By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Meet Iran’s Gen Z: The Driving Force Behind The Protests

There is no sign that the protest movement led by women in Iran is slowing down, despite violent crackdowns by Iranian security forces. Just last week, thousands of Iranians marched to the city of Sanchez, the hometown of Mahsa “Zina” Amini, whose death in custody 40 days earlier had sparked an outpouring of public grief and outrage that has evolved into a mass movement. Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian, had been visiting family members in Tehran when the morality police arrested her for allegedly violating Iran’s hijab law. Witnesses claim that the police severely beat her; she died three days later in a hospital after slipping into a coma.

Her death has catalyzed one of Iran's largest and most sustained uprisings in a generation, mobilizing thousands of Iranians and supporters globally. Protesters have adopted the Kurdish slogan “Woman, life, freedom!” as their rallying cry. They have taken to the streets to demand political freedom in the face of internet blackouts, mass arrests, and live-fire attacks by security services. The remarkable size and resilience of these protests are directly tied to the central participation of women. When women are on the frontlines, mass movements have a higher chance of succeeding and are likelier to lead to more egalitarian democracy. This is one of the reasons today’s protests are so threatening to the Iranian regime. Entirely free, politically active women risk authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning leaders, so those leaders have a strategic reason to be sexist.

Over the past year in Iran, the government’s control over women’s lives has tightened, especially regarding the hijab law. Viral videos of the morality police violently enforcing the law have generated anger and defiance. Amini’s death was arguably the tipping point.

From the start, women have set the tone of these protests and have found innovative ways to register their anger with the government. Although men have also participated in large numbers, they have done so in the name of Amini and by embracing more feminist rhetoric than ever before. In this way, women’s organizing and outrage have laid the groundwork for a much wider pro-democratic uprising.

This is a moment of great hope but also great worry. Although the extensive frontline participation of women in protest movements often makes them more effective, it also raises the stakes dramatically. Should the Iranian regime defeat today’s protesters, a more patriarchal backlash could follow, potentially setting back Iranian women’s rights and political freedom by decades.

Women carry a child through the streets during a demonstration during the Iranian Revolution on May 1, 1979

The children born during the 1980s are referred to as daheye shast or the 60s (about the 1360s of the Iranian calendar), and children of the 2000s—Iran’s Gen Z—are known as daheye hashtad or the 80s (the 1380s of the Iranian calendar). Generation Alpha, born after Gen Z, is known as daheye navad or the 90s (the 1390s of the Iranian calendar).

Iran’s Gen Z didn’t experience the constant threat of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles or the food shortages that plagued much of the 1980s, which coincided with Iran’s darker years that saw mass executions and arrests of dissidents and political rivals. Zoomers were just born when Khatami became president and are too young to remember the sweeping changes in dress and public spaces under a short-lived reform movement quelled after a student uprising in 1999 prompted by the shutting of reformist newspaper Salam.

Additionally, Gen Z is too young to remember the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; the invasions of neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq; and the dinner conversations about whether their country, a member of the so-called axis of evil, would be the next target of the George W. Bush administration.

As Zoomers come of age, they have been exposed to brutal repression, systematic mismanagement, and corruption. They were barely in their double digits when the 2009 Green Movement unfolded and hardly adults when the November 2019 anti-government protests, prompted by a fuel strike, resulted in security forces arresting and killing thousands of people, including at least 23 children. They’ve since witnessed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) shoot down a Ukraine passenger airliner in 2020, killing all 176 people aboard—including many of the country’s brightest, who had “moved to Canada to do something bigger.”

This generation also survived a global pandemic and experienced how Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei initially denied them Western vaccines despite having the largest number of deaths and cases in the Middle East. Then they mostly sat on the sidelines as the clerical establishment engineered a hard-line-led government to take power, first in the 2020 parliamentary elections and then in the 2021 presidential elections.

This new generation of Iranian youth also grew up under almost two decades of punitive, broad-based economic sanctions and international isolation prompted by a nuclear program that Iranians increasingly question the merits of and have expressed opposition to publicly. For most young people, life is hard in Iran unless they have connections or wealth.

