Neither Khamenei, Trump, nor Shah: Towards a roadmap for democracy in Iran

How does one write in this moment when overtaken by grief? In Iran, mass civil resistance to authoritarianism since late December 2025 has been met with large-scale state murder. As I write these words, over 2600 people (with estimates claiming the figure is closer to 3500, or higher), have been killed by state security forces. At least 18,000 have been arrested.

Harrowing images of morgues and warehouses overflowing with corpses in body bags demand that people of conscience globally bear witness.

People in Iran are no strangers to mass civil resistance. This is the fourth nationwide uprising in just eight years. But what explains the takeover of streets time and again by masses who face the tremendous risk of being shot dead, blinded, or maimed, of being imprisoned and surveilled by a judicial system known for its use of execution as a tool to quell dissent? The answer can only be that people are unable to continually ignore their desire to be free from an oppressive state—one which has lost all legitimacy among broad swathes of society.

Nevertheless, we must not romanticise this event. People continually expressing their desire to be free does not necessarily translate into winning that freedom, which makes it extraordinarily painful. Still, making visible en masse people’s refusal of the state wholesale—and within that, individuals’ refusal to be silenced, to accept power on its own terms—will form an indelible entry in the historical record.

In other words, when future generations of Iranians who are no longer living under the Islamic Republic look back, they will remember these years of struggle as profoundly meaningful.

At the same time, it is important to remember that everyday acts of resistance do wrest fragments of power in the present. One example of this is how countless women in many parts of the country no longer abide by the legally mandated religious dress code (hijab), a direct result of their bloody battles during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising of 2022, sparked by Mahsa Jina Amini’s arrest and subsequent death in custody.

Building a democratic future

What has been glaringly absent from current Western media coverage of these protests, however, is the coalescing of a progressive pole of mobilisation among a notable segment of movement builders, who for many years have put forward a radically democratic program for Iran’s future, and whose legitimacy in the eyes of their immediate communities must not be ignored or understated.

This segment consists of feminist collectives, student groups, labour unions and guilds, retirees, teachers, writers fighting censorship, protest coordination councils among national minorities like the Kurds and Baluch, and political prisoners.

At the same time, this progressive pole—what some describe as civil society—has made clear its opposition to the co-optation of Iran’s democratic struggle by foreign powers. This mainly includes the United States and Israel, and their would-be surrogate Reza Pahlavi—the exiled son of the former deposed shah and dictator of Iran—who is claiming leadership of the movement and urging said powers to intervene on his behalf.

US President Donald Trump has both threatened to intervene militarily, while also claiming that Iran’s government is ready to negotiate with him. It is clear that the US public has little appetite for what would certainly be a protracted war. At this time, when it is becoming clear that Trump shifts his rhetoric based on US political and business interests rather than those of the people in Iran, it is especially important to instead tend to the work and perspectives of civil resistance leaders.

Why there’s fury

While the first protests began among merchants angered by a sharp fall in the value of currency due to the impact of US sanctions, they quickly evolved into a broader anti-government uprising expressing rage at the state and Iran’s domestic economic elite over decades of accumulated economic injustices and brutal repression along gender, sexual, ethnic, and class lines.

Indeed, the elite class has grown richer in spite of sanctions due to massive privatisation of industries over decades and concentration of wealth into the hands of state and military-linked contractors whose holdings are not taxed or transparent.

Meanwhile, workers across sectors, from education to gas and oil, are hired under widespread neoliberal hyper-exploitative temporary contracts as labour leaders are jailed for protesting.

While Trump’s imposition of maximum sanctions led to a sharp fall in the currency’s value and ballooning inflation, the foundations for gross domestic inequality had already been laid by the Islamic Republic over decades.

Additionally, the current uprising echoed demands made during the Woman, Life Freedom uprising that saw society’s widespread rejection of state-sponsored gender injustice, whether in family law and civil rights, policing of dress and women’s bodies, or labour.

The Islamic Republic, like the Pahlavi monarchy before it, has also pursued centralist development policies which have enriched the country’s Persian centre while institutionalizing the organised abandonment of peripheral regions populated by national minorities including Kurdish, Baluch, Arab, and Lor communities. This, coupled with repression of linguistic and civil rights, has brought many from these communities to the streets.

All of these factors, together with sustained deadly state repression, form the roots of people’s fury at the Islamic Republic, and their calls for its abolition. This fury is certainly not an invention orchestrated by foreign powers, as some suggest.

Solutions

At the same time, support for Pahlavi among a section of protesters and the diaspora demand attention. While this segment has called for his return, either as shah or leader of a transitional council, the reality is that this support is uneven and limited. In reality, it often comes out of a sense of desperation and the desire for a tangible solution.

