Iran’s Protests and the Threat to Domestic Stability

Robier Elfares

Weeks of mass demonstrations have engulfed Lebanon and Iraq, two countries where Iran wields significant influence. On October 29, 2019, for example, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned following massive protests. In Iraq, violent demonstrations erupted as protesters complained about poor economic conditions, the government’s failure to deliver adequate public services, and Iran’s influence in the country.

Even before the Lebanese and Iraqi protests began, domestic unrest within Iran prompted many observers to predict that the regime was on the verge of collapse.

As former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton tweeted, “With the recent protests in #Iran, we can see the danger that the regime is in.” Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA) remarked that “protests throughout Iran suggest that clerical rule’s days are numbered. Iranians want more freedom.”

Citing unnamed senior U.S. government officials, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted that U.S. policymakers “believe there is now a rare opportunity to bring about the collapse of the Iranian regime.”

Not to be outdone, Trump adviser Rudolph Giuliani predicted that “the people of Iran obviously have had enough. The sanctions are working. The currency is going to nothing . . . these are the kinds of conditions that lead to successful revolutions.”

In light of these views and the broader protests in countries like Iraq and Lebanon, this CSIS brief asks two main questions. What types of grievances have caused Iranian protests? Does the current protest movement represent a veritable threat to the regime?

To answer these questions, this brief utilizes qualitative and quantitative information. It compiles a list of major Iranian protests since the 1890s and assesses factors that contributed to the outbreak of protests. In addition, it utilizes the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project to compile and analyze over 4,200 protests from January 2018 through October 2019.

In analyzing the data, this brief makes several arguments. First, while protests in Iran are not new, the number and breadth of protests today are significant compared to previous years.

Since late 2017, there have been hundreds of small protests per month led by a range of networks from shopkeepers to students to truckers. They have protested about economic conditions, environmental issues, political grievances, and cultural issues. Second, however, these protests are unlikely to threaten the survival of the regime—at least at the moment.

Though galvanized by Lebanese and Iraqi protests, the Iranian protest movement remains fractured and lacks central leadership, and the regime’s security and intelligence forces are strong.

The capabilities of Iran’s police forces have improved since the 2009 Green Movement, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij can act as surge forces if protests intensify and spread.

The rest of this brief is divided into four sections. The first examines Iran’s history of protests and domestic unrest. The second section analyzes recent Iranian protests. The third assesses the regime’s response, including Iran’s efforts to strengthen its security forces. And the fourth section highlights Iranian weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

Iran has a robust history of protests that have tested the state. As one history of Iranian protests concluded, “The topics of revolution and resistance are central to the history of the modern Muslim world, and especially to Iran.”

There have been a wide range of protests in Iran’s history, which have been caused by economic, political, environmental, and other grievances. In virtually all of these cases, more than one factor triggered the protests.

First, economic grievances have triggered the vast majority of protests in Iran, a trend which has historical precedents in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

These grievances frequently include rising unemployment, increasing prices of basic commodities, growing inflation, or a recession. For example, the tobacco protests in 1890 occurred in part because Nasir al-Din Shah granted a monopoly over the purchase, sale, and export of tobacco in Iran to a British subject. Nationalism and a resentment of British domination also fueled the protests. Demonstrations erupted in Tehran, Shiraz, Tabriz, and other locations.

Over a decade later, riots broke out in Tehran when merchants raised the price of sugar during the constitutional revolution, leading merchants and mullahs to push for reforms. In recent history, the 2017 Dey Protests were sparked, at least initially, by frustration with poor economic conditions. The protests then expanded to include opposition to the regime and concerns about corruption, environmental degradation, and other issues.

Second, some protests also occurred because of political grievances, such as the passage of unpopular policies or programs, arrests of political leaders, anger at government corruption, or real or perceived fraudulent elections. The Khordad uprising in 1963 occurred following the arrest of Ayatollah Khomeini after his denouncement of the Shah and Israel. In 1999, students protested the closure of a reformist newspaper and a subsequent police raid against a student dormitory in what became known as the 18th of Tir and Kuye Deneshgah Disaster.

In 2009, the Green Movement was initially triggered by concerns about election-rigging following the disputed victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the defeat of Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

Finally, the Dey Protests—which, as discussed above, began in December 2017 as a reaction to economic concerns quickly evolved into a wide-ranging political opposition movement.

They became significantly more anti-regime than the reform-minded Green Movement, with chants of “death to the dictator” and “we will die, we will die, we will take back Iran” becoming common.

Still, both the Green Movement and Dey Protests lacked significant organization, limiting the threat posed to the regime.

Third, protests have increasingly been motivated by environmental grievances, including water and food shortages. Since the mid-2000s, these grievances have been largely water-related, as major rivers and lakes in Isfahan, East Azerbaijan, and Ahvaz have dried up due to a combination of climate change and wasteful irrigation practices.

The shrinking of Lake Urmia in particular sparked a series of violent protests in the city of Tabriz between 2010-2011.12 Meanwhile, when Tehran imposed water use bans on the agricultural sector in 2013 as a result of water shortages, farmers took to the streets to complain about unequal water distribution practices.

Not all environmental protests have been water-specific, however. In early 2017 and during the Dey Protests, some individuals protested about poor infrastructure planning that caused marshes to dry up, as well as higher levels of air pollution—including in Ahvaz, designated by the World Health Organization as the most polluted city in the world.

Fourth, there were a range of other protests motivated in part by religious, cultural, and other grievances. The 1979 revolution was a popular uprising that led to the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and the replacement of his government with an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Khomeini. Religious leaders were deeply involved in several other demonstrations, such as the tobacco protests and the Constitutional Revolution.

While protests have occurred with some frequency, revolutions which lead to regime change—have been rare in Iran and other countries. One of the challenges in starting a revolution is what economist Mancur Olson termed the “collective action problem.”

Individuals—including would-be revolutionaries—value numerous goods that can be produced only through collective action. Collective goods are non-excludable; everyone can take advantage of them, regardless of whether they play a role in securing the good.

If a group or network overthrows an oppressive government, for example, many people may benefit. Yet individuals also value purely personal goods, such as the time, opportunity cost, and risk involved in acting collectively. In other words, the benefits of collective action are often public, while the costs are private.

Under these circumstances, every person’s best move is to stay home and let someone else work for the public benefit. The injury or death of participants (and sometimes their friends, family members, and neighbors), financial difficulties, unpleasantness of living a clandestine lifestyle, and forced relocation dissuade many people from participating in the initial stages of a revolution.

The central implication of the collective action paradigm is that activists face tremendous obstacles in launching revolutions—let alone successfully overthrowing a regime.

In addition to the collective action problem, research on revolutions indicates that several conditions need to be in place for a revolution to occur: a weak and economically uncompetitive state, poor or co-optable security forces, a divided internal elite, popular social groups that are mobilized to protest the regime, and an ideology that justifies rebellion against the state.

The absence of many of these factors helps explain why most protests in Iran have not led to revolutions.

This section examines the over 4,200 protests that took place after the conclusion of the Dey Protests, from January 2018 through October 2019.

The data used here were drawn primarily from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED), corroborated and updated as necessary using primary sources as well as Iranian and Western media reporting on individual protest events.