 

Policing Women’s Bodies

In the months before Amini was killed, pent-up anger was building in Iran. A woman named Sepideh Rashno was arrested, beaten, and forced to “confess” on state-run TV after an altercation with a female hijab enforcer on a city bus that went viral in July. In another incident, a viral video showed a mother trying to stop a police van, crying: “Please release my daughter! She is sick!” The van proceeded, ignoring her pleas. In addition to the hijab-related attacks, the government recently implemented a natalist population policy that imposes social control over women and families and is poised to marginalize women from the public sphere further. The policy, denounced by the UN high commissioner on human rights, criminalizes abortion and restricts family planning and reproductive health care, such as fetal monitoring, access to contraceptives, and voluntary vasectomies.

Mona Tajali, a scholar of women’s political representation, has noted that during the past two decades, Iranian women working inside and outside the government have made some progress in opening up political space and increasing inclusion. For example, Tajali notes that there have been numerous nonviolent protests against mandatory hijab since its introduction in 1979. And in 2018, female members of Iran’s parliament arranged for the first official government survey on the state’s religious decrees on women’s dress, revealing that a majority of Iranians disapproved of such measures. But in 2020, a conservative crackdown began to reverse these hard-won gains, with fundamentalist leaders banning outspoken women from running for office, persecuting them with frivolous lawsuits, throwing their support behind hard-line candidates of both genders, and brutally enforcing Islamic dress code. Now, Iranian women – and men – are fighting back.

Women have long been agents of change in Iran. Women’s high turnout in the 1997 presidential election brought President Mohammad Khatami to the office and helped usher in an era of reform. Women played obvious roles in the 2009 Green Movement against state-sponsored election fraud, constituting a substantial proportion of frontline activists, if not a majority. Women developed several initiatives to keep the movement on the streets, such as Mothers in Mourning and Mothers for Peace, groups for women who had either lost their children during the protests or seen them arrested, prompting their loved ones to demand justice and their release.

But the centrality of women’s rights in today’s uprising makes it different from those earlier instances of women’s political mobilization in Iran and unique among recent mass movements in the broader Middle East. From the Arab Spring in 2010–11 through Sudan’s 2019 revolution, protests in the region have often erupted in the wake of the deaths of young men. This is the first time in the region’s recent history that a nationwide uprising has been ignited by the death of a young woman—and one from an ethnic minority group, no less. The wave of protests in Amini’s name signifies broad-based support for women’s political power and agency as central to political change in Iran while underscoring the gendered nature of repression by the regime. And her Kurdish identity has evoked multiethnic solidarity.

Two girls use an online chatroom to make an appointment with friends in a coffee shop in Tehran on Oct. 16, 2003, during the early days of internet usage in Iran.

 

Not Just Survive, But Thrive

This uprising is also different from other recent campaigns because it is being led, visibly and persistently, by women. From protesting in traffic circles to spearheading massive demonstrations, women are not just symbolizing freedom but also taking tremendous risks—sometimes, losing their lives—to demand it. This has made it more difficult for the regime to stop the uprising and has increased the movement’s chances of producing change. Movements in which women play a prominent role tend to attract much larger participants. On average, they are about seven times as large as movements that sideline women—and larger movements are more likely to succeed. Because of information blackouts, it is impossible to know how many people have been active in the movement. As the sociologist, Mohammad Ali Kadivar has noted. However, today’s movement has attracted far broader support than other recent protests in the streets and critical sectors of Iranian society. Beyond reformists, students, a nd intellectual in significant cities, the movement has engaged diverse bases of support from oil workers to prominent athletes and artists to merchants from Tehran’s bazaar.

Movements with large numbers of female participants also tend to be perceived as more legitimate in the eyes of observers, who often respond to the symbolic power of grandmothers and schoolgirls protesting bravely. In Iran, news of students being killed or detained—often during raids of all-girls schools suspected of defying the hijab law—has catalyzed the teachers union to go on strike and demand the resignation of the education minister. Women’s involvement in mass movements also allows activists to access social levers of change that women influence within their families and communities, where they can draw on different networks and norms than those dominated by men. For instance, in families and communities, women can often make moral claims and wield social power in ways that shape the behavior and attitudes of those around them. As a result, gender-inclusive protest movements are often better at chipping away at the loyalties of regime elites, empowering reformers, and sidelining hard-liners as a conflict intensifies.

