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Iran Protests and Patterns of State Repression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2023

Maryam Alemzadeh
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Extract

Over the past four months, the brutal, extralegal, and violent repression of protestors during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran has taken observers and participants by devastating and sometimes fatal surprise. Although not a drastic departure from past practices, the large scale and seemingly random acts of violence, such as the beating of protestors to death on the streets, the shooting of passersby and nonviolent demonstrators point blank, and the fatal torturing of detained protestors and activists, have marked new levels and scales of violence. In what follows I analyze this brutal repression campaign in relation to the institutional history of the Islamic Republic's armed units, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as the most controversial entity among all. I contend that the IRGC's historic endorsement of firing at will as an accepted practice among its ranks has enabled the decentralized radical instances of violence. I will discuss how, despite the continued reliance on decentralized forces, their firing at will is not unanimously endorsed this time around, due to the different nature of the current movement and the deepening uncertainties and schisms in both the forces on the ground and the ruling elite.

Type
Round Table
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , July 2023 , pp. 557 - 561
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Iranian Studies

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References

1 Maziar Motamedi, “Riot Police Raid Iran's Sharif University after Student Protest,” Aljazeera, October 3, 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/3/students-injured-after-security-forces-raid-iran-university.

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5 Maryam Alemzadeh, “The Attraction of Direct Action: The Making of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the Iranian Kurdish Conflict,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, October 2021, doi: 10.1080/13530194.2021.1990013.

6 Ibid.

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