Why Do We Need a New Sociology of Revolution? The (Im)possibility of Zan-Zendegi-Azadi

Despite their uniqueness and unrepeatability, all revolutions in modern times have something in common: they surprise and overwhelm. They surprise because they expose everyone, even the actors who bring them about, to the unknown, the new. They are surprising because they suspend history, understood as causally explainable processes. Yet we cannot endure the moment of revolution, which we perceive as chaos. We feel that the irrationality of chaotic reality must be tamed by order of conceptual rationality, just as order supposedly replaces disorder in reality. Sociology of revolution, of any persuasion, often represents this viewpoint.

Hannah Arendt (1963), however, confronts us with a different interpretation of revolution in modernity, which eludes the chaos/order dichotomy. All revolutions, whether successful or failed, are, Arendt tells us, Janus-faced. They always contain two different, even contradictory, ideas and realities of order: the idea and the reality of the republican community of free and equal citizens and, in contrast, the tendency towards hierarchization and nationalization of the republican order; this second order of reality has always prevailed. From the perspective of the state's transcendent order, the republic of free and equal citizens appears as chaos and thus must be tamed, domesticated, and, if necessary, crushed.

ZZA transcends the dichotomies of liberal statehood and society: state/civil, public/private, system/life-world. Thus it cannot be represented scientifically or politically within these dichotomies.

The Zan-Zendegi-Azadi (Woman-Life-Freedom, ZZA)1 revolutionary movement is no exception.
Prevailing political and media interpretations directly question the extent to which the movement is capable of returning Iran to the path of secular “modernization” that was ruined by the Islamist “barbarism” in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.2 Regardless of the dramatic, neoliberal changes in the capitalist world-system over the last four decades, this modernist question sees in the Western “democracies” an “end of history” that presents the “oriental” successors with the final goal to be striven for, a final state that is characterized by a tense but productive and forward-looking balance between sociological dichotomies that are considered key to the ordering of liberal statehood and society: state/civil society, public/private spheres, system/life-world. In contrast to this modernist, state-oriented interpretation, ZZA is, in our opinion, characterized precisely by transcending these dichotomies. It cannot, therefore, be represented scientifically or politically within these dichotomies. ZZA traverses sociologically established boundaries between state and society, public and private, system and life-world, transforming all areas of life into the contested arena of its politics of equality.

In this respect, ZZA certainly shows similarities with other recent movements and uprisings in the Middle East (see, for example, Bayat 2021; Gervasio and Teti 2023; Göle 2002; Jongerden and Akkaya 2022). The ZZA movement is the consequence and expression of a changing global situation that can no longer be described by the conventional sociological-orientalist conceptual apparatus constantly reproduced in the social sciences, which legitimizes itself with an ever-new ideology of progress. After demonstrating how state-oriented forces have tried to subdue republican moments of the ZZA, we problematize the roots and tenacity of these theoretical frameworks and their consequences for understanding the Middle East. Then, returning to the ZZA, we discuss the possibility of a critical reading of these movements.

The Secularism of the Revolution

During its very short heyday in the fall of 2022, when it was brutally and bloodily suppressed, the movement was barely able to articulate itself discursively and institutionally, and it was therefore easy for the state-oriented opposition forces to try to subdue ZZA according to their own interests. Reformist Islamists, monarchists, and republicans were the most vociferous of these forces. The largely disempowered Islamist reformers pursued their trite policy of fear-mongering. The former president, M. Khatami, asked, “Isn't this catastrophe and similar events enough to stop… these recurrent behaviours against the law, logic, and Sharia?” and warned that “Islam and the regime are becoming discredited” (Khatami 2022). These politicians presented the movement as the peak in a series of uprisings aimed at overthrowing the regime that had been occurring at ever shorter intervals since the uprising in the fall of 2017. They thus explicitly urged the ruling fundamentalists to return to reformist policies in order to deter the ultimate danger.

