{"id":7193,"date":"2019-12-07T12:21:37","date_gmt":"2019-12-07T09:21:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/?p=7193"},"modified":"2021-05-30T13:13:00","modified_gmt":"2021-05-30T10:13:00","slug":"irans-november-2019-uprisings-iranian-society-in-transition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/monitoring-and-translation\/reports\/irans-november-2019-uprisings-iranian-society-in-transition\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran’s November 2019 Uprisings: Iranian Society in Transition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\u00a0Social movements help social scientists to understand what is happening in society. Even if society is open and research is not prohibited, social movements provide information that social scientists are not able to gather in their regular studies through qualitative and quantitative methods. This is more helpful in the Iranian case due to the intentional decision of the Iranian government to obstruct any studies investigating social transformation. There is no independent survey or research center in the country. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Iranian society has been in transition for four decades due to a number of structural changes<\/a> such as faster urbanization (from 25 percent in 1976 to 75 percent in 2016), increasing<\/a>\u00a0 literacy levels (from 36 percent in 1979 to\u00a086 percent in 2016), decreasing population growth (from \u00a03.91<\/a> percent in the 1980s to around \u00a01<\/a> percent in 2010), and\u00a0an ever-increasing number of university students (from 175<\/a>,000 in 1979 to 3.8<\/a> million in 2019). However, despite these structural changes, we do not exactly know how Iranian society and communities all around the country have changed in response to these transformations. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this piece, I will discuss\nfour specific signs of social change seen in the November 2019 uprisings. These\nchanges are not only more obvious than others but also have more long-term\neffects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Change of Reference Groups<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until the 1990s, the clergy, intellectuals, and academics were the main reference groups in Iran. The December 2018 uprising was a sign that this was now changing. The protesters showed that they do not care about what the traditional reference groups\u00a0 think about the direction of the country, the policies that should be enforced, and what decisions should be made. The November 2019 uprisings made this even clearer with an outright rejection of the\u00a0 direction , instructions, and policies that are promoted by these reference groups.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Islamicization in Disarray<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the protests of 2009, slogans such as \u201cGod is great,\u201d \u201cO Hosein\u201d (the third Shi`i imam<\/em>), and \u201cno to abjectness\u201d (hayhat menn al-zellah<\/em>, Imam Hosein\u2019s slogan in Karbala) were rampant. In the November 2019 uprisings, no religious slogans were heard. It seems that the downtrodden and deprived are done with political Islam. The protesters, between 16 and 35 years of age who were\u00a0 expected to be brainwashed in\u00a0Iran\u2019s Islamicized educational system, no longer mix politics with religious beliefs. It is now clear that the public has been undergoing secularization\u00a0 due to the failure of\u00a0 forced Islamicization. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Depletion of Social Capital<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Forty years of the Islamic government\u2019s structural and institutionalized corruption, terrorism, inefficiency, incompetence, and regional interventions have\u00a0 led to an unbridgeable schism between the people and their government. The people\u2019s trust in the government has been so low that candidates usually ask people to choose between the bad and the even worse during elections. According to some friendly sources<\/a>, Rouhani\u2019s popularity was\u00a0 under 10 percent in August 2019. No polling center is permitted to evaluate Khamenei\u2019s popularity in the country. According to a government survey<\/a> in 2018, 74.8 percent of the people were not satisfied with the direction of the country and\u00a031percent believed that the government was not capable of any reform. In fact,\u00a0 these numbers should be much higher due to government failure in providing basic services in the last two years. The country is under US sanctions,\u00a0infrastructure is\u00a0 crumbling and factories are operating at\u00a0only 20 percent to\u00a030 percent of their total capacities<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Civil Society is Almost Non-existent<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The non-existent role of\npolitical parties and interest groups in the uprisings shows that civil society\nhas been eroding  during the reigns of\nAhmadinejad and Rouhani. At the end of the Khatami administration, the\napproximate number of civil society organizations  was around 25,000. This number shrank to\naround 5,000  during Rouhani\u2019s\nadministration while at least some of these organizations became state owned.\nFrom day one of the November 2019 uprisings, these organizations – mostly on\npaper – were absent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Small Town Dynamism<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The map of the uprisings in\naround 100 cities<\/a> and 27 provinces<\/a> shows  that the centers of protest were  small towns and slums\nin the vicinity of larger cities where around 20 million<\/a>\nIranians live without access to many amenities. More than 7,000<\/a> people were arrested. Most of\nthe reported killings (more than 218<\/a>\ntill November 25, 2019) happened in Javanroud, Karaj, Marivan, Behbahan,\nKhorramshahr, Mahshahr, and Kermanshah. These are the cities which are dealing\nwith the highest unemployment and poverty rates. By paying subsidies to more\nthan 60 million Iranians after the recent gasoline price hike, the government\nindirectly accepts the fact that Iranians \nare living below the poverty line. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We do not know whether these\nchanges are due to the mentioned structural transformations  or due to the government\u2019s Islamicization\nprocess. What we do know is that Iranian society is not what the government\nsays about it: it is a society in transition. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first action of the government during the protests\u00a0 was to shoot protesters in the chest. This means that the government has accepted the point that Iranian society is under transition and it no longer submits to the government\u2019s direction, policies, and decisions. The promise to reform will no longer persuade people to wait for better days. The protesters do not see any light at the end of the tunnel. They are not only dismissive of \u201creformist\u201d\/\u201cprincipalist\u201d factional politics but also of Islamist politics.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Social movements help social scientists to understand what is happening in society. Even if society is open and research is not prohibited, social movements provide information that social scientists are not able to gather in their regular studies through qualitative and quantitative methods. This is more helpful in the Iranian case due to the intentional […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":7194,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2151,3508,12,263,3509,3507,2466,2731,38,1871,2540],"class_list":["post-7193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reports","tag-hassan-rouhani","tag-imam-hosei","tag-iran","tag-iranian","tag-islamic-government","tag-o-hosein","tag-rasanah","tag-rasanah-issues","tag-rouhani","tag-rouhanis-government","tag-united-states-of-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7193"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9161,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7193\/revisions\/9161"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}