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Iran’s decade of protests: an interview with Firoozeh Farvardin and Nader Talebi
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In the past few years, Iran has witnessed waves of popular protests involving large parts of the population making economic and political demands.

On 28 December 2017, demonstrations erupted in Mashhad, the second largest city in Iran. The unrest quickly extended to other cities, and continued into 2018. The protesters’ demands focused on the economy at first, but soon included political slogans against the regime.

These were the largest demonstrations in the country since the 2009 ‘Green Movement’, when supporters of reformist presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi took to the streets to demand the removal of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claiming the election results were fraudulent.

In April 2018, a series of general strikes and protests took place and continued well into 2019, involving teachers, and bus and truck drivers, as well as workers angry about the worsening economic conditions in the country.

Then, in November 2019, a final wave of protests began, continuing into the early months of 2020 before fading away.

Almost a year later, in November 2020, we met Firoozeh Farvardin and Nader Talebi, two Iranian academics based in Berlin, to discuss the causes and the grievances behind the protests, as well as their historical and future trajectories.

Before coming to Europe, both studied sociology in Iran. They are researchers at Berlin’s Humboldt University, specialising in Middle Eastern politics, nationalism, migration and gender politics.

The interview was previously published in Italian on the platform OrientXXI.

Can you give us an idea about the situation in Iran on the eve of the 2018-19 uprising, especially outside the largest cities? Is there any link between the 2019-20 movement and the 2009 Green Movement in terms of geography and class?

First, there is a huge geographical difference in the scale of the demonstrations. The 2019 wave was the largest in Iran's history, even larger than the 1979 Revolution. It involved a large number of medium and large cities, and some towns that many Iranians had never heard of in the news. We can say that Iranians learned geography through demonstrations.

Second, the violence of the state response was not comparable. According to some reports, 1,500 people (the official number is 230) were killed in three days in 2019, compared to 70 victims during the ten months of the ‘Green Movement’ protests. More than 10,000 people were arrested during the first month of the 2019 uprising. Needless to say, it was more violent in marginalised areas, with Arab and Kurdish populations, than in the central cities.

The Green Movement, on the other hand, was a middle-class protest that occurred mainly in the middle-class neighborhoods of the major cities. In its last days, when it started spreading into poorer areas, especially in Tehran, it was immediately crushed by the riot police. The Green Movement had leaders who represented it or could claim to embody it: the reformists Mir Hossein Mousavi and his wife Zahra Rahnavard and Mehdi Karroubi, all of whom were later jailed or put under house arrest.

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/irans-decade-of-protests-an-interview-with-firoozeh-farvardin-and-nader-talebi/