Political Change and Participation
Kaveh and Mohammad, activists from Tehran in their late thirties, do not know each other but have a number of friends in common. Both were active in Mir Hoseyn Musavi’s electoral campaign in 2009 in Tehran and, after protests erupted in June 2009 upon the announcement of the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of the Republic, both became very active in attending, organising, and participating in the protests that came to be known as the Green Movement.1 Kaveh and Mohammad enjoyed a certain degree of popularity within activist circles, because they had already been politically active as university students. They had a network they could mobilise and indirect access to other social circles outside Tehran. The marches, demonstrations, and sit-ins lasted into 2010, and were met with increasing state violence. In 2010, both left for Turkey where they became asylum seekers and where I met them in 2011 and 2012. Kaveh and Mohammad’s words reflected the excitement and enthusiasm that characterised the days of the mobilisation in the summer of 2009: while the Green Movement was initially guided by the leaders Musavi and Mehdi Karrubi (the two reformist candidates competing against Ahmadinejad) and was born to protest against the electoral results, it had become more and more radical and independent of the reformist elite. Its demands extended beyond recounting the votes to target the entire political class, the regime, and the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (Sadri and Sadri 2010; Gheytanchi 2010; Naficy 2010; Reisinezhad 2015).2 The radicality of the protests provoked both excitement and fear in Kaveh and Mohammad. On the one hand, the movement could radicalise and aspire to overcome all political boundaries the elite had set. On the other hand, boundless and unprotected, the movement could be crushed easily by violent state repression. Its fate rested with the protesters: those like Kaveh and Mohammad found themselves in a position of leadership.
In conversation, their rhetorical skills and charisma shine through. Both Kaveh and Mohammad fit the typical character of ‘the activist’ the media in the West like to describe: they are (relatively) young, tech-savvy, educated, extremely articulate, and liberal-minded. Political participation is a principle they cherish and defend as the foundation of a working democratic society. They understand political participation as the right of citizens to enter the public sphere, either individually or as members of an organisation, and make claims against and demands to the government and the state safely. As such, they denounce the Islamic Republic as a political system that punishes those citizens who want to participate or dare to do so.
Their frustration is the product of the authoritarian interventions of the state they have witnessed in 2009–2010 and earlier. It is no mystery that the Iranian state has usually reacted violently to protests and overt criticism, thwarting attempts at political organisation. Mohammad and Kaveh had witnessed state violence against peaceful protesters on several occasions. However, while they understandably describe the Islamic Republic as a system impenetrable to political participation, history clearly indicates just how crucial political participation actually was to the origin of the Islamic Republic. Indeed, the latter originated from sustained popular mobilisations, which, since the mid-1970s and despite the Shah’s repression, resulted in a revolution in 1979. Because of its relevance to revolutionary history, the notion of political participation has been a crucial element in the state’s self-representation, as well as in the rhetoric of state officials, regardless of their ideological differences. Furthermore, the very existence of the Green Movement, and of political activism of the kind Kaveh and Mohammad embody, is an indication of the fact that some degree of political participation is acceptable in and accepted by the Islamic Republic. Nonetheless, this does not mean that political participation is unrestricted.
Is there a kind of political participation and activism that is viewed as legitimate by the regime? Are there ‘good’ and ‘bad’ activists, then? To which group did Kaveh and Mohammad belong? How and why have Mohammad and Kaveh found themselves in a position of leadership of the Green Movement? How and why has the latter radicalised? This book answers these questions. First, it explains how between 1997 and 2005 the state tried to discipline political activism by creating the possibilities for participation from above and how, unexpectedly, such disciplinary project forged independent paths to activism and agency from below, thus setting the field for the development of the Green Movement and its autonomy.
