women of Iran have confronted the authority of their government, after one young woman died in the state's custody.

Today's guest views the advocacy of those brave women through the broader struggle for democracy around the world.

He's Ali Kadivar, this week, on "Story in the Public Square."

(light orchestral music) (light orchestral music fades) Hello and welcome to a "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also at Salve.

- This week we're joined by Mohammad Ali Kadivar, a professor of sociology and international studies at Boston College.

He's also the author of a new book, "Popular Politics and the Path to a Durable Democracy."

Ali, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you very much for having me.

- So we're gonna talk about the book in a little bit, but we wanna start off talking about your native Iran, where the fall has seen popular protests, the likes of which we haven't seen in a number of years in Iran.

Can you tell us, how did these particular protests start?

- So, I think the story is known at this point.

It was about the death, or more precisely, the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini.

She was a 22-years-old woman from city of Saqez, which is in Kurdistan, part of Iran in the west.

And she was picked up by morality police, for not observing the mandatory hijab properly.

They took her to custody to give her education, and then she was transferred to a hospital.

She went to coma and died.

This created public outrage, because these issues have been going on for years.

The state has been trying to enforce mandatory hijab, in women in particular, and in general just subjugating women's bodies.

So this is how the protests started.

They started in her funeral, and women took off their scarves and burned them.

They cut their hair, and they chanted the slogan, "Women, life, freedom," which is a slogan that was initiated by Kurdish women in Turkey first, but then traveled to Iran protests, spread to other Kurdish cities, and then women activists in Tehran organized a protest, and protests erupted in other big cities, spread to the whole country.

So women issues has been a major issue in this wave of protests.

Women have been leading these waves of protest, but in addition to that, people are also calling for an end of the Islamic Republic.

Main issue is they consider the regime tyrannical, that they are not representing the population, and the regime is also highly corrupt.

- You mentioned the morality police, and I think that for American audiences that maybe don't follow Iran closely, they might not know what the morality police is.

Could you help educate our audience on that front?

- So morality police is the last installation or last institution that has been enforcing hijab.

Enforcing hijab goes back to right after the 1979 revolution.

Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian Revolution, gave a speech about mandatory hijab a few weeks after the fall of the monarchy.

It took a few years for the regime to consolidate this policy.

And different institutions under police, or committees initially, were enforcing mandatory hijab.

Morality police, as I said, is the last installation.

And they just pick up women who wear their hijabs loosely, even some men that are not dressed as the dress code they consider proper.

These people get arrested, get fined, they get harassed under arrest.

And I mean, they supposedly give them classes or education, but we see that what kind of education they give to people.

- So these latest protests began in September- - [Ali] Yeah.

- With the death of this young woman.

And they've continued ever since.

Can you give us a sense of who is demonstrating, and not specifically by name, but demographically, age- - Yeah.

- Gender, occupation.

- Of course.

- Who, and the numbers of people too.

- Yeah, so this episode of protests has been very widespread.

So as I mentioned, women have have been at the forefront.

I think many videos went viral.

There were young women that were killed by the police later during the protests.

It started with Jina Amini, but there are many other names that are now being mentioned by protestors.

So young people, people in their teens and 20s have been present at these protests.

We see these name of these people among the people who have been killed and people who have been arrested.

And some of the two people that were executed, they were both in their 20s, and there're more people that have received execution sentences.

These people, most of them are also in their 20s.

So this is also a generational issue.

This is a generation that through internet, has learned about values of the world, and they want to be part of the, just how people live in the globe.

They have values that don't come together with what Islamic Republic has been imposing on the population, in terms of dress codes and other type of lifestyle.

There is an important ethnic aspect to these protests.

I mentioned the Kurdish region, and it was very significant that Mahsa Amini was a Kurdish woman.

So Kurds have felt for decades now that they are marginalized from the political process in Iran.

They feel that they are discriminated against economically, and they have protested these issues before.

This time, they're not specifically speaking about these issues, but they have been, the Kurdistan region in Iran has been a bastion of protests.

