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Iran's Green Movement: A Foucauldian Account of Everyday Resistance, Political Contestation and Social Mobilization in the Post-Revolutionary Period
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- Author / Creator
- Navid Pourmokhtari Yakhdani
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In June 2009 there appeared on the streets of Tehran and other major Iranian cities something unprecedented in the thirty-year history of the Islamic Republic: immense crowds engaged in spontaneous forms of collective action directed against what was widely perceived to be election fraud. The so-called Green Movement had emerged upon the scene. This study uses a Foucauldian theoretical/analytical, that is, discursive, framework to examine the emergence and development of the 2009 Green Movement. Such an approach emphasizes the context, or the local and historical specificities, in which mass oppositional movements arise, develop and conduct their operations while at the same time foregrounding an account of multiple modernities that works to transcend modernist assumptions embedded in some mainstream social movement theories, in particular the notion of a Western modernity that is all-encompassing. I begin by making a case for the Green Movement as a movement of movements, the purpose being to reveal its disparate constituencies. I also critique mainstream social movement theories, focusing on their universalistic assumptions and West-centric orientation, and by implication totalizing and grand-causal narratives, that serve to obfuscate rather than elucidate social movements in the Middle East and North Africa. On the basis of this critique, and drawing upon Michel Foucault's governmentality-power-resistance nexus model, I describe and analyze the power modalities, disciplinary, biopolitical, and sovereign, employed by the Islamic Republic to governmentalize the masses. It is at the point of application of these power modalities that an immense field of possibility opens up for resistance to the status quo, both social and political. Three research questions are addressed: What set of conditions, historical, economic, social and political, gave rise to the 2009 Green Movement? What ends did the Green Movement seek to achieve, and to what extent were they realized? To what degree did it signify a paradigm shift in Iran's social and political landscape? In answering these queries, I bring to bear a triangular methodology consisting of six semi-structured interviews with authorities on Iran's post-revolutionary period as well as activists who participated in the pivotal events of that period; discourse analysis focusing on the Iranian constitution and the relevant government policy documents and publications and official speeches; and archival analysis of primary and secondary sources. This will provide the historical background, perspectives and insights required both to analyze and explicate the historical, social and political conditions responsible for the emergence of the Green Movement and grasp how collective action was enabled and organized. Two conclusions may be drawn from this study. First, the Green Movement may be more constructively viewed as what I call a movement of movements, by which I mean a mega social movement consisting of smaller oppositional movements, or in Foucauldian terms, a coalition of smaller movements of counterconduct. Second, this movement of movements marks a particular historical phase in the development of a home-grown democracy in post-revolutionary Iran, and for this reason signals a paradigmatic paradigm shift with profound social implications for transforming the country's political landscape.
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- Graduation date
- Spring 2018
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.