Protesters have taken the streets of Iran ever since the last presidential elections of 12th June 2009. The turmoil started when the three opposition candidates accused the government of amending the election results, doubting that the not-so-popular incumbent candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could win two thirds of the votes – 63% of the total – while the Independent Reformist Mir-Hossein Mousavi, stronger candidate with the opposition, just got 33%. The pre-election environment in Iran was already tense and the increasing pressure of international society to uncover the many irregularities of the electoral process has just intensified the magnitude of the protest. A month on from the electoral day, Iran is still in political turmoil, with more than 2000 dissidents arrested – according to human rights groups – and with a political representative body still unable to quell or evade the accusations of political fraud.
The approach that the Western academia has towards the Iranian turmoil is interesting. Some are starting to talk about a pacific revolution – the ‘Iranian Velvet revolution’ – and its implicit future political changes. Western theorists tend to attribute the strength of the revolt to the disposition of Iranians for democracy and political change and – to certain extent – overemphasize the role that massive citizen participation will have in the outcome of the social protest. In the opinion article ‘Iran’s manufactured revolution’ written by Lionel Beehner, columnist of the Guardian, the author questions the real outcome of massive revolts and explains that Western analysts tend to overestimate the political pressure of a popular uprising.
Recent European political history has evolved and shaped up to our current welfare state partly because of protest movements and workers strikes. Popular movements have had a similar influence when Eastern European countries claimed their independence from the USSR; it even led – to certain extent – most of the European colonies to their independence during the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The effectiveness of social protest has been prominent in our culture and, partly because of this outcome, many political analysts tends to look at foreign political situations from the same perspective. However, as Beehner points out, this is not necessarily the case of Iran. The country seems to have a stable political system and as the time gap from the electoral day increases, lower are the chances of the protesters to get a real change out of this turmoil. The incident has not been as serious as to justify further intervention from the international community, nor does the position of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seem to be in danger. Then, why are political analysts talking about revolution in the case of Iran?
Following this argument, I am interested to know the relevance of popular protest and political turmoil in the reshaping of a country’s political system. My topic of study is open and allows a wide research on the topic, from case studies to comparative international panorama and from current issues like Iran’s electoral turmoil to a wider historical analysis on the topic. I decide to narrow my search to pure theoretical approach on the relation between social movements and political change. I go to IBSS database and I introduce the keywords ‘Revolution’, ‘political systems’ and ‘political movements’ and I get 54 results. I scanned quickly the list that the database offers me and I pick an interesting article written by J. A Geschwender [1968] ‘Explorations in the theory of social movements and revolutions’ which will be helpful for an initial introductory background. Looking at the same list of results, I note down Kathia Légaré’s [2007] ‘The influence of the international system on the evolution of semi-authoritarian regimes: four approaches to the colour revolutions (2003-2005)’; John Ginkel and Alastair Smith [1999] titled ‘So you say you want a revolution: a game theoretic explanation of revolution in repressive regimes’; Asef Bayat’s [1998] ‘Revolution without movement, movement without revolution: comparing Islamic activism in Iran and Egypt’ and Mark P. Thompson’s [2000] ‘Whatever happened to democratic revolutions?’.
I try to use different keywords this time. I understand that for my research I need a broad selection of books that will allow me to have a good theoretical insight on the topic. Again I introduce the keywords ‘revolution’, ‘democratization’, ‘political movements’ and ‘social movements’ into the search box. This time the database gives me a narrower list of 22 results, from which I pick Adam K. Webb’s article [2006] ‘The calm before the storm? Revolutionary pressures and global governance’. The article focus on how globalization has made the great social revolutions more unlikely. It is an interesting article on how the international community and globalization itself can interfere in the social and political movements that leads a country’s revolution.
I consider that this first selection of articles will give an introductory approach to my topic of discussion and will, once read, open the debate for new focus on the discussion.
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