Green Movement, Clerical, Activist and Public Responses to Heightened Repression Since the 2009 Presidential Elections in Iran: A Survey and Assessment of Implications for Political Change

Abstract

In order to contain the considerable challenge they faced from opposition and popular forces following the 2009 Presidential elections, Iran’s hardliners resorted to heightened levels of coercion and repression. Mass arrests, forced confessions, show trails, systematic torture and rape in detention centers and severe limits on freedoms of press, speech and assembly ensued. This study has two primary aims. First, it attempts to draw a composite of the elaborate response to this repression which emerged from four sources: (1) the de facto leaders of the Green Movement, (2) a group of mostly high-ranking clerics, (3) jailed opposition and civil society activists and (4) the broader population. Second, the study considers the significance of the response laid out for political accommodation and change in Iran. The study finds that the repression undertaken by hardliners following the 2009 elections spurred contention and criticism unprecedented in its nature and scope in the history of the Islamic Republic. The resort to coercion had significant delegitimizing effects on hardliners’ ideology, institutions, and claims to legitimate rule. The regime’s repression backfired after rising to the level of a major societal grievance. Yet hardliners were able to weather the initial storm of the first six months of discontent and to date the repression has failed to translate into openings for consequential political change. At the same time, while the political and public focus on the state’s repression has waned since the first months following the 2009 elections, the issue as a grievance and source of delegitimation has never entirely disappeared from opposition discourses and public consciousness since. This means that as both repression and opposition challenges to its deployment continue in Iran, the potential for political change at least in part spurred by challenges to hardliners’ repression since June 2009, remains a possibility.

Keywords: Iran, human rights, repression, contention, political change, Islamism