There is footage of an elderly mother taking her son away from a group of policemen preparing to crack down on protesters. And female celebrities have objected to being portrayed on state-sponsored billboards with the slogan “Women of my Land.” The award-winning actor Fatemeh Motamed-Arya was among the first to protest publicly, releasing a video in which she appeared without a hijab and said, “I am not considered a woman in a land where young children, little girls, and freedom-loving youths are killed in its fields.”

Worldwide, movements led by women also tend to be more innovative— particularly in noncooperation tactics—than those that sideline women. In Iran, some protest tactics have been uniquely gendered. Women have taken off their hijabs, burning them or waving them while chanting slogans, as with the female students who were filmed shouting “Get out!” at a representative of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps at their school. Women are cutting their hair publicly, invoking an ancient Persian motif of mourning and outrage over injustice, and launching a new international protest symbol. An 80-year-old mother whose son was killed in prison unveiled and cut her hair to support the movement after a lifetime of publicly veiling. From the streets of Sanandaj, the capital of Iran’s Kurdistan Province, to neighboring Afghanistan and Turkey, to the EU and Belgian Parliaments, women worldwide are wielding scissors on the hair of all colors and textures to symbolize violence against women’s bodies and the rejection of conservative standards for beauty and morals.

Finally, campaigns with women participating prominently are more resilient in the face of repression, partly because inclusive protests are more likely to remain nonviolent. State violence against female protesters can backfire; attacking women and children is often seen as illegitimate and a sign of government weakness. This was poignantly seen in Iran’s 2009 protests, when Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old woman, was shot and killed, becoming a martyr for the movement. During the current unrest, reports suggest that the Iranian regime has arrested over 8,000 people, including hundreds of children, and killed upward of 200 protesters. When young and old women and children are treated this way, it poses a severe risk to the perceived legitimacy of the security forces’ use of force.

Thanks to the internet though, this generation of youth are “digital natives” and part of the globalized Gen Z in that they share many of the same interests and preferences. Like their Western counterparts, this generation has been born with information and communications technology at its fingertips, albeit with the hurdle of having to use circumvention tools, such as virtual private networks. Zoomers can illegally stream the latest season of The Mandalorian or download the latest podcast or Rap-e Farsi (“Persian rap”) song to listen on their bootleg Apple AirPods, spouting lyrics word for word while walking down the tree-lined streets or metro.

Zoomers have produced viral memes making fun of the clerical establishment, such as Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s lack of charisma, and deep fakes of hard-line former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as singer Billie Eilish performing “Bad Guy.” They’ve created viral videos pertaining to the 2020 U.S. presidential election that one would never guess were made inside Iran and formed an online army of critical voices about how an Iranian tourism initiative whitewashes the Islamic Republic.

In March 2021, audio-only app Clubhouse became popular in Iran (but has since waned). In a Persian language room, “Clerics: yes or no?” (Akhoond, na ya na?), I listened to several Iran-based teenagers, none older than age 17 or 18, turn their mics on one by one and rail against the Islamic Republic using language that would make their parents blush. When the moderator expressed concern for their safety for being so blunt, one basically responded, “So what?”

More importantly, through the internet, Gen Zers have learned not just about their country’s past but also to question things and do their own research. “They are significantly bolder compared to the previous generation. They don’t shy away from trying new things, exploring new worlds,” Isfahani said. “[Iranian youth] also have a deep sense of individualism and aversion towards anything that would intrude on their privacy or personal freedoms.”

Social media has given Zoomers the ability to see the misfortunes of their country in real time, be it through nationwide or localized protests, violent crackdowns viewed on Instagram accounts like @1500tasvir, or the disparity of wealth between themselves and regime elites through viral posts and accounts like @therichkidsoftehran.

This is confirmed by Iran-based dissident rapper Toomaj Salehi, who was arrested in 2021 for criticizing the government through his lyrics about repression, poverty, and injustice and again on Oct. 30 for reportedly supporting ongoing anti-government protests. He said this new generation is more aware of current affairs because of social media. “[The new generation is] braver because it has nothing to lose [and] more violent because it has suffered more,” Salehi said, referring to the pressure on society both economically and due to the brutal clampdown on protesters in recent years.

