Past protests shared a crucial assumption: that reform within the Islamic Republic remained possible. That assumption has collapsed

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Iran has entered yet another wave of nationwide protests. To outside observers, the images may seem familiar: crowds in the streets, security forces deployed, warnings issued by the state. But these similarities risk obscuring what is genuinely new about this moment.

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Over the past four decades, repeated uprisings have shaken the Islamic Republic. Each was eventually suppressed. Each left behind deeper skepticism about the possibility of change.

What distinguishes the present moment is not scale or emotion, but context. Demographic change, ideological exhaustion, economic collapse and geopolitical realignment have converged in ways unseen since the regime’s founding.

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The 1979 Iranian revolution did more than replace one political order with another. It severed Iran from its historical continuity and imposed an ideological system that was alien to its civilizational memory.

Many were displaced, identities fractured and the country reorganized around a theocratic project sustained by coercion, fear and psychological control. For decades, Iranians have lived with the consequences of that rupture.

Past protests, most notably in 2009, shared a crucial assumption: that reform within the Islamic Republic remained possible. That assumption collapsed in 2022. The killing of Mahsa Amini by Iran’s morality police was........

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