The beginning of 2026 marked yet another human tragedy for Iranian society. In January, hundreds of thousands of Iranian protesters took to the streets in over 100 cities in response to political repression and growing socio-economic hardships. This new wave of popular uprising was met with ruthless violence by the clerical regime, resulting in significant loss of life. Thousands of protesters are believed to have been killed within only a few days. Meanwhile, Iran remains largely isolated from the global internet, as authorities enforce a near-total communications blackout to conceal the scale of the nationwide protests and brutal crackdown. 

At the time of writing, media are saturated with images of bloodshed, corpses, and destroyed buildings and present an exhibition of necropolitical victimhood. Human rights organizations are engaged in a race to produce casualty figures, reducing human suffering to a spectacle of statistics. Western leaders are, in turn, manoeuvring around these images and statistics with hyperbolic statements and hollow pledges to bring democracy to Iran through military interventions and bunker-buster bombs. This essay does not seek to participate in this necropolitical spectacle. Instead, it offers five preliminary observations that highlight the underlying dynamics and characteristics of the ongoing uprising.

I.

The country’s deepening socio-economic crisis has created the immediate breeding ground and driving force behind the uprising. The protest waves first emerged as a series of demonstrations and strikes led by the shopkeepers and small and medium-sized enterprises, in response to the country’s economic decline. In recent months, the Iranian economy has produced a perfect storm: the national currency has lost 50% of its value due to stricter sanctions, inflation has surged, youth unemployment has risen sharply, economic growth has stagnated, and systemic corruption has permeated all levels of society. Moreover, in an attempt to address structural budget deficits, the government implemented unpopular reforms and austerity measures that further burden ordinary citizens. 

While economic grievances acted as the initial catalyst, the protests quickly evolved into a nation-wide uprising challenging the clerical establishment. From a socio-economic perspective, the uprising reflects a deepening class conflict targeting an economic oligarchy with institutional ties to the state apparatus, the clerical hierarchy, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It encompasses diverse segments of society, including the impoverished middle class, marginalized social groups, ethnic minorities, and small business owners.

At first glance, the uprising recalls the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement and can be perceived as its continuation. However, this uprising shows three distinctive tendencies that distinguish it from its predecessor. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement was inherently emancipatory and bottom-up. It relied on grassroots networks and non-violent methods to articulate the democratic aspirations of a broad spectrum of oppressed groups, including women, ethnic minorities, students, the working class, activists, and the dispossessed. These actors collectively exercised their agency and, albeit partially, successfully reclaimed social freedoms and public spaces within society. Despite the ongoing presence of these actors, the current uprising is significantly constrained by active neocolonial involvement, the expansion of anti-democratic forces, and the state’s militarized repression of its population.

II.

It is important to note that the current uprising is taking shape at the intersection of geopolitical conflicts between the clerical government and its regional and global rivals. Notably, it comes just six months after a 12-day period of Israeli-U.S. aggression against Iran. The current Israeli government considers the Islamic Republic as an existential threat to its expansionist political agenda in the region. Following the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, the Israeli military targeted and destroyed a significant portion of the country’s military and economic infrastructure. Israel appears to be seeking opportunities to pursue a similar strategy in Iran. In light of Trump’s neocolonial ambitions in the region, it sees a window of opportunity to weaken or potentially overthrow the regime in Tehran in a similar manner. 

Despite the failure of Israel’s military aggression in June, it has developed a broad transnational network aimed at applying sustained political pressure on Iran. This approach is designed to destabilize the regime by co-opting popular protests and empowering ideologically aligned factions (such as monarchist and pro-Israel elements) within the broader Iranian opposition. This reflects a deliberate attempt to manipulate domestic sociopolitical fault lines as instruments of external statecraft. Both the United States and Israel regard the monarchists as a useful political instrument. On the one hand, they can serve as an effective means of pressuring Iran to make strategic concessions. On the other hand, in a potential regime-change scenario, they represent a relatively safe option and could potentially function as a proxy regime that would secure Western economic and political interests in the region. 

III.

Given these geopolitical developments, the leadership of the current uprising has been increasingly appropriated by monarchist forces, organized around Reza Pahlavi, the former crown prince of the deposed monarchy. These factions openly position themselves as geopolitical auxiliaries of Israel and the Trump-aligned political bloc. They explicitly rely on external logistical, military, and diplomatic backing. Consistent with this orientation, monarchist leaders and their affiliates have repeatedly and unapologetically called for large-scale U.S. military intervention in Iran.