Other ethnicity that has considerably participated are Baluch.

These Baluch are in the southeast of Iran.

So what's interesting is that both the Kurds that I mentioned, most of them, and the Baluch, they are ethnic minorities, but they're also religious minorities.

These are Sunnis.

So in the Muslim population in the world, Sunnis are majority, and Shias are minority.

In Iran is the opposite.

We have a majority Shia country, and the government's official ideology is also Shi'ism.

Students have been participating.

And again, this is remarkable, because this comes after years of repression, surveillance and restrictions on student activities and associations.

We've seen protests in dozens of universities.

Many students have been arrested again, have been barred from entering universities, and have been harassed by the security forces.

Another remarkable matter is that we have seen occupations also participated in these waves of protest.

Over last several years, we have had protests by workers, industrial workers, nurses, teachers, but in those protests, they were not asking for political goals.

They were basically asking for higher wages, protesting against layoffs, and so on.

This is the first time an anti-regime wave of protest is coinciding by teachers also going on a strike, workers also going on a strike.

Even more privileged occupations had protests.

There was a couple of protests by lawyers, protests by doctors, and yeah, so these are all different groups that have participated.

It does not mean that the whole occupation has participated.

I mean, like part of teachers, part of doctors have participated.

From videos that protestors record of this protest, I can estimate that on a single day we see tens of thousands of people coming out to the streets, and this has continued for about three month or longer.

So I think that this movement still has potential to expand much larger.

Iran is a country of 90 million people.

The protests are risky.

People have been losing their lives going out.

But for what protesters are asking, they need to expand the rank of people who come out in the streets.

We know that people that are satisfied are much more than tens of thousands.

We know this from a very low turnout in the last presidential election in Iran, which was the lowest turnout for any presidential election.

And we also know from a lot of people who participate online and protest online, but for this movement to actually achieve regime change or any like concrete change in the political process, they need to scale up from tens of thousand to hundreds of thousand and millions of people.

So we have a revolutionary movement, but we don't have a revolutionary situation yet.

And the main thing that needs to happen is a scale shift, in terms of the number of participants.

- Do you have a sense of, so there are protest movements and protests all over the world, on a fairly regular basis.

In the United States, we've had some important social movements and social protests even the last couple of years.

But what's different, in my mind anyways, about Iran is the very real risk that these women took in removing the hijab, the very real risk that protestors take when they go to the street.

We've seen people killed by security forces.

We've seen public executions now, specifically because people were protesting.

Where does the moral and physical courage come from in the people of Iran to confront this tyranny?

- Yeah, that's a great question.

So in addition to what you mentioned, we had two other episodes, at least two other episodes of nationwide anti-regime protest.

The first happened in December of 2017, January of 2018.

Lasted for only 10 days.

The second one was in November of 2019.

That lasted for one week.

In 2019, based on human right organizations, at least 300 people were killed in one week.

We have another number from Reuters that says 1,500 people were killed in.

So just the fact that people still come out, and it's a known fact that you are putting your life in risk, is remarkable.

Where is the courage coming from?

I think it's coming from a sense of moral outrage, and also a sense of urgency.

The sense that we don't want to live under these conditions anymore.

In the discourse that I see from protestors, it's interesting to see references to slavery, that we are not slaves anymore.

We don't want to put up with subjugation, under the tyrannical rule of the Islamic Republic anymore.

And in social movement studies, we call this cognitive liberation, when a group of people consider a situation unjust, and subject to change.

So people think that these people who come out, I mean, they come out of a sense of urgency, but I think they also think that it is possible to change this situation if more and more people join the rank of protestors.

- So Ali, is that a realistic possibility, that more and more people will be coming out and it will reach what you called "a revolutionary situation," and the Islamic Republic will be overthrown?

What's your sense of that?

Again, you can't predict the future, but you certainly know the country and the movement very well.

What's your best guess?

- It depends on the actions, I think, that the movements and protestor take and the government takes.

This is like a, I mean, there are two major players that they're also, the government is more unified, protestors are more fragmented.