In a 2022 article, H. Jalaipour, a well-known sociologist affiliated with the reformist movement, describes both the achievements of the reform era (political development,
”modesty”3, and “civil society”) and the government's dismissal and exclusion of them. After stating that both authoritarian governance and revolutionary violence are wrong, he writes: "The authorities, who seek to control from above, and the protesters, who are pushing for change from below, will eventually grow weary of their struggle. Therefore, a context may emerge for an unwritten agreement, a certain flexibility, or a 'win-win' situation between the government and the protesting segments of society. This should ideally happen during elections, but has been prevented for years due to the strict oversight of the Guardian Council" (Jalaipour 2022).

While the reformist Islamists hardly knew what to do with a movement that categorically rejects all forms of religious rule, the radical secularity of the movement enabled other opposition forces, mostly based abroad, to declare the ongoing revolution an ideologically secularist attempt to lead Iran back to the normative historical path of progress that, supposedly, had been broken off with the “ahistorical” or “anti-historical” accident of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Reza Pahlavi, allegedly Iran’s crown prince, said in 2023 that “[t]his generation knows the importance of a secular future, in which religion will be separated from politics” and that in “this generation, from the perspective of political maturity, significant progress has been made” because “discussing religion is no longer a taboo, as it once was” (Pahlavi 2023).

Once the revolution’s secularism had been established, there was a dispute within the secularist camp as to the future form of government: monarchy or republic? While the monarchists, recalling the “civilizational” achievements of the Pahlavi dynasty, assumed the leading role, the republicans saw the Pahlavi regime itself as an unfortunate accident, one that had put an end to the republicanism of the 1906 Constitutional and restored the old despotism, albeit with a modernist face. It was precisely this despotism that, according to the republicans, paved the way for the Islamist-clerical revolution of 1979. The author of a text entitled “An Open Letter from a Republican to Prince Reza Pahlavi” considered Pahlavi's use of the term “constitutionalism” to be a misrepresentation that aids the current regime, writing: “You have repeatedly defended constitutionalism over a republic. What constitutionalism? ... You know better than I that your grandfather, Reza Shah, was not committed to any fundamental principles of the Constitutional Revolution during his rule. Let the people achieve positive demands, such as ‘secularism, democracy, republic,’ through a natural process. By creating ambiguity about the goals of the revolution and defending your late father's weak and oppressive government, along with your cyber-army of violence, your presence will only benefit the authoritarian clerical regime" (Yazdani 2022).

The quasi-coalition of monarchists and republicans set the standard for telling enemies from friends and determining the limits of this supposedly "nationalist revolution".

Despite this dispute, the two branches of the secularist opposition converged in characterizing the movement as a "nationalist revolution". This shared view was perhaps best formulated by the now-deceased philosopher Seyed-Javad Tabatabai (2022): “The current ‘national revolution’ is [the recurrence/resurrection of] the historical ‘nation’ of Iran, which has suddenly emerged like a phoenix from the ashes of the Islamic Revolution … [Islamists] have no homeland, and because they have no homeland and do not understand what a homeland is, they destroy it”. If the movement gave life to these ghosts, the quasi-coalition of monarchists and republicans now set the standard for telling enemies from friends and determining the limits of this supposedly nationalist revolution. This quasi-coalition promised to overcome all gender, ethnic, and religious discriminations, but believed it was first necessary to put aside all differences, unite as an Iranian nation, and help the new self-declared leaders of the revolution to restore the secularist nation-state.