Second, the questions that underpin this work have a temporal dimension. While we understand authoritarianism as homogeneously repressive, authoritarian politics is dynamic and transforms according to environmental conditions, allowing for more or less freedom, more or less accountability of state authorities, and freer elections when necessary (Howard and Roessler 2006; Gandhi and Lust-Okar 2009; Lust-Okar 2006; Blaydes 2011). The ways in which governments are authoritarian may change over the decades. Arguably, political participation has always been central to the politics of authoritarian control in Iran, but successive governments have had a different level of toleration for it. The Iranian reformist elite, namely a segment of the national elite that controlled the presidency of the Republic and, with varying fortunes, dominated the public sphere between the late 1990s and mid-2000s, looked rather favourably at the possibility of increasing political participation, in certain conditions. The so-called reformist era covered the two presidential terms of Mohammad Khatami (1997–2001 and 2001–2005) who, more than any other figure, symbolises reformism (eslahat). Reformism was, in the words of its proponents, about democratising the public sphere, encouraging political and ideological diversity, and transforming the Islamic Republic from a marginalised ideological state into a modern country integrated in international politics and the global economy. While the reformist political project failed to fulfil expectations of change because of the opposition of powerful conservative forces, it did shape the political views of a generation, and beyond. Eslahat articulated a meaningful critique of the Islamic Republic that still has a considerable impact on Iranian politics and the public opinion. People like Mohammad and Kaveh, who were in their twenties during the ‘reformist era’, feel entitled to political and civil liberties. Mohammad and Kaveh belong to a generation that educated itself to political leadership and activism during a period of limited political liberalisation. Crucial to that education was the right to political participation.
The reformist elite, then, created spaces where participation, and contention, could take place. In this sense, eslahat was a social and political programme aimed at crafting a new public sphere and changing what politics and participation were about. The reformist elite was successful in instilling the notion that contentious political participation too ought to be legal and acceptable in a republic like Iran. The reformist elite set out to transform Iranian politics and society, with the twofold aim of broadening their support base and of establishing new, stable intra-elite alliances. The reformists, whose nucleus originated from the leftist factions of the elite (the so-called Islamic left), capitalised on the demographic and cultural transformations that the end of the Iran-Iraq war had eventually brought about. Indeed, in a post-national emergency context, according to them, the regime ought to see demands for political tolerance and change as legitimate. As a friend and feminist activist, Fatemeh, told me in 2017: ‘The freedom we had to organise under Khatami is unimaginable today. We used to celebrate the Eighth of March3 in the streets and public parks. We gave public speeches. Today, the celebration of the Eighth of March happens in private houses’. One of the objectives of the repression that hit, among others, the women’s movement after the end of the reform era in 2005 was to push activists into invisibility, far away from the public space. While state repression worked and led to the shutting down of spaces for political participation, it did not manage to erase the ‘political education’ and ‘taste for freedom’ that people and activists had developed during the reform era. The impact of eslahat is long-lasting and resilient, especially for those who experienced their ‘coming of age’ during the reformist period.
The Short-Circuit
Reformism, however, was not exclusively about political liberty. It also was a project of social engineering that needed to foster political participation to reinforce the legitimacy of the government to withstand the counterpressure coming from powerful conservative forces, who feared losing the grip on state ideology, institutions, and popular culture. I understand eslahat as a project of engineered social and political change that segments of the national elite envisioned and promoted in the attempt to create a historical bloc through which to reconfigure the circulation of power in society and among state institutions in their favour. To secure popular support for this project, the reformist elites needed to allow and to control political participation at once, with the necessary corollary of co-opting civil society and political organisations embedded in such a top-down reform project.
The opening up of the public sphere, however, allowed for the participation of forces that countered elite co-optation, too. Certainly, the elite could not control political participation in all its articulations and unintended implications. Needless to say, the ‘co-optable’ nature of civil society groups became a criterion for selective inclusion: exclusion was operated against ‘non-co-optable’ groups and individuals. The reformist elite, who considered non-co-opted forces dangerous, often ended up legitimising the repression they had decried.
This book examines how the reformist elite actively promoted political participation as an instrument to elicit electoral support and renew state legitimacy, but eventually created spaces for radical and uncontrolled political critiques. While ...