Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March/April 2026, pp. 78-79
Waging Peace
THE QUINCY INSTITUTE for Responsible Statecraft hosted an online panel on Jan. 12 to analyze the recent wave of anti-government protests across Iran. Beginning in late December 2025, due to the collapse of the Iranian rial and skyrocketing prices, protests broke out in the bazaars of Tehran and exploded across the country. The government responded with an internet blackout and brutal force, with reports indicating that thousands of civilians have been killed.
This mass uprising, noted Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, is the largest in the Islamic Republic since 2009, igniting speculation that the regime may be approaching a breaking point or even face an internal coup.
The idea of a defection from within the regime, or a coup by the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has long been the source of much speculation, largely because “everybody in the political class in Iran knows that the regime is at a dead end,” argued Vali Nasr, professor of international relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. “It cannot get out of its economic situation. It’s mismanaging the country…which has water shortages, electricity shortages…[and] an unhappy population.”
Being almost completely isolated diplomatically, Iran lacks options under its current circumstances to address these issues, “so this idea that the country needed a new direction has been out there,” he added. That being said, Nasr noted that protests are difficult to sustain without clear leadership—especially when faced with a well-armed and well-trained state security apparatus.
Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior policy fellow and deputy head of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, observed that prior protests have altered the government’s approach, but have never led to its collapse. A prime example is the 2022 protests that broke out following the killing of Mahsa Amini, a young woman detained for violating the country’s hijab laws. The regime survived the upswell of anger but was forced to tacitly ease its enforcement of laws restricting how women can dress in public.
“I think it’s important to note that with every major political upheaval we have seen in the country in the past, it has forced the Islamic Republic of Iran to provide some gifts to the people,” she said, “[but] it hasn’t at all met the expectations of those leading the demonstrations and giving their lives for the protests.”
Geranmayeh went on to question whether the degree of anger we have seen from the protesters on the ground will lead to “some sort of a change, or a reconciliation offer from the state to the citizens.” However, “off-ramps right now…are limited for a system that is facing huge economic problems. That economic part of the social contract is going to be very difficult to repair, as sanctions remain, and corruption networks continue to lead the way on the economy.”
Geranmayeh also pointed out that inside Iran there is a shrinking but viable civil society coalition, which has worked through unions, student movements and various bodies to organize protests over the past two decades. Advocates for U.S. or Israeli intervention must ask how they would impact actual activists on the ground in Iran. “I think too often in the West we are forgetting that those people in the country exist, and that those people have not been necessarily calling for foreign intervention through military strikes, and they have not been calling for violence by the protesters,” she said.
Mohammad Ali Shabani, of Amwaj media, a London-based news site focusing on Iran, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula, noted there are also massive state-sponsored rallies across Iran supporting the government. “It’s an attempt by the Islamic Republic to show that it still has a base, however small, that it can mobilize in an organized manner,” he said.
Parsi pointed out there is a segment of the population that wants to get rid of the regime, but not at the cost of complete chaos. Yet, there seems to be a growing number, he said, who have reached the conclusion that in the absence of overthrowing the regime nothing will really change, because the trajectory has been so negative for decades. However, he doubts the recent protests, which appear to have been successfully suppressed via deadly force, will be able to force a leadership change in Iran. “I believe protests require organization to be able to succeed in achieving the declared aims of changing the political structure, and right now it doesn’t seem like that organization exists,” he lamented.
—Elaine Pasquini
