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Iran After Khamenei. Interview with Asef Bayat – 3 March 2026

From Boston Review

Alex Shams: You have written extensively on sociopolitical transformations in the Middle East in recent decades, including the Arab Spring revolutions that led to the toppling of several long-standing Arab dictators. We have now witnessed the demise of another long-ruling leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. How do the recent mass protests against the Islamic Republic and now the U.S.-Israeli war—waged partly in the name of giving the Iranian people their “hour” of “freedom”—fit into the broader patterns of regional change you have studied?

Asef Bayat: For decades, the Middle East has been marked by entrenched authoritarian regimes that have subjugated the majority of their populations. If there is anything “exceptional” about the region, it may be the particular convergence of oil, Israel, and Islamism—a unique combination that has significantly contributed to authoritarian resilience. In Iran and most Arab countries, for instance, open and organized dissent—along with the free expression of demands by workers, women, students, and other social groups—is severely restricted due to repression. As a result, citizens often resort to what I have called “non-movements”: forms of everyday resistance through which ordinary people quietly and directly claim housing, employment, rights, and dignity, while remaining alert to opportunities for more organized collective action when political space opens up. These daily struggles, often invisible to officials and observers, can gradually accumulate and intensify to the point where open confrontation with the state becomes unavoidable. An important example is Iranian women’s persistent everyday resistance—particularly their struggle over compulsory hijab—which eventually culminated in the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising in September 2022.

Over the past decade, new developments in the political economy of these countries created fresh opportunities for mobilization, which ultimately found expression in the Arab Spring revolutions. First is staggering inequality and exclusion, resulting largely from neoliberal economic policies pursued by ruling regimes. Second is a large constituency of educated and aware citizens who nonetheless felt economically marginalized and socially devalued. The central force here has been what I call the “middle-class poor”: a contradictory social group with middle-class aspirations and expectations but living under precarious, often impoverished conditions. Third—and critically—the rise of digital technologies and social media enabled new forms of connective action, making mobilization faster, less costly, and more decentralized. Together these dynamics produced the wave of remarkable uprisings across ten Arab countries, and later in Iran.

However, these rapid and widespread mobilizations largely lacked coherent organization, identifiable and accountable leadership, and a clearly articulated vision of the kind of political order they wanted to establish. In other words, while the uprisings were spectacular in their scale and energy, they did not constitute a structured and organized alternative to the incumbents. They succeeded in toppling dictators, but they did not take power.

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Asef Bayat is an Iranian American sociologist and scholar of Middle Eastern society and social movements. Among his many books, a trilogy of studies—’Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Can Change the Middle East’ (2013), ‘Revolutions without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring’ (2017), and ‘Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring’ (2021)—examines how ordinary people have been agents of political change in Iran and across the region as well as how militarization reshapes grassroots struggles for liberation.

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