After the Massacre: Rethinking Strategy in Iran’s Uprising

In my previous posts, I wrote about the context, early geography, and the buildup of this protest wave. This essay shifts focus to a different but urgent question that has emerged after the massacre: the question of strategy — how power shifts in moments like this, what paths are being proposed, and what alternatives might exist.

The recent wave of anti-regime protests in Iran began in late December after a sharp depreciation of the currency triggered unrest in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar. Protests quickly spread to other cities and soon entered a second, far more intense phase: a nationwide uprising with unprecedented scale in both participation and geographic diffusion — surpassing levels seen in Iran’s protest cycles over the past two decades.

January 8 marked a decisive turning point. On that day, demonstrations were met with a deadly state response alongside a nationwide internet shutdown that severely limited verification. Even so, documentation from human rights groups, eyewitnesses, and video evidence indicates repression on a scale unseen in recent protest waves. Security forces used live ammunition and other lethal methods against largely unarmed protesters.

Human rights organizations are still documenting the full scope of the violence, but the lowest confirmed death toll reported by HRANA already exceeds five thousand protesters, with thousands of additional cases under review and more than two hundred reported security-force fatalities. Images emerging from Iran show morgues filled with body bags and families searching for loved ones among the dead.

Even this lowest estimate dwarfs confirmed death tolls from recent nationwide protests based on human rights reporting:

· 2017–18: 22 deaths

· November 2019: at least 300

· 2022: roughly 550

The current toll places this episode far above the scale of fatalities during the 1979 revolution itself, when fewer than three thousand protesters were killed over more than a year.

HRANA also reports unusually high casualties among security forces — more than two hundred — compared to recent protest episodes. Multiple reports, including Financial Times coverage, suggest that organized groups may have played a role in escalating some confrontations, including the use of firearms. A physician returning from Tehran described in an NPR interview how initially peaceful gatherings were overtaken by rapidly intensifying clashes.

Other accounts point to a broader social dynamic: in some locations, protesters engaged directly with security forces after being fired upon; in others, anger translated into attempts to seize police stations and symbolic state buildings. As Aqil Daghagheleh has argued, many participants appeared to believe the regime was on the verge of collapse and acted accordingly. Around the same time, Reza Pahlavi publicly called on supporters to join the protests on January 8–9 and urged them to move toward key government buildings.

The protests, in other words, entered a phase of frontal confrontation — and the state responded with unprecedented levels of violence.

It is crucial to stress, however, that these developments do not create symmetry between the two sides. The scale, capacity, and deadliness of state violence vastly exceed those of protesters. The Islamic Republic’s security apparatus holds overwhelming coercive power, and responsibility for the mass killing rests primarily and overwhelmingly with the state.

By every credible account, this crackdown now stands as the deadliest episode of state violence against street protesters in the history of the Islamic Republic — and likely one of the gravest single moments of political bloodshed in modern Iran. Beyond those killed, tens of thousands are reported injured or arrested, and deep anxiety surrounds the fate of detainees now held in prisons and detention centers, where families fear further abuse, torture, harsh sentences, or even executions.

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1979 vs. 2025-6: The Missing Variable Is Time

Many observers have compared the current uprising to the 1979 revolution, often by listing factors present in one moment and absent in the other. These comparisons tend to be static. What they miss is time and sequence—how movements evolve through stages.

Although we label the Iranian Revolution as “1979,” the monarchy collapsed only after over a year of escalating mobilization that began in 1978. In a now-classic analysis, Ahmad Ashraf and Ali Banuazizi identified five stages of the revolution: (1) nonviolent protests, (2) cyclical urban riots, (3) mass demonstrations, (4) mass strikes, and (5) dual sovereignty. Only in the final stage did the takeover of state institutions become a central revolutionary strategy.

By contrast, the 2025-6 uprising reached mass demonstrations in some major cities and attempts to seize state buildings within roughly two weeks. The sequence collapsed into simultaneity: mass protest and frontal confrontation unfolded at the same time.

This difference in tempo reflects both context and strategy. Digital communication accelerates diffusion, allowing protests to reach national scale rapidly. Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 demonstrated how regimes could fall within weeks. But speed comes with tradeoffs. In 1978–79, mobilization depended on building organizational capacity through mosques, bazaars, universities, and public-sector networks. Strikes—especially in oil—gradually undermined the regime’s governing capacity.

In 2025-6, the pace of escalation left little time for that kind of institutional and sectoral mobilization. Although civil society actors expressed sympathy, occupational groups that had previously organized sectoral protests did not have the opportunity to join in their own collective capacities. This pattern mirrors 2017–18 and 2019, where rapid escalation limited organizational convergence. By contrast, the 2022 uprising—although slower in peak turnout—allowed more sustained interaction between street protest and sectoral actors such as contract oil workers. It resembled a social movement more than a sudden insurrection.

