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This Thesis Has Been Approved by the Honors Tutorial College and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology 1 This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology __________________________ Dr. Stephen Scanlan Professor, Sociology Thesis Adviser __________________________ Dr. Elizabeth Lee Director of Studies, Sociology ___________________________ Dr. Cary Frith Dean, Honors Tutorial College 2 PROTEST AND POLICE: AN EXPLORATION OF THE GREEN MOVEMENT AND THE 2017-18 PROTESTS IN IRAN ____________________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University _______________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Sociology ______________________________________ By Zachary Gheen June 2019 3 Table of Contents I. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 4 II. POLITCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT OF IRAN .............. 7 III. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE............................................................................ 15 IV. METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS ............................................. 25 V. FINDINGS .................................................................................................................... 30 VI. OPPORTUNITIES AND LIMITATIONS ................................................................ 51 VII. CONCLUSIONS .......................................................................................................... 56 VIII. REFERENCES ........................................................................................................... 59 4 I. INTRODUCTION Over the past ten years, the Middle East has stood out as an area of significant political unrest. In 2009, for example, demonstrators took to the streets under the leadership of Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and their close associates in Iran. Following the contested July 2009 election, millions gathered in major urban areas to call for the removal of the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Drissel 2017). While initially quite strong, bringing out anywhere from an estimated hundreds of thousands to millions, what came to be known as the Green Movement was brutally repressed. Dozens of protestors were killed, hundreds were injured, and thousands were arrested (Hashemi and Postel 2010). Significantly, the Green Movement is the largest popular movement in Iran since the Iranian Revolution in 1979 at this point in time. While protest efforts in Iran were being stifled, a contentious wave was preparing to arise across much of the Arab world, ultimately with varying results. In Tunisia and Egypt, long-standing presidents were removed from office, with a military coup soon following the revolutionary efforts in the latter of these countries. In places like Syria, Yemen, and Libya, civil conflicts raged and caused enormous displacements of peoples and massive deaths (Gelvin 2015). Syria has experienced massive death tolls as a result of the civil war that began in 2011, and has only recently came to a close. The United Nations provided estimates of the death toll until 2016, after it became impossible to verify the number of deaths as a result of the difficulties in obtaining reliable information and that estimate was reliant upon data from 2014 (Specia 2018). As I near completion of the present analysis, Algerian protests pressured 82-year-old Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika to not pursue an additional term and extend his power past the 5 twenty-year mark. While this concession has been made, protestors are urging the Algerian president to immediately step down before any sort of negotiations between the government and protestors will be made (BBC 2019). Returning to Iran, lively protests emerged in several provincial towns beginning in December of 2017. These protests were notable in that they did not occur in the large urban centers typical of the 2009 Green Movement. The protests were seemingly comprised of economically disadvantaged young men. Contentious messages calling for the downfall of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei especially garnered international attention (Dehghan Kamali and Graham-Harrison 2017; Gast, Andone, and Fox 2018). Following the beginning of the more recent round of protests in 2017, dozens of Iranian women were arrested for violating Iran’s strict official dress code by publicly removing their mandatory headscarves (Mackintosh 2018). Subsequently, Iranian police arrested prominent human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh and prosecuted her for a multitude of charges related to her work. She has been sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes (Magra 2019). The emergence of new protests in Iran provide scholars an opportunity to investigate thought-provoking variations in protest dynamics over the last 10 years. As alluded to above, the recent protests in Iran are a far departure from the 2009 Green Movement. Seeking to be at the forefront of this conversation, this research seeks to identify important similarities and differences between the Green Movement and recent Iranian protests as well as the potential connections between these movements. More specifically, this research explores the interaction between protest policing and protest 6 dynamics in particular seeking to provide a deeper understanding of Iranian protest experience over the last 10 years. Although research regarding protest policing has been quite popular in the field of social movement studies, scholars have surprisingly paid relatively little attention to protest repression tactics in authoritarian states (Earl 2003). Earl notes the critical theoretical differences between forms of repression in democratic and authoritarian societies. Iran provides a very interesting theoretical case and that is why I examine it here. Rather than relying on a democracy-autocracy dichotomy, scholars of electoral authoritarianism have noted that many hybrid states do not fit nicely into this simple framework and have adopted terms such as semi-authoritarianism (Ottaway 2013) and illiberal democracy (Zakaria 1997). Iran has an interesting place in this conversation. While there are elections, regular changes in power, and institutionalized political parties in Iran, they are not without their problems. For example, no national or international authority monitors elections to ensure their fairness. The Guardian Council vets all Iranian presidential candidates and is a hegemonic authority in the country. While reversals of power between conservative and reformist parties are common in the presidency as well as the parliament, the clerical establishment in Iran has made its preference for the conservatives clear. Political parties are therefore heavily regulated and monitored by the state (Ghobadzadeh and Rahim 2016). This combination of authoritarian and democratic elements may serve to challenge many classical assumptions that generally do not acknowledge this dynamic. This research examines this relatively untouched territory in social movement studies. 7 Another key dynamic of this research is that it focuses on a non-Western case. Many of the most thorough works that detail the policing of protest rely primarily on non- Western cases (Davenport, Soule, and Armstrong 2011; Della Porta and Reiter 1998; Earl, Soule, and McCarthy 2003) As Loveman demonstrates, considering non-Western examples can challenge many sociological assumptions regarding social movements. By analyzing high-risk activism in Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, Loveman found that severe repression stimulates certain forms of social movements. While one would generally assume that severe repression would encourage a general demobilization of protest efforts, Loveman suggests that severe repression may in fact inspire repression from certain sectors of society as a result of the severity itself (Loveman 1998). In this research by examining the non-Western case of Iran, I therefore challenge many assumptions about social movement dynamics, protest policing, and its forms. II. POLITCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT OF IRAN To ground this research properly, I will give a brief overview of the modern history of Iran. The current government of Iran was founded within a revolutionary context. As the Iranian theocracy has cemented itself within the Iranian political dimension, it has continuously butted heads with reformists and those unhappy with what they feel to be the unfulfilled promises of the Iranian Revolution. The following section will trace Iran’s political history since the 1979 revolution, and will draw attention to the important dynamics that have greatly contributed to the protests of the last decade. With the fall of the Qajar Empire in 1925, and the subsequent rise of Reza Shah Pahlavi and the Pahlavi state, Iran has long experimented with different political and economic models. Throughout all of these developments, Iran remained a significant 8 place of interest to the foreign policy of a number of powers, including the British Empire, Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States (Amanat 2017). Because of disastrous and antagonistic relationships with these superpowers, continued grievances accumulating at home, and an uneasiness about the Pahlavi state’s friendly relationship with the United States, revolution broke out in 1979. The end of the first Pahlavi era began with the onset of World War II. During World War I, the Germans had supported the Iranian nationalist project. German
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