This is arguably in part why Khamenei, in a June speech, pushed parliament to ratify a controversial internet bill: the Regulatory System for Cyberspace Services Bill, better known as the so-called Protection Bill. In the same speech, he also called for a massive clampdown “similar to 1981”—a reference to a time when mass arrests and executions were common.

The bill criminalizes all forms of circumvention tools and would potentially force Iranians to use the National Information Network, a domestic or “halal” internet separate from the international internet used by much of the world. Internet freedom researchers and activists are reporting that the bill is already being implemented since Raisi took office in August 2021.

In July 2021, when the news initially broke about the bill being debated in parliament, Entekhab reported that internet searches for “immigration” went up. This is backed by a July study by Stasis Consulting that found that almost half of Iranians surveyed between 18 and 29 wanted to leave the country. (It’s worth noting that it’s tough to conduct precise polling in the country due to the authoritarian nature of the government; however, brain drain is a real problem.)

As they interact online and watch youth in other countries live freely, particularly in the West, Iranians recognize the injustices and hypocrisy in their society and their wasted potential. And they do not accept that these are the living standards they must put up with. As a result, much Iranian youths feel disconnected from the geriatric clerical establishment—as apparent by the ageism memes of 95-year-old politician Ahmad Jannati, who leads Iran’s powerful vetting body, the Guardian Council, and is often referenced as a “dinosaur” or “prehistoric.”

All of this makes these youth a threat to the Islamic Republic.

A skateboarder performs at a park in western Tehran on June 17, 2021.

In June, a video of Go Skateboarding Day in the southern city of Shiraz went viral in Iran—but not because of skateboarding tricks. Rather, it was because most of the teenagers were dressed like goths or in skatecore (skater clothes), and girls exposed their dyed hair without the mandatory hijab. The viral video shocked authorities so much that they arrested five of the organizers.

Within days, dozens of conservatives came out to pray in the space where the teenagers had gathered. They chose a prayer that is specifically evoked when a calamity occurs. These children were an earthquake to the conservative’s core belief system.

A week after Go Skateboarding Day, another video went viral. This time, a teenage boy put on a chador, the tent-like garment conservative women wear, and did ollies on his skateboard. It was his way of trolling the authorities—including the conservatives that prayed for his sins to be washed away.

Separately, in August, a video of a little girl hip-hop dancing to Rap-e Farsi surrounded by a gaggle of cheering teenage girls wearing tracksuits and no hijab went viral. If it weren’t for the flag in the background, no one would have believed that the video was shot in Iran.

That video emerged at the same time a massive government crackdown was underway against women who refused to wear the mandatory hijab. An August order signed by Raisi imposed numerous new restrictions on how women’s dress in public, and authorities are reportedly going as far as using China-like surveillance technology with facial recognition software on metros to monitor who is and isn’t wearing a hijab.

Then came Amini’s death. Amini was visiting the capital with her family from western Kurdistan province. On Sept. 13, morality police arrested her for “violating” mandatory hijab rules after she exited a metro station with her brother. Amini was taken to a police station for a “reeducation” class, but within two hours, she ended up in a hospital after allegedly being brutally beaten by the morality police. Three days later, Amini died.

Outcry against Amini’s murder was swift. Before long, a protest movement, prompted by a Persian language #Mahsa_Amini, spread from the internet into the streets. At the University of Tehran, students held signs with messages such as: “I’m not a hashtag. I’m a human being,” “I don’t want to die,” and “Jina dear, you won’t die. Your name will become a symbol”—a phrase that was etched on Amini’s grave.

Then videos went viral as women, often under age 25, began removing their headscarves, burning their headscarves, and cutting their hair. Young men also joined the cause by shaving their heads on TikTok. Before long, the protests reached all 31 provinces, led by Iran’s Gen Z and with women at the forefront.