Sociological Dichotomies

Despite their many political differences and rivalries, both the secularists and reformist Islamists (as well as the fundamentalists, with whom we are not currently concerned) operate in the same globally dominant and sociologically legitimized discursive space, described by Edward Said (2003) as “Orientalist”. In the “imaginary geography” of Orientalism, the superiority of the contemporary West over “the rest” appears as the consequence of a historical process of successive differentiations of social spheres of life that has resulted in a social state characterized by the discursive and institutional reinforcement of progress, no matter to what degree. Sociology
describes a society’s level of “progress” using conceptual dichotomies such as individual/society, private/public, civil society/state, etc. With a few exceptions, “the rest” continue to grapple with their different historical traditions and generally produce deficient formations of these dichotomies through various modernization processes triggered by colonial and post-colonial encounters with the West. Unlike the West, they are unable to achieve “progress” as a stable dynamic of social development. The question of whether the “difference” between the West and the rest of the world is due to surmountable historical backwardness or to a fundamental otherness has always provided mainstream sociology with the leeway to move back and forth between ethnocentrism and universalism. It can thus oscillate between these poles simultaneously and with different emphases according to political power relations, thus making it possible to assert the universal normativity of its dichotomies while emphasizing the fundamental otherness of the Other, all at one and the same time.

The question of whether the “difference” between the West and the rest is due to surmountable historical backwardness or to a fundamental otherness has provided mainstream sociology with the leeway to move back and forth between ethnocentrism and universalism.

The dominant sociological interpretation of the emergence in the 1970s of political Islam in the Islamic world, and especially the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, is that it was an Islamist-traditionalist reaction to deficient modernization, and in particular deficient secularization and Westernization, of Muslim countries. The sociological debate on Islamism reflects the “dichotomy” that was later posited between the “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992) and the “clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1996). The revival of the traditional Orientalist thesis of Islam’s incompatibility with modernity has been countered by a wide-ranging field of research that meticulously searches for approaches to modernity in the past and present of Muslim-majority countries. As early as 1988, Leonard Binder developed the idea of "Islamic liberalism" with a view to transformations in the Islamist camp in Egypt and Turkey. The takeover of power by reformist Islamists in Iran in 1997 accelerated this line of research. Noting the failure of political Islam in turn paved the way for "religious democratic government" (Soroush 1993) and "Islamic secularism" (Adib-Moghaddam 2016) in a "post-secular" (Habermas 2001) and "post-Islamist" (Roy 2004) era. From the evolutionist perspective, social movements are appraised according to the extent to which they have been able to overcome the deficient structures of their societies, as understood on the basis of normative sociological dichotomies. This is particularly true after the 2009 Green Movement in Iran and the Arab Spring of 2011. Although social movements in the Middle East are quite comparable to anti-globalization movements in the West in terms of their objectives and their forms of organization and performance, the former are normatively assumed to be in a different historical phase: one in which productive reciprocity between state and civil society can only be established through the conquest of the state and the establishment of a parliamentary democracy (see, for example, Bayat 2017).

The
Fordist Social Model

Critical works on recent movements in the region show that
they can hardly be captured by such normative dichotomies as secular/religious, system/life-world, private/public (see, for example, Bayat 2021; Göle 2002). Why do we, or rather why does sociology, nevertheless adhere to these dichotomies as the basic conceptual framework for interpreting social movements? Beyond our current topic, sociological approaches (whether critical or not) are increasingly acknowledging that since the 1980s, reality itself has “gone wild”, becoming less and less compliant with the normativity of such conceptual pairs. It is not necessary to look to the Middle East to realize that states are generally closing themselves off from civil society, and that raison d’état and the common good hardly ever coincide anywhere.

The search for order and equilibrium in a world in which “all that is solid melts into air” was and is constitutive of sociology.

Sociology’s rigidity is not the topic of our discussion; however, what Georg Stauth (1993) called "
nostalgic memory" permeates sociology like an episteme: The search for order and equilibrium in a world that has become unstable and in which “all that is solid melts into air”, as Marx and Engels aptly put it in the Communist Manifesto, was, and is, constitutive of sociology. A balanced relationship between the two poles of sociology’s foundational dichotomies is understood as the condition of possibility of a society that is in constant transformation and incessant progress. These dichotomies are simultaneously analytical and normative pairs of concepts, whose degree of realization can be used to measure the degree of modernity of any national society.