Unlike the Woman, Life, Freedom movement’s inclusive and pluralistic political project, the monarchists’ political agenda is premised on patriarchal, reactionary, and anti-democratic foundations. The leader of the monarchists portrays himself as “the father of the nation” and positions himself as a quasi-transcendent authority above parties, classes, and social groups. Rather than advancing a democratic project, monarchism functions as an anti-democratic political formation seeking the restoration of an absolutist order overthrown in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The monarchist discourse is fuelled by idealized visions of a glorified monarchical order that is to be restored. In this imagined political order, there is little room for leftists, ethnic minorities, republicans, social democrats, or other actors who played a role in the Revolution. These groups are depicted as traitors who should be held responsible for the fall of the monarchy. 

The democratic forces within Iran are currently fragmented and are participating cautiously in the uprising. These forces are primarily rooted in independent workers’ councils, student associations, ethnic minority communities, grassroots movements, feminist groups, and underground political organizations. These groups have long struggled against the clerical system. At the same time, they firmly reject neocolonial military intervention and advocate a bottom-up democratic transition. Unlike earlier protest movements, these forces do not seem to hold the upper hand in the current uprising. This situation stems from several factors. First, over the past few decades, democratic forces have been primary targets of state violence and repression, resulting in the extermination of thousands of dissidents. Second, many political leaders are currently imprisoned, which prevents them from actively guiding the revolutionary process. Third, in recent years, democratic forces have remained fragmented and have failed to develop an effective revolutionary strategy capable of challenging state oppression. As a result, they have been unable to establish a coordinated, broad-based leadership that could present a viable alternative to the Iranian regime.

IV.

From a geopolitical perspective, U.S. policy in the Middle East can be understood as part of a broader neocolonial project aimed at preserving its status as the global hegemon amid declining control over energy resources. Iran possesses vast oil and gas reserves as well as other valuable natural resources. Until the Iranian Revolution, these resources were largely exploited by Western companies. Since then, American access to them has been effectively cut off.  For this reason, the Iranian case cannot be viewed in isolation. It fits into a wider pattern of an aggressive American posture toward resource-rich regions such as Venezuela and Greenland. 

As a result of large-scale Western sanctions, the Iranian government has increasingly sought to build long-term economic and military partnerships with Russia, China and other major economies in the global south. These partnerships have been institutionalized through Iran’s membership in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), as well as through bilateral strategic agreements with China and Russia. In addition, Iran is geographically located at the crossroads of major North–South and East–West trade routes. Therefore, its vast natural resources and geoeconomic significance make Iran a central arena for great-power competition.

At present, Iran’s alignment with China and Russia poses a significant challenge to American interests in the Middle East. Washington has a clear interest in preventing its rivals from establishing a stronghold over Iran’s resources and geoeconomic position. This provides the United States with powerful incentives to intervene in Iranian affairs through sanctions, hybrid warfare, Libya-style direct military action, and threats of leadership decapitation. Such efforts risk turning Iran into a fragmented and internally divided state.

V.

The overtly aggressive rhetoric and direct interference of the United States and Israel in the uprising have given the Islamic Republic a prime opportunity to portray the protesters as Western mercenaries and Zionist terrorists. This framing enables the regime to treat them as enemies of the nation and Islam in a wartime context. These neocolonial interventions strengthen the regime’s ability to exploit anti-imperialist propaganda on a global scale. They help consolidate competing factions within the ruling elite, and sharpen its sophisticated apparatus of mass oppression, such as revolutionary courts, the revolutionary guards and its affiliated militias. Moreover, they facilitate the mass mobilization of its shrinking yet still committed social base and ideological supporters.

In conclusion, deep-rooted political struggles for liberation and persistent socio-economic grievances have generated an exceptional revolutionary momentum, which has been curtailed by clerical violence and neocolonial interventions. In the short term, the prospects of the current uprising appear bleak. The clerical regime has effectively suppressed revolutionary energy through brutal force, while ongoing geopolitical confrontations with Israel and the United States continue to undermine indigenous democratic development. The absence of cohesive leadership within democratic forces remains a critical obstacle to liberatory change. To break the cycle of clerical repression, these groups must learn from past failures and develop a coordinated strategy for democratic transition.

Shahin Nasiri, Lecturer in Political Philosophy, University of Amsterdam