And then there are third parties.

So what needs to happen is the third parties to join protestors.

What I think really can make a change is organizing, so it's not just about coming to the streets and protest.

This is a long game.

This is a marathon.

This is not a sprint.

So the movement needs strategizing and planning, and that itself needs leadership that is embedded in organizations.

These are matters I discuss in the book.

And to organize people, the movement need a discourse, a message that would be inclusive, and convince people to join the movement.

As we said, this is very risky.

This is very costly.

And my sense is that there are a lot of people that are dissatisfied with the situation.

So it really is important for the protestors that can show a path forward.

So a big part of discourse right now is about the atrocities of Islamic Republic, the grievances that protestors have, and how corrupt and awful the regime is.

And this can be and should be part of the discourse that makes organizing possible.

But the other part is to show a path forward, to ensure people that this is not only about destruction.

What is it that we want to build instead?

So the slogan, "Woman, life, freedom" is significant, because it's positive.

It's not just negation of what the Islamic Republic is.

So the more protestors can elaborate on this slogan and talk about the future of Iran, a democratic Iran, that women's right is observed and different ethnicities don't feel marginalized and discriminated against, I think that can convince more people to join, because this is a social movement.

You need to convince people.

What happens is that the repression is making protestors angry.

And when you are angry and you have so much hatred, it becomes challenging for you to be able to speak with the third parties, with the calm that you need to invite them to join the protestors.

So I, the outcome is not certain.

It is possible.

This is, I think, what it takes for the movement to do.

And big part of it is also what the regime does.

I mean, they can do stupid things that just change the situation.

So it's like a game we are watching, now.

- So we're just about to get into your book, but one last question on this issue here.

Is democracy possible in Iran, given the history of the last four-plus decades?

- I think democracy is possible now.

In this movement there is certainly a progressive side.

There's a democratic side.

There is conversations about democracy rights and so on.

But there is also an intolerant side to the movement, which comes from that hatred, which comes from that anger.

But when we compare, when I compare, when I see that angry, like hateful side, I become concerned about the prospect for democracy.

But when I compare it with 1979, I see the democratic side has become much stronger, and yeah, it has grown much larger.

There are already calls for restraint on the side of protestors thinking about the future, that even though they're executing protestors, this is not what we want to do to them if the regime change happens one day.

So those parts give me hope, as the other part gives me concern.

So I think it is possible, and that's what I have been trying to do and many other people have been trying to do.

So I think the future is in the making.

- This, it's a great segue to the book actually, because the book essentially argues that it's the practice that you have in those years of opposition that essentially either builds or does not build the civil society that's necessary to then sustain democracy.

Tell us a little bit about the book.

- Yeah, so one idea you hear from part of the protestors now is that, "Let's just focus on toppling regime.

The day after we can figure everything else out.

So let's put all the-" - That's a revolutionary sentiment, right, yeah.

- Yes, that's a revolutionary sentiment, but yes, that is not, that's the opposite of what I argue in the book, and that's the opposite of what I observe in other movements.

When I look at Solidarity movement in Poland or the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, it took years of protest mobilization, for the regime change to happen in those two countries.

And at the side of the coming out to the streets and striking and protesting was organization building, organizations that were organized around the principles and values of democracy.

So these movements were practicing participatory democracy, internal democracy, Solidarity in Poland, and United Democratic Front in South Africa.

So it's through this process that people learn skills how to cooperate with each other, the values of toleration, and to resolve conflict based on the rules they agree upon.

Because that's what democracy is.

Democracy doesn't tell us what policies to agree, but democracy tell us how to regulate our disagreements about policymaking, with some guarantees about the rights that should not be violated, the institutions that facilitate participations of marginalized populations.

And yet, so democracy is a formal organization at a macro level, but building that macro organization starts from building these smaller organizations, that then scale up.

I spoke about how population of protestors need to scale up.

This I think happens with the scaling up the organizations that connect people together.

So not all of the struggle is in the street.