The key contrast is not simply 1979 vs. 2025-6—it is gradual mobilization versus compressed insurrection.

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The Strategic Debate After the Massacre

As the Iranian society has been mourning the massacre, a serious strategic discussion has emerged among Iranian activists, analysts, and participants about how the uprising unfolded and why it led to such a catastrophic loss of life.

At the center of this debate is a hard question: did the insurrectionary turn outpace strategy?

Insurrection Without Strategy

Many critics argue that while the uprising demonstrated extraordinary courage and mass participation, it lacked a coherent strategy for confronting a regime whose security apparatus remained intact, unified, and willing to kill.

Calls circulated — including from prominent opposition figures — urging protesters to move toward and seize key government buildings. But such calls often did not reckon with the actual balance of power. Unlike late-stage revolutionary situations where state coercive capacity has already fractured, Iran’s repressive institutions — the Revolutionary Guards, Basij, special police units, and intelligence services — remained fully operational and ideologically mobilized.

In this context, frontal confrontation was not a sign that the regime was collapsing; it triggered a survival response from a state that still possessed overwhelming coercive capacity.

The Question of Nonviolent Discipline

A related criticism concerns the absence of efforts to maintain nonviolent discipline. Research on contentious politics has repeatedly shown that even when protester violence is reactive or defensive, it can shift the terrain of struggle in ways that benefit authoritarian regimes. Once protests become militarized, regimes gain both tactical advantages and narrative justification for intensified repression.

Reports from inside Iran indicate that while peaceful protest remained the dominant form of participation, some confrontations escalated into attacks on state buildings and clashes with security forces. Critics argue that opposition leadership and media did little to discourage such escalation or to frame discipline as a strategic asset rather than a moral preference.

The result was a tragic asymmetry: protester violence occurred on a vastly smaller scale than state violence, yet the regime invoked it as justification for its deadly crackdown.

The Security Forces: Strategy or Fantasy?

Perhaps the most pointed debate concerns the regime’s coercive apparatus. In every revolutionary situation, the stance of security forces is decisive. Yet critics argue that much of the insurrectionary discourse relied less on strategy than on hope and misinformation.

Reza Pahlavi publicly claimed that 50,000 members of Iran’s security forces had pledged loyalty to him. No credible evidence of such defections has appeared — not even during the height of the repression. At the same time, some opposition media adopted a rhetoric of threat, warning security personnel that they would face punishment after regime change unless they defected immediately.

Analysts warn that such messaging may have been strategically counterproductive. Security personnel who believe they face retribution regardless of their choices have little incentive to defect and greater incentive to remain loyal and fight. Rather than splitting the security apparatus, threats may have reinforced cohesion within it.

The Foreign Intervention Illusion

Another major theme in this debate is the role of foreign intervention in the imagination of the uprising. Protest videos and diaspora broadcasts revealed that many participants believed outside military action — particularly by the United States or Israel — could tip the balance.

This expectation was echoed, implicitly or explicitly, in parts of the opposition discourse. But critics argue that this reflects a deeper strategic contradiction: an insurrection that does not fully believe in the power of grassroots mobilization alone, and instead treats mass uprising as a way to create conditions for foreign intervention.

Voices such as Parastoo Forouhar have warned against this logic. Reliance on foreign military action shifts political agency away from society and toward geopolitics. It encourages people to enter deadly confrontation under the belief that external forces will intervene — without any guarantee of protection and without necessarily weakening the regime’s internal capacity for repression.

Escalation and Its Costs

Taken together, these elements — calls for frontal seizure of state institutions, lack of emphasis on nonviolent discipline, unrealistic expectations of mass defections, and reliance on the prospect of foreign intervention — contributed to a rapid escalation of confrontation.

The result was not regime collapse, but escalated violence and an extraordinarily high death toll that society must now grapple with.

This critique does not question the legitimacy of anger or the justice of resistance. It raises a different issue: whether the uprising’s strategic framework matched the realities of power in Iran — and whether different strategic choices might have reduced the human cost while strengthening society’s long-term capacity to shift the balance of forces.

Three Strategic Models: Insurrection, Revolution, and Movement-Centered Change

The strategic debate emerging from the crackdown and the comparisons with 1979 ultimately reflects three distinct ways of understanding how authoritarian power can be overcome. All three share a rejection of the Islamic Republic as an unjust and repressive system. But they differ fundamentally in how they understand power, time, and the role of society in political transformation.

