Immediately after the Iranian “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” uprising, Iranians in the global diaspora (estimated at five million) joined the protests. Indeed, some of this movement’s greatest demonstrations occurred in the Western world. In the global internet era, however, it is difficult to analyze events inside and outside Iran separately. The ubiquity of electronic media has enhanced what Hegel perceived as a “dialectical” relationship in which the more energized the dialogue, the less focal the interlocutors.Footnote 1 This insight also pervades sociological exploration of the modern and postmodern world.Footnote 2 In the Iranian “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, the inside/outside divide remains but is less of a factor, which explains its dubbing as a movement of the “TikTok Generation.”Footnote 3
Although the often-hoped-for political revolution was not attained, the movement went on to permanently change the Iranian public sphere. Here, we explore the reasons for the failure of a political revolution and the success of a culture revolution: an enduring civil society rebellion against state intrusion in society’s public and private spaces. In this article, we conceptualize “culture revolution” as the opposite of “cultural revolution.”
Excursus: sociological theories of revolution
At the outset, it is essential to offer a provisional sociological definition of political revolution. As such, we adopt the following definition in this article: “[a]ny and all instances in which a state or political regime is overthrown and thereby transformed by a popular movement in an irregular, extra-constitutional, and/or violent fashion.”Footnote 4
Marx considered revolutions as necessary consequences of a process in which the “base” (forces of production) outstrips the coping capacity of the “superstructure” (social institutions). This imbalance leads to a revolution.Footnote 5 A sociological iteration of this theory is found in Talcott Parsons’s theory, which outlines that revolutions occur to restore the lost balance between society’s “allocative” and “integrative” mechanisms. Revolutions repair “disjunctions” and restore “equilibrium.”Footnote 6
The fulcrum of the sociology of revolution has shifted from cultural and societal to demographic and “state-centered” theories.Footnote 7 According to the latter, a revolution occurs once four preconditions are satisfied: a financial crisis (disjunction between the regime’s responsibilities and its resources); a strategic crisis (inability of a regime’s armed forces to quell opponents); a fracture among the regime’s leadership; and a popular uprising. Scholars of social movements in Iran have drawn on schema ranging from neo-Marxist and post-humanist to class-structural, cultural, and state-centered theories.Footnote 8
Why not a political revolution?
During the 2022 uprising, the first author of this article, using a “state-centered” perspective, evaluated the dim prospects of a political revolution.Footnote 9 Utilizing Goodwin’s 2001 model, this analysis showed that although the Iranian regime had failed on two of three axes of state stability—”organizational rationality” and “political legitimacy”—it managed to retain its third axis: “infrastructural capability.” Throughout the uprising, the regime provided sufficient staple goods to the people and rewards to its troops. As such, the regime used its infrastructural capacity to compensate for its rationalization and legitimation deficits.
One may even call the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement a “minirevolution”: a social revolution with real consequences that, nevertheless, did not overthrow the regime, such as the American Civil Rights Movement.Footnote 10 We argue, that while a political revolution failed to materialize, the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement triggered a secondary “culture revolution” with the support of diaspora Iranians. As a result, a “civil rights” and “lifestyle” movement found a secure foothold in Iran’s cultural sphere.
Iranians in the diaspora: excitement and disappointment
In response to the demonstrations in Iran, Iranian communities abroad mobilized. There are many studies on the role of transnational constituencies in native movements, such as how diaspora Kurds (1990s), Iranians (2009), Arabs (2010), and Nigerians (2012) influenced the outcomes of uprisings in their countries of origin.Footnote 11 In 2022, the Iranian diaspora persuaded Western governments to condemn the Iranian regime and apply diplomatic pressure. However, the diaspora’s main accomplishment was to dialectically merge with the domestic movement.
Although fractured along nationalist, social, ethnic, and monarchist lines, diaspora Iranians stridently supported the movement. Western cities came alive with chants and banners calling for the restoration women’s rights and the overthrow of the regime in Iran. From September 23, 2022, to December 25, 2023 (not counting repeated demonstrations in the same cities), thirty-four demonstrations occurred in twenty-eight Western and six non-Western cities. The largest demonstration had an estimated 80,000 participants.Footnote 12 Hand-made signs featured composite pictures of demonstrators who had been killed or blinded.Footnote 13 Placards appeared in Persian, Kurdish, English, German, Swedish, French, Spanish, and German. Demonstrations also featured headscarf-burning, hair-chopping, face-painting, and other performance-art, with a virtual feedback loop between demonstrations in Iran and abroad. Throughout the protests, the Iranian diaspora mimicked, augmented, and transfigured domestic slogans and styles, which, in turn, intensified the movement in Iran. The two sides were connected through familial, peer-group and common-interest virtual communities that created “passive networks,” which were activated by the eruption of public protests.Footnote 14
In diaspora demonstrations, Iranian factions—including royalists, republicans, constitutionalists, the LBGTQ+ community, relatives of the victims of the downed Ukrainian aircraft in 2020, and ethnic organizations—coalesced. Subsequently, a self-appointed leadership committee declared the objectives of the movement.Footnote 15 In another sign of synchronicity, the decline of street demonstrations in Iran took the wind out of the sails of diaspora protests and the above-mentioned leadership council disbanded, However, the movement endured.
