⇱ Index page

The Internationalist Archive

Chowra Makaremi is an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. She completed a PhD on the ethnography of border detention in France, and published Aziz's Notebook (Gallimard, 2011) and Enghelab Street: A revolution through books 1979-83 (Le Bal/Spector, 2019). In 2019, she directed the movie Hitch. An Iranian Story. She leads the ERC research programme Off-Site on "Violence, State formation and memory politics: an off-site ethnography of post-revolution Iran.”

For Issue #20 of The Internationalist, Makaremi discusses the 2022 protests in Iran, which began after the killing of Jina Mahsa Amini. She argues that the protests derived their power from their display of solidarity across ethnic and national groups, classes, genders, and generations.

Jina Mahsa Amini died under the blows of the morality police five months ago in Iran because she was a "badly veiled" woman who also happened to be Kurdish. Jina Mahsa, originally from Saqez in Iranian Kurdistan, had come to visit Tehran, and her veil was no more unkempt than that of other middle-class Tehranis.

When I was investigating border control at airports in France, a policeman explained that he immediately knew who to stop: "We spot those who are not used to circulating". Was it this eye for class triage that drew the morality police to Jina Mahsa? Was it her Kurdish accent that signalled to the police that they could unleash on her with impunity?

The death of Jina Mahsa Amini has initiated the longest, steadiest and largest wave of protests since the Iranian revolution of 1979, dismantling the "red lines" that organized political life and participation and radically reshaped the relations between the Iranian State and society. In the streets of Iran, burning the veil was never an end; it was the starting point of a frontal protest that targeted the theocratic order by attacking one of its most tangible pillars. Unlike the previous waves of protests in 1999, 2009, and 2017-19, the current movement did not present any demands for power, such as the end of the morality police or forced hijab. Instead, the chants in the street claimed: “In akharin payam-e, hadaf kole nezam” (This is the last call, our aim is the whole political order).

These insurrections that have opened a new chapter in Iran are intersectional, allowing us to understand how a feminist revolt can become the engine of a national uprising that unites different groups and segments of a society in an unprecedented demand for political change. In Iran, the mandatory veil – which inscribes patriarchal power over every woman's body everywhere and at every hour – embodies a much deeper legal, political, spatial and cultural discrimination. This gender discrimination has been fought for thirty years by feminist movements that are the most powerful and organized strand of civil society inside and outside the country. This discriminatory regime, which affects more than half of the population, is superimposed on the ever-increasing social and ethnic inequalities. The Iranian Kurds are subjected to daily state violence that also affects all ethnic, national and religious minorities (Baluchi, Iranian Arabs, and Baha'i religious minorities, as well as more than three million Afghan refugees, including children, who cannot access citizenship).

However, the numerous populations that make up the Iranian ethnic mosaic are not only at the forefront of economic exclusion but are also subjected to armed State violence under the guise of counter-insurgency in Kurdistan and anti-terrorism in Baluchistan. This is why these regions joined the revolt in such large numbers and why the repression was so bloody.

Iran has been economically drained by the corruption of an extractivist state infiltrated at all levels by the military-economic elite of the Revolutionary Guards, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the never-ending assault of Western sanctions. The middle class has been squeezed to the point of extinction, and the working classes, the regime's historical clientele, are suffocated by the high cost of living, as made evident by the bloody uprisings of November 2019, which left 1,500 dead in a matter of days. This situation pushes into the streets a new generation whose horizon is as gloomy and blocked as the polluted sky of Tehran.

Over 20,000 people have been imprisoned or disappeared since September 2022, and more than 500 protesters were killed. Half of these deaths occurred in the peripheral provinces, such as the massacre of Zahedan in Baluchistan, where the armed forces fired on the crowd as they left the mosque on 30 September, killing more than 90 and injuring hundreds. The same militarized violence occurred in Kurdistan, where the uprising began on the evening of Jina Mahsa Amini's funeral. Forged in Rojava and inspired by the writings of the PKK leader Abdullah Öcallan, this is also where the slogan "Jin, Jian, Azadi" (Women, Life, Freedom) comes from. These are the words with which all those who rise against the multiple faces of injustice now recognize themselves, from the working-class neighbourhoods to the top universities of Tehran and the Sunni towns of Sistan-Baluchistan.

This intersectional understanding of the socio-economic, environmental, xenophobic and gendered violence experienced every day, is the legacy of decades of feminist struggles, including the campaign for one million signatures which intended to change the laws on gender segregation in 2005. Struggles such as these have constantly denounced the production of second-class citizens in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The 2022 protests are radical because they want to redefine the Iranian regime, where it is not the defender of the mostazafin (the oppressed) that it claims to be since the 1979 revolution but is a political system based on legal, socio-economic and ethnic segregation. These protests are also remarkable in their display of solidarity across ethnic and national groups, classes, genders and generations, as one of the slogans that were sung throughout Iran was, “Sanandaj, Zahedan, (are) the light and the apple of Iran’s eye” in support of the capitals of Kurdish and Baluchi provinces.

The challenge we face now lies in cementing this wave of solidarity (as shared effects, values, and practices of resistance). The first step towards this came from a joint charter recently published by twenty independent organizations based in Iran (a first since 1981), among which ten trade unions listed their "minimum demands”. Along with the separation of religion and State and the release of all political prisoners, they also included “equality of rights between women and men”, “recognition of the rainbow LGBTQIA+ society”, and the “end (of) environmental destruction”.

While some observers wonder where to look for alternatives and leadership, let us remind them that feminism is not only a frame of analysis but also a political project that is anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, ecologist and anti-imperialist at its core. Creative and assertive, “Jin, Jian, Azadi” was not just a revindication but also a plan of action.

The Internationalist Archive