The potential for sudden formation of civil disobedience campaigns.

In recent months, as street protests have calmed down, the more peaceful strains of these protests have continued as an ongoing struggle. These strains included acts of civil disobedience by women against mandatory hijab laws, as well as encouraging and financially punishing businesses that support and protest against this disobedience. During this time, the image was created that the main burden of the struggle was placed on the shoulders of women, and men were asked to join them in civil disobedience.

The first idea seemed very strange: encouraging men to wear shorts! This is in a situation where there has been no restriction in law, religion, or even government practice for such a level of clothing for men. In such a space, the question arises as to why not defying the outdated, discriminatory and controversial mandatory military service is not proposed as civil disobedience?

In order to raise this question more seriously, we must also look at the deaths resulting from these discriminatory laws. The mandatory hijab law led to the death of Ms. Mahsa Amini. This news quickly became the most talked about news of the day and sparked a wave of protests that continue in various forms. However, the news of the deaths of Iranian soldiers with the lowest level of military training on the borders did not receive much reaction, even in the virtual space; let alone providing grounds for widespread civil disobedience.

While compulsory military service has shown serious potential for organizing civil disobedience campaigns throughout history, it is one of the issues that has been most associated with civil disobedience, as seen in recent cases such as world wars, the Vietnam War, and others, and has become a significant factor in shaping the battlefield. This is an example of civil disobedience as a moral, correct, and effective practice. However, in our country, despite all the problems and difficulties, we are not witnessing a widespread campaign of civil disobedience against compulsory military service.

In the first place, the cultural component is mentioned. In our society, mandatory military service is still considered a natural and even necessary part of masculine life; to the extent that it is sometimes seen as a prerequisite for marriage and other times as a means of “becoming a man”. This social acceptance diminishes the legitimacy of disobedience and prevents action and advocacy for it.

In the second degree, class discrimination is effective in the quality of compulsory military service. The government implements it in various ways to prevent more severe reactions to the law. For example, according to the internal algorithms of the conscription organization, border areas of the country are filled with soldiers from lower social and economic classes who generally do not live in major cities. Meanwhile, wealthier economic classes, with higher levels of education and more administrative access, are able to go through this period in a safer and less expensive environment. This issue causes the middle class of our society, which has a stronger presence in the virtual and social space, to have the least self-awareness with the passing of soldiers in border areas and to show a lighter reaction accordingly.

In the third degree of economic recession, which has been ongoing in the past decade, two methods have been used to remove compulsory military service from the subject of dispute. Firstly, the economic recession has led to the devaluation of young people’s lives and the society has less concern about wasting them. Secondly, this recession has reduced the need for young people to have recognition in society. This is because living without a service completion card does not incur a high cost for them, and this has caused compulsory military service to be put aside as a concern.

However, amidst all of this, perhaps the most important issue is paying attention to creating suitable tools for the formation of civil resistance against compulsory military service, which covers the importance of other matters. In the past, it was mentioned that civil resistance without organization has a very small chance of success. As Erica Chenoweth emphasizes: “Organized and disciplined campaigns often spend months or years planning and organizing before mass mobilization… Nonviolent campaigns are rarely spontaneous and impulsive.” This perspective highlights the necessity of paying attention to and strengthening civil society for the formation of widespread campaigns against compulsory military service. This means that we must strive to strengthen civil and political organizations in our country in order to be able to seriously and long-term organize for the creation of a widespread civil resistance campaign against compulsory military service.

This image shows a society that is far from accessible in our society today, because civil society in our country has become very weak. This weakening of civil society has two structural reasons. Firstly, the closure of the political space has taken away the opportunity for official activism from our society. And secondly, the spread of the internet globally has led to a decrease in interest in official activism, and in societies around the world, parties, NGOs, unions, etc. have less popularity and fewer members, while virtual and unofficial activism has been strengthened. As Van Zandt points out, the membership rate in parties has halved from 1980 until the time of the study.

On the other hand, the experience of our society and other societies contradicts the idea of these researchers regarding the necessity of organization. We have witnessed in the past years the creation of widespread campaigns in our country or in other countries in the region, where revolutions have taken place despite the existence of a not-so-strong civil society.

In this regard, the internet and social networks have formed the platform that can explain this issue. Researchers such as Manuel Castells, who have studied the impact of social networks on social movements, believe that social networks can perform the functions of political and civil organizations. Functions such as creating new meanings, networking, building trust in the sustainability of the movement, and so on, can be expected from social networks. This is why we do not see significant participation from political and civil organizations in notable protests such as the Arab Spring, the Indignados in Spain, Occupy Wall Street, and the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. Instead, it is these social networks that create such movements.

Given the fading importance of civil society in the face of widespread campaigns in today’s world, our main issue still remains. Why is there no campaign for civil disobedience against mandatory military service?

The most accurate answer to this issue can be derived from the theory proposed by Helen Margetts and Peter John. They believe that the internet and social networks have also had a significant impact on the political space. The internet and social networks have caused “political turbulence” in the political space. They believe that the internet has made political ideas very inexpensive on one hand, and has also removed them from the monopoly of organizations on the other hand. On the other hand, phenomena such as “aimless signatories” in the virtual space and the possibility of accessing social information on social networks have led to the success or failure of various ideas being rapidly and haphazardly discussed in the virtual space. This speed and randomness have made the political space unpredictable.

In general, analyzing the success or failure of a campaign in today’s turbulent world of politics is very difficult, and politics in this day and age creates new phenomena every day that were previously unpredictable; such as the widespread disobedience of Iranian women, which was not predictable for us a year ago.

In such circumstances, considering the abolishment of mandatory military service in many countries and its discriminatory nature, the existence of a large number of absent soldiers, political turmoil resulting from the virtual space, and the organizing power of social networks to compensate for political and civil organizations, we must always be prepared for a widespread campaign in protest against this law.