In recent years, our country has constantly been aflame. The widespread protests of December 2017, November 2019, the protests over the Ukrainian airplane tragedy, the Mahsa Movement, protests against the serial poisoning of schoolgirls, and the ongoing civil disobedience of Iranian women against mandatory hijab are just part of society’s resistance to the ruling regime. This situation has led many activists and political analysts to consider the status quo unsustainable and view it as pregnant with future transformations.

Economic crises throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have also ended the lifespan of many governments, significantly reducing Iran’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, which means smaller tables for Iranians.

Looking at the chart of Iran’s GDP per capita since World War II to today, this is the second major collapse—the first having led to the 1979 Revolution.

On the other hand, the diminishing legitimacy of the regime in recent years—estimated through declining voter turnout—heightens the likelihood of political changes in observers’ eyes. While governance without legitimacy is possible, it becomes extremely costly in its absence. When both the efficiency and legitimacy of a government face serious crises, the government must rely on coercion and suppression.

Ultimately, widespread protests, social movements, and revolutions ignite with sudden sparks. The two recent widespread protests began due to the suppression of social freedoms and a gasoline price hike to offset energy imbalances. The current government is playing with both of these factors. Energy imbalances and consequent power outages and other social consequences have created widespread dissatisfaction. Meanwhile, the continuous shuttle of the chastity and hijab law through various layers of government bureaucracy, alongside its repeated discussion in the public discourse, further fuels the fire of discontent over the suppression of social freedoms.

Given this evidence, is the situation heading toward a broad civil resistance movement capable of changing the face of governance under grassroots pressure? To answer this question, we must first consider our times.

In her latest work, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, Erica Chenoweth states that over the past two decades, the success rates of both nonviolent and violent revolutions have decreased, with this decline becoming more noticeable in the past decade.

Among the structural reasons based on contextual changes, Chenoweth focuses particularly on the issue of “smart suppression.” She argues that non-democratic governments have developed methods that suppress movements without provoking intensified societal reactions. Moreover, these governments share smart suppression methods with one another. These methods include narrative creation, counter-mobilization, infiltration of provocateurs, management of cyberspace, and more. It could be said that authoritarian rulers have learned the necessary countermeasures to civil resistance to a great extent.

However, Chenoweth pays more attention to reasons dependent on the protesters’ actions, highlighting the reduced participation in movements, a shift toward street presence over techniques of non-cooperation, an increased reliance on virtual spaces, and a rise in peripheral violence. Together, these factors reduce the chances of success for civil resistance. But to understand the reasons behind these changes in movements over the past two decades, we must consider additional factors.

During these two decades, there has been a global trend toward informal activism instead of formal activism. This means that instead of joining parties, unions, and civil organizations or participating in elections, people have turned to activism in virtual spaces and street protests. Some researchers attribute these changes to the advent of the internet and social media. While reducing the costs of activism in virtual spaces has increased its volume, it has decreased formal participation and eliminated activists’ reliance on organizations.

For instance, the participation rate in European elections has dropped from an average of 80% in the 1980s to 60%, and in Asia from 70% in the late 1990s to 53%. Similarly, membership in European political parties has halved. Whatever the reasons behind these changes, the decline in formal activism leads to the same outcomes associated with reduced chances of success for civil resistance in our era.

On the other hand, the internet and virtual space provide non-democratic rulers with a tool that did not previously exist. Today, the footprint of the internet can be found in all aspects of human life, including financial transactions, travel, interests, social media activities, and even sexual matters. The aggregation of this data provides a level of information to its holders that was unattainable at any other time or with any other tool. The problem is exacerbated in non-democratic countries, where big data can be used to predict and influence societal behavior. As a result, we live in an era where the ability to form effective civil resistance has significantly diminished.

Beyond the times, the political, social, and economic conditions of Iran must also be examined to assess the success of civil resistance. One structural obstacle to successful civil resistance is natural resource-based states. Civil resistance succeeds by impacting a government’s pillars of support. Depriving the government of its supportive structures leads to change. However, rentier states like oil-rich countries, which possess independent financial resources, have the means to maintain their support pillars through these resources. While the experience of the 1979 Revolution in Iran is considered an exception where revolutionaries successfully disrupted the oil industry through strikes, the existing managerial and organizational structures that emerged from this revolution make effective strikes unlikely.

Broad and effective civil resistance requires organization. Organization typically requires societal capacity. Yet, in today’s Iran—where political parties and organizations are in poor condition, civil organizations like the Imam Ali Society and student unions have been dismantled, religious institutions are controlled by the government, and strong, independent labor unions are absent—organization has effectively been weakened.

Moreover, strengthening civil society faces serious challenges. In the current circumstances, where the government aims to weaken civil society, we also confront a lack of societal trust. Any collective action or program in society requires trust. Among the factors that reduce trust in a country are authoritarianism and economic crises, both of which we have faced in recent years. To these two factors, one must add the impact of cyberspace and the global decline in trust toward political and civil organizations. As such, it appears that our society lacks the readiness for widespread organization.

In their book Revolution and Dictatorship, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way examine the political systems born out of revolutions claiming to bring about social change. They argue that these systems, due to their revolutionary claims, find themselves engaged in internal or external wars against counterrevolutions. This confrontation endows such regimes with specific characteristics, including a siege mentality within the ruling elite, heightened cohesion in response to crises, a powerful coercive apparatus loyal to the ruling elite, and the elimination of power centers within society due to ongoing struggles with counterrevolutions. These three outcomes make such revolutionary regimes resistant to civil resistance.

For example, during the 1980s and 1990s, when the Soviet Union could no longer support Cuba, the country experienced a severe economic crisis. U.S. sanctions pushed the situation to the brink. Shortages of gasoline and widespread power outages led Castro to call on society to use bicycles instead of cars. These conditions sparked widespread protests predicted to topple Cuba’s authoritarian government. However, contrary to analysts’ predictions, a weak civil society, a fragmented political opposition, a strong coercive apparatus integrated with the government, and internal cohesion among the rulers enabled the regime to survive.

Another similar example is Tiananmen Square in China. This authoritarian regime, born out of a social revolution, managed to suppress protests in the 1990s, unlike other Marxist governments of that era. Based on the current political, economic, and social conditions, as well as the state of civil society in our country, it seems that the emergence of a successful civil resistance movement in today’s circumstances is unlikely.