The rise of a culture revolution
Although the absence of a practical political vision and leadership, combined with increasing pressure from the regime’s security/surveillance apparatus, dimmed the prospect of a political revolution, the movement ignited an enduring lifestyle and “civil rights” protest movement, which continues to burn amid the ashes of the 2022 bonfires. This is what we call a “culture revolution,” a potent reaction to the state-sponsored “cultural revolution” of the last century.Footnote 16
The term “cultural revolution” has been used in authoritarian—usually Marxist—contexts since 1923 and signifies the revolutionary state’s intrusion in society’s cultural subsystem in order to crush resistance—even indifference—to the regime’s master ideology.Footnote 17 The two notable 20th-century cultural revolutions, in China (1966–76) and Iran (1981–83), are replete with instances of cultural suppression, including: closing universities, firing professors, reforming curricula, radicalizing social sciences instruction, censuring music, literature, visual and performative arts, and institutionalizing heterodox religions, sexualities, and identities.
By contrast, a “culture revolution” restores actors’ autonomy. While a regime uses a cultural revolution comprising propaganda, penalties, and punishment to encroach on the cultural sphere, protestors instigate a “culture revolution” by drawing on culture’s native stock-in-trade (communication and performative acts) to defy the logic of state coercion.Footnote 18 In sociological terms, while a cultural revolution is an antimodern attempt at functional “de-differentiation” of the social system, culture revolution aims to restore functional “differentiation,” a hallmark of “modernity.”Footnote 19 In Iran, the struggle against the hegemony of the theocratic regime is at the core of rebellion.Footnote 20
Unlike cultural revolutions of the past, culture revolution originates within the “lifeworld,” not in opposition to it.Footnote 21 The only thing these two revolutions have in common is their slow unfolding, while one represses and the other revives. Culture revolution is proactive and protean, with the advantage of surprise, maneuvering around barriers and reappears where least expected. Iran’s culture revolution confounds the Orwellian-titled “Guidance Squads,” dragging them into a war of attrition on its turf.
The hub of Iran’s culture revolution is its youth. Born after the 1979 revolution, these youth have been heavily indoctrinated by it and rose to denounce it. Many voted with their feet, joining the diaspora. Those who remained rose up in 2022, fulfilling the sociologists’ prophecy, “demography is destiny.” The revolution’s baby-boom generation turned against it.Footnote 22 No regime that fails to “socialize” its children can endure, and now it is clear that the blazes of the Mahsa uprising are out of state control. Every time the state douses one flame, another erupts.
War stories
“Woman, Life, Freedom” movement protests were overwhelmingly performative: women would take off their scarves, burn them in piles, and dance around, their comrades applauding, whistling, and engaging in cat-and-mouse skirmishes with the police. Such events were captured by mobile phones and shared innumerable times. Although the uprising was crushed, resulting in thousands of arrests, hundreds of injuries, and dozens of deaths, it was not extinguished like previous uprisings.
Domestic and transnational virtual communities launched a “cultural trauma process” in which factual struggles and suffering were made meaningful to wider audiences, triggering “vicarious traumatization.” Women told harrowing war stories and diaspora communities reenacted these “trauma dramas” on a global stage.Footnote 23 Non-Iranians also joined the protests, with some prominent women publicly chopping their hair. Within the country, the proliferation of these performances overwhelmed the regime’s capacity to unleash waves of retaliation. The premier lyricist of the protest, Shervin Haji Pour, received a Grammy award in absentia.Footnote 24 He was summoned and charged with propaganda against the regime, but charges were suspended thanks to his immense popularity. In other chilling performances, women who had been blinded in one eye by police pellet guns appeared on social media channels and chatted amiably while casually removing and replacing their glass eye.
Daring and transgressive escapades returned to the streets the following year. In July 2024, during annual Ashura processions, a group of young women in Karaj joined the self-flagellation processions without headcovers.Footnote 25 This iconoclastic performance was reenacted in 2024 and 2025. Thus, re-signifying religious rituals, women stymied the moral police. Bourdieu explains such performances best: “parody confirms emancipation … not by explicitly denouncing it but by repeating and reproducing it in a sociologically non-congruent context.”Footnote 26
Later that day, another group of women organized an all-women mourning band. The procession was iconoclastic, but the headcovers were proper.Footnote 27 Meanwhile, videos of women singing melodious religious dirges about the martyrdom of Ashura saints circulated widely. The performances weaved together valorized religious chanting with forbidden female singing.Footnote 28
Another subversive “resignification” of traditional mourning processions featured a stunning leap toward the carnivalesque. Men and women marched together in colorful garb to the tune of Western music, all in the name of religious processions and passion plays. This scandalized the religious authorities, who found themselves unable to react to the innovative reenactment of religious rituals.Footnote 29
Even traditional religious women entered the fray, with septuagenarians taking off their veil in solidarity with youngsters.Footnote 30 Female theologians and authors challenged traditional religious injunctions about modesty of dress and unveiled.Footnote 31 Other women kept their veils but vociferously defended women who had set theirs aside. Those who were imprisoned remained unrepentant. Variations on this theme continued to reverberate on the internet.