As constitutive as this perspective is for sociology, we believe that it only manifested in the post-colonial and Fordist post-war era. Looking at the world since Fukuyama (1992) proclaimed his “end of history”, no historical period seems more deserving of that appellation than the post-war Fordist era. In the wake of the long nineteenth century, which was characterized by revolutions, social misery, class struggle, colonialism, racism, fascism, and seemingly never-ending wars, Kant’s “eternal peace” suddenly seemed within reach. For less than three decades, arrangements were made at the global, regional, national, and local levels to
either contain existing conflicts, or to resolve them peacefully. The exceptions seemed to confirm the rule. The policy of détente between rival blocs, the end of colonialism, and the emergence of post-colonial states had made the United Nations a relatively effective body for regulating conflicts worldwide.

Decolonization made it possible, for the first time in the history of modernity, to hold out the prospect of progress and catch-up development to the whole of humanity. While the Soviet bloc’s “non-capitalist” development path was attractive to liberation fighters in colonies, capitalist catch-up development proved to be a more realistic (and often
unavoidable) alternative for many new states in the face of the financial, institutional, military, technological, scientific, and symbolic superiority of the West under US hegemony. The Fordist social model of the post-war era was able to present itself as the better model. Its social welfare state promised to end class struggle, while its integration of labour into the reproduction process of capital, as well as its establishment of mass parliamentary democracy, seemed capable of putting capitalism, i.e. innovation and progress, at the service of a free and just society.

Only at this point did the normativity of sociological dichotomies become an institutionalized and irreversible factual reality inherent in the system. All macro-sociological theories of this era (such as structural functionalism, systems theory, and Habermas’s theory of communicative action) reflect the Fordist model of society, which becomes not a historically contingent product, but a logical consequence of Western rationality. Modernization theories of the post-war era suggested how post-colonial states should transition from their various traditions to Western modernity without ever departing from the framework of Orientalist discourse. Eisenstadt’s (2003) theory of “multiple modernities” could be interpreted as the recognition of different developmental paths. We, however, see it more as a cynical retraction of the prospect of development, which does away with the illusion of a Fordist world and opposes it to a deeply hierarchical world that is culturally explained and legitimized.

The Orientalist Framework

In peripheral states, it is precisely this Orientalist framework that has transformed the ideal of political development and the dream of national liberation into developmentalist and nationalist ideologies, and it continues to underlie political strategies. Orientalist developmentalism provides the framework by which sociological dichotomies are taken up by the peripheral political forces from which they in turn derive their legitimacy. This reciprocal game follows different paths in different countries.

The successive incorporation of the Middle East into the capitalist world-system during the nineteenth century led to a period of upheaval at the beginning of the twentieth century. During this turbulent period, in a fundamental break with previous constellations of political power, the modern nation-state became the dominant territorial power formation. The diverse, multiple, and sometimes fragmented power structures of large empires, such as the Qajar and Ottoman empires, gave way rapidly and abruptly to a political order in which the centralist and homogenizing regulations and modes of exploitation and power monopolization of the nation-state became dominant. Archaism and Islamism (and their twin ideologies of sectarianism and racism), the foundations of a centralist and modern re-traditionalization of traditional relations, were used to define homogeneous nations. The “modern” and the “traditional” were both given centralist and authoritarian meanings that, necessarily and compulsorily, went hand in hand with corresponding definitions of national territory and territorialization policies. This modern Orientalist environment made possible the defence, modification, pathologization, commendation, and condemnation of modernity, as well as archaism and Islamism. Today, post-Islamism does not mark a return to the normative framework of old sociological dichotomies; rather, it denotes the overcoming of that dichotomously articulated field altogether after “the failure of political Islam” (Roy 1992). Post-Islamism represents a weariness with all the debates over how to reconcile opposite poles and an indifference to artificial oppositions or compatibilities.