As Iranian studies scholar Elham Hoominfar argues: “support for Pahlavi signals despair, not consensus.” Others have similarly analysed this limited support within protests across specific regions, as well as the lack of a network loyal to Pahlavi in the state apparatus that could defect and seize power.

Beyond this, the US does not have a good track record of bringing democracy to Iran, as evidenced by the 1953 US-led coup of the democratic prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh and the return of a deeply repressive monarchy.

Moreover, a sober view demands that we recognise the contradiction that a democratic transitional program can be delivered to Iran by a foreign power that has facilitated a genocide in Gaza the last two years, and the occupation of Palestinians for much longer. Nor can it be delivered by the United States, a nominally democratic superpower whose own people have been fighting its slide into authoritarianism.

History makes it hard to imagine that such powers would intervene in Iran for anything other than their own economic and geopolitical interests. It is equally hard to imagine that they would support the building of a democratic political system which is anathema to their own patently anti-democratic systems.

The struggle for a democratic transitional program

The progressive sections of the country’s organised civil resistance have fought at great cost to abolish the state and delineate a democratic program, while also opposing the movement’s co-optation by foreign powers as well as a return to past authoritarian systems.

During the first days of the uprising, many of these organisations issued several calls to action while participating in protests. This included a statement endorsed by the Retirees’ Union, Kermanshah Electricity and Metal Association, the Do Not Execute Campaign, the Council for Organizing the Protests of Contract Oil Workers, the Coordinating Council of Nurses’ Protests, Call of the Women of Iran, and other groups.

Other labour unions issuing similar statements included the nationwide Coordination Council for Teachers’ Unions and the Bus Workers’ Syndicate. The Iranian Writers’ Association, which has a long history of fighting censorship both under the shah and the Islamic Republic, added to these calls, as did a coalition of student activists across five major Iranian universities.

Among the minoritized peoples that have long faced the oppression of Persian nationalism and socio-economic disenfranchisement, notable statements included those from the Coordinating Organization of Baluchistan Protests and a Collective of Civil and Political Activists and Currents from Kermanshan, Ilam, and Lorestan as well as the Kurdish Civil Society.

In Iranian Kurdistan in particular, where popular movements have long fought for civil and linguistic rights, autonomy, and democracy, statements that stand out include those from six Kurdish Women’s Organisations, the Kurdistan Teacher’s Trade Association, and Varisheh Moradi, a Kurdish feminist political prisoner whose death sentence was recently overturned and her case slated for retrial.

These and other organisations have coalesced over years to propose a democratic transitional program for the interlocking crises facing millions of Iranians.

The first expression of their cohesion occurred during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising when twenty civil society organisations issued an unprecedented twelve-point charter offering a blueprint for Iran’s democratic transition. It declared the coalition’s aims to “bring an end to the formation of any kind of power from above and to start a social, progressive, and human revolution for the liberation of people from any form of tyranny, discrimination, colonisation, oppression, and dictatorship.”

The program included freeing all political prisoners; unconditional freedom of belief and expression; abolition of the death penalty; abolition of patriarchal legal codes; decriminalisation and official recognition of LGBTQ people; recognition of religion as a personal and non-governmental matter; socio-economic redistribution to the country’s ethnically diverse periphery; recognition of the right to learn and teach repressed languages; power sharing between the central government and local and regional councils; confiscation of wealth accumulated through rent-seeking and privatization and redistribution into education, pensions, infrastructure, and the environment; and popular reclamation of environmental resources privatized and desecrated for industry including water, agricultural fields, and forests.

The cohering of grassroots networks like this takes years. While some express uncertainty that this pole of civil society can transform into a viable alternative that is able to seize power, the fact that they have already coalesced to their current level despite tremendous repression, shows that further cohesion and the development of a revolutionary strategy are possible.

The continued building of social bases around this mobilisational pole, and popular internationalist solidarity with such homegrown grassroots-built programs for democracy in Iran, arguably offers stronger prospects for democracy in the long-term than the mythic quick fix presented by the intervention of self-interested foreign powers or reform within the system.

Alborz Ghandehari is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic, Gender, and Disability Studies at the University of Utah. He is the author of the new book Post/Revolutionary Conditions: Renewed Visions of the Iranian Freedom Struggle which explores oral histories with intersectional feminist organizers across Iran’s gender justice, labor, and student movements. Also a creative writer and performer, Ghandehari is developing a folk opera based on a hundred years of Iranian freedom songs, to premiere in Los Angeles in June 2026.

Follow Alborz on Instagram: @alborz101

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.