Diaspora Iranians engaged in performances that were unthinkable inside Iran, but they were instantaneously seen there. Around the world, numerous performance art events, mostly on the margins of the demonstrations, showed Iranian youth in handcuffs, wounded, imprisoned, and wailing, creating a global visual language. In 2023, NPR published in an article detailing the variety of public spaces, including murals and graffiti, utilized to keep Iran’s protests in the collective memory.Footnote 32 As such, while protest performances left the public space in 2022, they re-emerged in cyberspace in 2023 and then re-entered the public space in 2024, refusing to leave.
The panoramic view
At the intersection of language, performance, and the material world, the epoch of “domination” (that fixes social and linguistic relations) comes to an end and the “rupture” (culture revolution) commences. The periphery challenges the center and violates the sanctity of theocratic orthodoxy. “Free play” and “resignification” flourish.Footnote 33 The center cannot control—or even recognize—new manifestations of mutating protest. The amorphous cultural domain awakens to its vast protean powers. The theocracy’s surveillance “panopticon” blinks, overwhelmed.Footnote 34 These are not random episodic “performances”; they are open-ended, boundless streams of “performativity.”Footnote 35
Unlike previous protests, this one has crossed the barriers of class, age, education, and population density. It is prevalent in smaller towns and among poorer and older groups. The state is not paralyzed, of course, but despite its vast resources, it has feet of clay on culture’s turf. The state has tried draconian measures: sending dire text messages to hijab violators based on surveillance cameras, impounding cars, levying monetary penalties, and jailing violators. Nothing has worked. On culture’s playground, performances turn into “political signifiers, mobilizing constituencies.”Footnote 36 Culture shifts battlegrounds and finds new ways of insurrection, and the movement’s leaders remain defiant in prison. Some win international humanitarian awards, including a Nobel Peace Prize in 2023.Footnote 37 Cultural resistance proves rich in symbolic reservoir.
The surveillance regime has shown signs of buckling under “the shadow of silent majorities.”Footnote 38 The regime has attempted “kinder, gentler” tactics, with a newfangled cadre of female “hijab guardians” sent to patrol subway entrances in 2024, attempting to cajole women into wearing “proper” hijab.Footnote 39 They were ignored. If there was a confrontation, pedestrians would gather, chant “velesh kon” (Let her go), and unsheathe their mobile phones—bad optics. Standing orders were to avoid confrontation. The “guardians” offered polite advice, even flowers—”beheading with cotton” in Persian parlance. The plan, however, backfired. The silent majority’s indifference blunted the state’s charm offensive. The masses absorbed the regime’s energy without reflecting any information back. The flower patrols disbanded quietly. All along, a visible portion of women insisted on going bare headed. Indeed, every unveiled woman in public space flutters as a flag of defiance against the country’s theocratic regime. Every act of defiance takes a scale out of the regime’s armor of plausibility.
In myriad ways, protest is back in public spaces. On September 14, 2024, the Associated Press reported that women were generally abandoning the veil in public places after dark.Footnote 40 As an unrepresentative fundamentalist parliament forges new draconian hijab legislation, several powerful Ayatollahs and official public figures have spoken against the country’s hijab policy.Footnote 41 The current president has openly refused to enforce the hijab law.
One official recently declared that loose hijab, for which Mahsa Amini was arrested on September 22, 2022, would be considered perfectly appropriate cover now, but that train has left the station.Footnote 42 None of this would have been possible without the mirroring, transfiguring, performative acts both inside and outside Iran. Such performances have become mutually “citational” political signifiers.Footnote 43 The transnational network of Iranian users and bloggers has emerged as a site of a global “civil society consensus and resistance to state oppression.”Footnote 44
In this article, we argued that dialectic communicative interactions between diaspora and homeland Iranians have been a salient feature of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement in our globalized society. On both sides of Iran’s porous borders, soft whispers rise and reach a crescendo: “The struggle continues.”Footnote 45 A culture revolution is afoot.
Postscript
Since submitting the final version of this article, Israel initiated a twelve-day war against Iran. We believe these events do not halt the dialectic of liberation in Iran but will possibly slow its course. As Narges Mohammadi (the Iranian Nobel laureate) recently stated, the war has provided an opening for the security forces to re-enter the public space.Footnote 46