Necropolitics

In Iran, a peripheral nation, developmentalism lent particular meaning to oppositional conceptions of modern (or Western) and traditional (or Iranian), as well as to their relationship with each other and with the dominant political order. After a hundred-year period, this political order apparently no longer enjoys any legitimacy, even if it did for a long time provide credible explanations for all existing inequalities at both the international and national levels, and projected the formation of a “real” modern nation-state as the necessary condition for overcoming these inequalities. Traditionalism and modernism were two different strategies that only became possible as a result of and within the framework of developmentalism. Both supported centralist, development-oriented nationalism, which concealed increasing gender, regional, and religious inequalities. Utopian futures were imagined differently depending on one’s ideological persuasion. For some, a utopian future meant the exact imitation of the West; others saw it achieved through the restoration of lost greatness; still others saw it realizable through the implementation of Shiite values. Regardless of ideological differences, none questioned what was explicitly or implicitly considered the cornerstone of the nation-state: catch-up development/industrialization, military strength, centralist nationalism, Persian as the national language, patriarchalism, and the preservation of Shiism as national religion.

Today, development and prosperity are neither possible in the sense in which they were previously understood, nor are they even central problems anymore.

There was a unanimous consensus in politics, academia, and the media about the need for a strong centralized state as a basic prerequisite for overcoming backwardness in a weak Oriental nation. Now, Orientalist developmentalism is no longer capable of explanation because its real foundations have collapsed. Today, development and prosperity are neither possible in the sense in which they were previously understood, nor are they even central problems anymore. With the region overshadowed by (civil) wars, territorial chaos, and terrorism, not as a remnant of the past but as an omen of the future; in a time when the idea of development and the metanarrative of progress have lost their legitimacy and the ineffectiveness of Islamism has shown everyone that this trend no longer promises a bright future (as it did in the last two decades of the Cold War); and as the state is preoccupied with increasing neoliberal restructuring and withdrawing from development and social welfare, development no longer plays a central role in disciplining populations and territories. The ideas of progress and biopolitics, whereby a population and territory become the object of development-oriented governmentalization, now reveal their other face: necropolitics. A population is now redefined based on the sovereign’s right to kill,4 and state policy transcends national borders, reviving the idea of empire-building (rather than the ideal of progress) by gaining strategic influence. At the same time, we seem to be witnessing a new edition of the Great Game in the region. In this sense, governance is untethered from nation and territory and the state assumes a transcendental position in which welfare and development are replaced by regional authority and a new kind of legitimacy based on the ever-endangered securitization of order and life.

Politics of Equality

The social fissures associated with exclusion and peripheralization have so far been covered up by nationalism, development, and the ideal of the welfare state. In the new context, these fissures are being torn open, thus preparing the ground for movements whose central concern is the reappropriation of political spaces that have been abandoned by the transcended state, or that are at least no longer subject to the obsession with the dichotomy of traditional/modern and the idea of progress. Gender, ethnic, geographical, and religious inequalities have so far been trivialized as minor, acceptable evils on the path to development, nation-building, and the rule of law. This legitimization of inequality is no longer convincing. The movements demanding equality today no longer accept such prioritizations.5 This “politics of equality”, to use Rancière’s (2006) term, by no means indicates the negation of modernity, but rather represents a different understanding of modernity that is not based on historical-philosophical dichotomies.6 It is about a different understanding of modernity. In this sense, deprivation is not the result of historical coercion, but of self-inflicted immaturity. Overcoming this immaturity cannot be measured by the achievement of standards set by developmentalist ideology, but requires critical work. Some authors have thus interpreted these and similar movements in the region primarily as a struggle against humiliation, immaturity, indecision, and heteronomy (Sadeghi 2022a; Sadeghi 2022b; Khademlu 2022; Keshavarzi 2022).

The radical desire for equality, self-determination, and autonomy has produced an immanent critique of power that aims to reappropriate politics by expropriating the  state and the old foundations of its legitimization.