1. The Insurrectionary Model: Collapse Through Confrontation

The first model — dominant in much “barandazi” discourse — views regime change as a decisive moment of rupture. It works through amplifying anger spreading information about regime’s wrong-doing and attempts to destroy the regime and its supporters. Since it has only focused on regime as the most evil, it has not presented a realistic understanding of the regime’s sources of power and corresponding strategies to confront it. The destructive approach towards the regime has reinforced the language of threat and intimdation towards anyone considered pro-regime which has included those who also struggle for freedm and democracy but with different approaches and strategies. Language of threat also discouraged organizing and coalition building, which requires dialogue and hearing others perspectives. In the barandazi model, however, everyone should repeat the same talking point about how the regime is evil and weak.

The insurrectionary model, in practice, does not fully believe that popular power alone can prevail over an intact security state — which is why it so often turns toward hopes of foreign intervention or dramatic elite defections. When those expectations fail to materialize, society bears the cost.

2. The 1979 Revolutionary Model: Destroying Power Through Building Counter-Power

The 1979 revolution also sought the destruction of the existing political order. But it rested on a different strategic understanding. Revolutionary actors did not assume the regime would simply collapse under pressure. They recognized that the monarchy possessed a powerful security apparatus and strong foreign backing.

Their response was not to leap immediately into frontal confrontation, but to build social power capable of eroding state power over time. Through strikes, organizational networks, and expanding coalitions across mosques, bazaars, universities, and workplaces, society gradually accumulated leverage. Only after this long process of mobilization did the regime’s coercive institutions fracture and lose the capacity to govern.

At the same time, the revolutionary discourse of 1979 shared with today’s insurrectionary rhetoric a dualistic moral logic of politics, in which the incumbent regime was cast as an absolute evil that had to be destroyed. While this framing helped mobilize broad opposition to the monarchy, it did not disappear after the Shah fell. Instead, different revolutionary factions increasingly applied the same logic to one another. Groups that had fought side by side against the monarchy began to depict rivals as existential threats to the revolution and to the nation. The Islamist forces that ultimately dominated the post-revolutionary state used this language of moral elimination to justify repression, exclusion, and violent crackdowns against other revolutionary actors. In this way, a discourse that had been effective for overthrowing a regime became a tool for consolidating a new authoritarian order. The lesson is not that building collective power was misguided, but that a politics organized around destroying evil, without institutionalized pluralism and protections for dissent, can turn inward and erode the very social strength a revolution depends on.

3. The Movement-Centered Democratic Model: Transformation Without the Myth of the Final Battle

A third model rejects the idea that political liberation arrives through one decisive collapse. A movement-centered approach understands politics as a long-term struggle over social capacity rather than a race toward a single revolutionary climax.

Social movements operate step by step. They build organizations, relationships, and collective skills over time. They mobilize around concrete demands while simultaneously expanding democratic practices within society itself. In this model, change is not postponed until “after the regime falls”; democratic life is cultivated in the present through forms of solidarity, participation, accountability, and collective self-organization.

Importantly, this approach is not hypothetical. It already exists inside Iran. Feminist networks, labor organizers, teachers’ associations, retirees’ groups, environmental activists, journalists, and other sectoral actors have for years engaged in sustained forms of collective action that build social capacity under extremely repressive conditions. These efforts rarely appear dramatic, and they often lack the financial resources and global media platforms available to diaspora-based insurrectionary politics. Yet they represent ongoing, grounded attempts to expand space for collective agency and rights from within society itself.

These actors have operated under constant surveillance, arrest, and repression, and their organizing is often fragmented and forced to remain cautious. But their work reflects a different strategic horizon: not a single climactic moment of regime collapse, but the gradual strengthening of society’s ability to organize, articulate demands, and act collectively.

This approach does not rule out revolutionary transformation. But it refuses to base strategy on the expectation of a sudden, total rupture. Because movements build collective capacity over time, they are better positioned to shape the terms of any transition — whether gradual reform, negotiated transformation, or revolutionary change. They seek not only the removal of an oppressive structure, but the creation of a society capable of governing itself democratically.

Deliberation Under Pressure

The debate over strategy is still unfolding. But alongside it, there have also been growing efforts to shut such discussions down. In moments of collective grief and rage, calls for reflection are sometimes dismissed as betrayal, and questioning dominant narratives is labeled disloyalty to the dead. As Salour Malayeri has argued, this dynamic risks turning suffering into a tool for silencing rather than a foundation for ethical and political responsibility.

At the same time, as violence has escalated inside the country, toxicity, threats, and intimidation have also intensified in online spaces and within the diaspora. Many activists, writers, and analysts — myself included — have faced waves of harassment for raising difficult questions. This atmosphere makes careful thinking harder precisely when it is most needed.

If the goal is a democratic future, however, democratic practice cannot be postponed. Public deliberation — including disagreement about strategy — is not a distraction from struggle but part of what gives it direction and legitimacy. It is through difficult, honest, and plural conversations that societies learn how to move forward without reproducing the very logics of exclusion and coercion they seek to overcome.