The existential challenges facing the Iranian regime will end with this wave of protests or their suppression. They would not be overcome if negotiations with Washington succeed and a strike is averted either. Recent developments are the culmination of problems that have been accumulating for years. The gap between the authorities and society has been widening, and the regime’s survival has become increasingly irreconcilable with society’s desire for change.
The past few weeks have shown that the gap between the authorities and society cannot be contained or bridged. The regime is facing an impossible task, as a state and an ongoing revolution because the chasm or gap between the authorities and society cannot be bridged by addressing specific demands. Rather, the chasm is born of the fact that the authorities seem increasingly alien to Iran society, leading to a collapse in its legitimacy.
The recent protest movement, the scale of violence used by the regime, and the sacrifices protesters were willing to make, have all demonstrated that reconciliation is highly unlikely. A crisis has been precipitated by the collapse of the contractual relationship between the two sides, as the social contract between the regime and society has been shredded.
This defiance of the state, the regime, and the revolution amounts to collective rupture, a clear declaration that Iran’s communities or peoples cannot tolerate their state. Moreover, this defiance shows that the regime has failed to build citizenship underpinned by equal rights and responsibilities. The deep rifts it has created among the country’s communities have now reached the regime itself, and it has pushed these groups toward mutual solidarity in opposition to it, compelling them to set aside their differences to confront the authorities.
The most dangerous aspect of the breakdown of the contractual relationship between the regime and society, or between the state and Iran’s groups or peoples, is the aggravating crisis between the center and the peripheries. The contractual gaps between them are growing. This is especially serious given that these peripheries are themselves central to the communities with whom they share bonds beyond Iran’s borders. They are willing to break with Iran’s center or marginalize it at a moment of weakness. Such an outcome represents an existential threat to the regime, which is willing to do anything necessary to avoid it. As the expert and researcher on Iranian affairs, Hassan Faqih, put it: “The regime has an ideological mindset that considers its preservation to be its ultimate duty, even if that requires extreme repression and violence. According to this logic, the numbers of the dead and the detained become a ‘necessary cost’ to ensure survival.”
What can be described as a crisis of the contractual relationship between the authorities and society has exposed a crisis of representation. Popular legitimacy has come to stand against two other forms of legitimacy: its revolutionary legitimacy and its religious legitimacy. The chasm between these two has become difficult to bridge, shattering its contractual relationship with society. The latter is now seeking change and ready to make sacrifices to this end, while the regime remains captive to the moment of its founding.
Accordingly, in the decades between its founding moment and the current moment in which it is fighting for its survival, the regime has reached a point of no return. Both sides have chosen radical options.