Based on the chants being heard in the streets—“Death to Khamenei,” “I will fight. I will die. I will take back Iran,” “freedom, freedom, freedom,” and “Khamenei is a murderer. His guardianship is invalid”— it was clear the concerns went beyond mandatory hijab. Protesters were saying loudly and clearly that they no longer wanted an Islamic Republic.

Zoomers begged their elders to join them in the streets: “Hello, Iranian people. I’m [a Gen Zer]! I send this message from Tehran! People, I helplessly ask you to come to the streets and end this now. … Don’t lose this opportunity. … Let’s overthrow this criminal and murderous regime that brought despair to Iran for 43 years,” one viral audio recording went.

In a separate video, teenage girls chanted, “Our shawl, our shawl, your noose”—referring to the clerical establishment—as they burned their headscarves in a pile. In another, a teenage girl in her school uniform spray-painted #Mahsa_Amini on walls and posted signs with a protest date and time to the TikTok version of singer Tom Odell’s “Another Love,” which was used in other protest videos.

But the Gen Z anthem became “Baraye” (“For the sake of”) by Iran-based singer Shervin Hajipour, who composed its lyrics from actual tweets, which included, “for the fear of kissing a lover on the street” and “for freedom.” The needs and wants of the protesters were as simple as that but threatening enough for authorities to arrest Hajipour on Sept. 29. (He was released on bail on Oct. 4.) Since then, Iranian Zoomers have defiantly sung the song in public spaces, including school yards, and blasted its lyrics from their cars.

According to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran, security forces have arrested over 14,000 people and killed at least 287 people. The group told Foreign Policy on Oct. 31 that of the 121 people whose names and ages they have been able to confirm, the average age was 23 years old, with 39 people under age 18.

One of those individuals shot to death by security forces was 23-year-old Hadis Najafi, a TikTok star who regularly posted lip-syncing dance videos and uploaded them onto her Instagram account. Since her death, Najafi’s Instagram account has grown from several thousand followers to over 82,000 followers and is full of condolence messages. “May your soul be happy, brave girl,” Iranian users write on her posts.

Another protester, 16-year-old Sarina Esmailzadeh, was beaten to death by security forces using batons. She used YouTube to log her feelings about living under the Islamic Republic, including the prohibitions women face daily, and compared her life to those who are better off in the West, even posting a video of herself singing along to Irish musician Hozier’s “Take Me to Church” while in her family’s car—all which have gone viral since her killing (especially now that authorities are covering it up by claiming she died by suicide).

These girls are the very essence of this Gen Z-led protest movement. Zoomers know full well that in the streets await not just batons but bullets, and they’re willing to take that risk out of desperation because they want to live ordinary lives.

Many older Iranians recognize the role of Gen Z in the current protests and are giving them credit. “For the courage of the 80s decade,” read one tweet. Another said: “I am speechless because of all this courage. I swear to God, Iran has never seen a generation with such courage. From now on, whoever speaks against [Gen Z], I will slap them in the face.”

Left: A supporter of defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi shouts slogans during riots in Tehran on June 13, 2009.

Right: Protesters try to rescue a riot policeman after he was caught in the middle of the melee during a Green Movement protest in Tehran on June 13, 2009.

                           

The Danger Of Failure

Historically, movements that feature women in large numbers are more likely than those that are male-dominated to lead to democratic breakthroughs. Examples include democracy campaigns in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Poland, and the Philippines in the 1980s. Where campaigns succeed, increased democratization also typically leads to tremendous respect for civil liberties and gender equality in the years that follow.

As a result, such movements raise the stakes for authoritarian regimes. And when they are defeated, an intense patriarchal backlash often follows, setting women’s rights to levels lower than before the movement started.

consequences: women in Iran make up more than 50 percent of university graduates but just 14 percent of the labor market. If the current movement falters, Iranian women will likely face harsher enforcement of already-repressive patriarchal policies.

renewed restrictions on reproductive autonomy and violence against women in politics have generated a sense of common cause.

In the future, the movement will have to weather organizational obstacles and transcend the information blackout imposed by the Iranian government. International actors could help protesters by providing alternative means of accessing the Internet, enabling them to circumvent government shutdowns to communicate with one another and the rest of the world. But even without such assistance, the videos and photographs that have made it through Iran’s media blackout demonstrate how women can act as powerful agents of change even—perhaps, particularly—under patriarchal authoritarian politics.