Even I think the more important part of the struggle happens, like organizing doesn't happen in the street.

It happens on a phone call, two people talking to each other, gathering some people in your house and talking to them, and then formalizing these relationships, building them up from local level to regional level to national level.

Those movements have a much better chance of building durable democracy.

Now with internet, it's possible, we saw this in Egypt for example.

- [G. Wayne] Right.

- It is possible with internet to bring together like hundreds of thousands of people, even millions of people to the streets at once.

But then sustaining what you achieved with that short mobilization, that still needs that organization.

So internet has allowed activists to skip the organizing steps.

Before, to organize a demonstrations, a lot more planning had to go into place.

That planning was important for that demonstration, but that planning and organizing then mattered long-term for the movements.

Now, when internet enables protestors to mobilize rapidly, they don't have the tools they need for long-term planning and negotiations, organizing and strategy.

- That seems really substantial, significant.

I can remember, I wanna say it was in the Obama administration.

Hillary Clinton was still Secretary of State.

There were protests in Iran at that point, and I can remember her publicly appealing to Twitter, to not service their servers that weekend, because they were being used by organizers in Tehran to get people into the streets.

But what you're saying is that that's almost short-circuiting the long-term development of a durable democracy- - Yeah.

- In wherever those protest places are.

Is that right?

- Yes, but I don't say, let the Twitter just get cut out.

- Yeah, yeah.

(laughs) - The protestors do need the technology.

It's about how they use it.

Do protestors only use internet for mobilizing?

- Yeah.

- It can be also used for organizing.

We just don't see the organizing messages because that's not, you just don't tweet or- - It's in public, yeah.

- You don't do that in public.

You, that goes through communication like one-on-one small groups.

From there it can go up, online meetings and so on.

And I know that is happening in Iran right now.

Lot of groups have come together, like groups from high school friends, college friends, from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 40 years ago.

So people are using now internet for organizing.

That, I think, can make a difference.

So it's not just, it's about how we use the technology.

It's not just about the technology.

- I think what sets your book apart and gives it its power is the combination of personal experience and the scholarship, the data analysis which is really impeccable and extraordinary.

Talk briefly about why you took that approach in writing your book, the personal experience and the scholarship, and the data analysis.

- So the question of the book, how to build democracy, how to transition to democracy, that is rooted in my personal experience of being an Iranian, being exposed to life under autocracy, for not having democratic freedoms.

I mean, I have observed people getting persecuted for their speeches, interviews, and my own father was in prison for his speeches and interviews.

I had friends whose parents served in prison for eight years, one year, five years.

I have friends who got arrested and got tortured.

I have friends right now in prison in Iran.

So that's why I decided to study politics, to study sociology.

And the more I studied, I realized that this is about a bottom-up change.

Initially I was paying attention to what the political elite could do, but then I realized it's only under pressure from a civil society that political elites would make decisions that would be favorable to democracy.

So that's what motivated my scholarship.

The book, Iran is not in the, it's in the preface where I say why I wrote it, but it's not any one of the cases studies.

I mean, then later I came to the States.

I studied, I did my PhD in sociology, and I had those goals and questions that I had from Iran.

But I also believe in what social scientific methodology can teach us.

That's why I chose to come to study social sciences, because I think we can learn from different experiences of successful democratization and failed democratization.

We can also learn from history of Iran and from history of other countries.

There are regularities in how people protest, when protestors achieve their goals, how democracy emerge, how democracy endure.

And I took a mixed method approach that has a statistical part, where I wanted to look at the general regularities, and then I focused on five cases studies.

I use comparative historical method to look at the processes.

And I hope the argument I make in the book will be read by activists, protestors, people in authoritarian countries that want democracy, that strive for democracy, including in Iran.

- Yeah, I think anybody who cares about democracy in general ought to read this book.

We're out of time.

Ali Kadivar, thank you you so much for being with us.

The book is "Popular Politics and the Path to a Durable Democracy."

That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about the "Story in the Public Square," find us on Facebook or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time, for more "Story in the Public Square."

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