If one wants to recognize the longing of this movement or revolution, one should relate it to the theme of modernity and its relationship to maturity in the Kantian sense (Kant 1996). According to Foucault, critique (or enlightenment) in Kant means the “exit” from immaturity, not through a predetermined “way out”, but through the insistence “not to want to be governed like that, by that” (Foucault 1997, 28). David Owen distinguishes between two modern approaches to understanding the Kantian idea of maturity. In these new movements, we seem to encounter the overcoming of the Hegelian-Habermasian line of interpretation and the emergence of a Weberian-Foucauldian understanding of the concept of maturity, in which maturity can be understood neither as the result of a historical necessity nor as a normative goal and ideal (Owen 1997). Accordingly, maturity is a form of encounter with politics and modern society
. It regards the very idea of “necessity” and “telos” as forms of external conduct, removed from
the will of those acting (Foucault 2000, 32–34).

In these movements, the radical desire for equality, self-determination, and autonomy has produced an immanent critique of power that aims to reappropriate politics by expropriating the transcended state and the old foundations of its legitimization, or at least by preventing it from perpetually taking place “like that, by that”. Although the neoliberal dream has successfully replaced the dream of development in some small states in the region, a comparable social and political
integration based on the neoliberal idea of progress is hardly conceivable in larger countries. Nevertheless, this repetitive moment of revolutionary transition is constantly absorbed and domesticated by the old familiar regulatory and explanatory frameworks. Under the heavy weight of modernist or traditionalist ideologies, and of false dreams and anachronistic nostalgias, these movements lose their momentum or fall back into the factual hinterlands of established dichotomies in imagining a political alternative. Or, in combating prevailing forms of nationalism and teleological modernism, they lapse into other forms of essentialism and identity politics. Perhaps the practice of critical theory now takes shape not in prognostic and diagnostic reflection on the final formation of political and historical change, but in “a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty” (Foucault 1984, 50).

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1 Zan-Zendegi-Azadi is the Persian translation of the original Kurdish slogan Jin-Jiyan-Azadi, which was proclaimed nationwide and became the name of the movement.

2 Iran’s first constitution, written after the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, was in force until the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The Pahlavi dynasty, which ruled from 1925–1979, abolished all the republican codes and regulations of the first constitutional parliament, nevertheless retained the constitutional parliament’s modernizing semi-secular approach.

3 Hassan Rouhani, the President of Iran between 2013- 2021, came to power promising “moderation”. The slogan was meant to express a compromise solution between reformists and conservatives. Toward the end of his presidency, however, this slogan transformed into political modesty and conformism among some of his allies and supporters in exchange for political survival.

4 Although Foucault, in his analysis of modern governmentality, understands biopolitics and the right to life as an additional layer to the sovereign’s right to kill (Foucault 2003, 239–241), theorists such as Agamben (1998) and Mbembe (2019) criticize Foucault's analytical framework for not being able to adequately trace the ruler’s right to kill in modern politics. They further argue that Foucault fails to pay sufficient attention to “bare life” and “necropolitics”, especially when explaining those moments and spaces in which modern citizenship based on the right to life is endangered or even suspended.

5 For example, in Iran the women's movement has left its lawful past (which prevailed in recent decades, particularly under Khatami’s reform government) behind. Similarly, the peripheralized regions are no longer calling for regional development to catch up. Certainly, these demands have not lost their relevance. However, it seems that for the first time, the historical pillars of the nation state, such as civil and political legal structures, development, and nationalism, are being called into question.

6 Although we are not conducting an empirical analysis here, a reference to the reality of the ZZA movement in Iran may make this transformation easier to understand. The main issue of controversy, namely women’s clothing, is an old issue in modern Iranian politics. It was an object of state regulation once during the authoritarian policy of unveiling at the beginning of the Pahlavi era, and has been so again by way of forced veiling since the beginning of the Islamic Republic. The current movement, however, does not aim to make an authoritative decision about the hijab issue (whether traditionalist or modernist), to replace one form with the other, or to reconcile them. The main concern, which is radically new compared to previous demands, is the demand for "self-determined" clothing. Likewise, regional ethnic movements are demanding regional self-determination. Thus, the movements’ actors are concerned with a kind of reconstruction of political free will, and not with the rejection or acceptance of developmentalist dichotomies as criteria of modernity.