major signposts in the women’s rights countermovement‘s journey towards legal gender equality. This work drives towards elaborating a multidisciplinary theoretical framework to study the dynamic interactions between the Islamist movements in Tunisia and the feminist countermovements. This framework draws heavily on the social movements’ theoretical framework as it allows for a diachronic study of these dynamics. It helps trace the patterns of change and continuity in terms of political opportunities, resource mobilization, and goal framing. However, It claims a ground for itself by demonstrating how global variables have always been decisive in shaping gender policies in Tunisia and how the perennial pilgrimage towards gender equality in postcolonial Tunisia has helped buffer unforeseen domestic offshoots of global conflicts. The paper builds its conclusions on a review of the literature on women’s rights in Tunisia and on ethnographic research. Keywords: global conflicts, Tunisian women, gender equality, Arab Spring, moderate Islam.