An Iranian cleric uses an application on his phone to find the new moon of the holy month of Ramadan nea Qom, Iran, on April 13, 2021.

The clerical establishment seems to recognize this. This year, Sobh-e-Sadegh, an IRGC-affiliated weekly magazine, warned of the threat Zoomers pose to the nezam (meaning “system”). The article noted that by studying their online behavior, it is clear “governing this generation will not be as easy as previous generations. Because this generation, unlike the previous generations, has a mainly protesting nature towards the current situation”—referring to the status quo.

Every generation seeks to differentiate itself from the generations before it. However, there’s been a pronounced mood shift in the past few years. Whereas the most punitive multilateral sanctions regime imposed under the Obama administration prompted Iranians to direct much of their anger at the U.S. government, U.S. sanctions reimposed by the Trump administration after the 2018 U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal—despite Iran not violating the deal—and continued by the Biden administration have Iranians directing much of their anger at their own leadership.

As one Iranian who asked to remain anonymous given security concerns told Foreign Policy, “sanctions and the government are the same in terms of their economic impact,” referring to the government’s mismanagement and corruption. Efforts to revive the 2015 nuclear accord remain in limbo. But even with a revived nuclear deal, many Iranians are aware that sanctions relief would be merely a temporary Band-Aid and would not fundamentally improve the economy.

Although there was always a sense of despair on the ground—67 percent of Iranians reportedly suffer from depression—the last few years have destroyed what little hope Iranians have for any sort of internal change or reform. This is reflected in the chants of protesters—such as “Reformists, hard-liners, the game is now over!”—that have become normalized over the past several years.

An Iranian woman poses as her friend takes a photo with his phone at a shopping mall in downtown Tehran on May 29, 2021.

Some Iranians hoped that former U.S. President Donald Trump would win a second term and that his so-called maximum pressure policy would somehow lead the Islamic Republic to collapse—or at least change its behavior. This view was echoed by Faezeh Hashemi, the firebrand daughter of former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Hashemi surprised many people when, during an interview with Iranian outlet Ensaf News in early 2021, she said: “Maybe if Trump’s pressure would have continued, we would have been forced to have change in some policies. And the change would have definitely benefited the people.” (She was arrested on Sept. 27 for allegedly “inciting rioters” in Tehran.)

Her comments spoke to the sense of desperation many Iranians, especially youth, feel. That sense of gloom with no hope for reform is reflected in the angry lyrics of rapper Salehi’s music, such as his song “Normal.” In it, Salehi sarcastically rattles about how “life is normal” but then breaks down all the ways in which it is not—such as how some Iranians sleep in empty graves because they’re homeless while others own 10 high-rises. “People are only alive. They don’t live,” Salehi said. “Hate is a bad thing, but society is suffering from hatred, not only of the regime. People are becoming violent, impatient, tired, and depressed.”

With a rise in repression and further tightening of controls, the selection of a hard-line government, and a rotten economy that benefits only the well-connected elite, the clerical establishment is telling Iranian youth that their lives don’t matter.

That leaves Iran’s youth with two options: Leave the country, or rise up.

 

Conclusion

It is known that Hossein Salami, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, made one of the regime’s starkest threats yet.

Salami is “probably the one individual that protesters should fear almost as much as [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei himself,” said Alex Vatanka, director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute.

Still, the demand didn’t have the effect he likely expected. Rather than backing down, protests continued to sweep university campuses on Sunday despite a violent crackdown, in a sharp repudiation of the Revolutionary Guard’s authority.

Experts say Tehran’s decision to issue the warning—and protesters’ clear defiance in response—underscores the regime’s growing concerns about the unrest. 

The fact that Iranian authorities “have almost to come out and issue an ultimatum like this tells me that they don’t see an end to this, and they’re starting to worry about how long this could continue,” Vatanka said.

As Iran has ramped up its repression, so has global pressure against the regime. Canada unveiled a new slate of sanctions against senior Iranian officials on Monday, while the European Union is reportedly considering designating the Revolutionary Guard, a terrorist group.

 

 

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