Author: Maryam Gholizadeh is a university instructor and academic researcher based in Ankara, Türkiye. She holds a PhD in Area Studies from Middle East Technical University, with a dissertation focusing on emotional transitions in social movements, specifically the case of Iran’s 1979 Revolution.
Abstract
The wave of protests that started in December 2025, first reported from Tehran's Grand Bazaar, quickly spread to other provinces and turned into a nationwide battle between long-standing social problems and state violence. A salient characteristic of this uprising is a severe information blackout reminiscent of the pre-internet informational environment during the Iranian Revolution of 1979. This article presents a mechanism-based comparative analysis of these two moments by incorporating a rural microhistory of winter 1979, reconstructed from the viewpoint of an observer in a remote village. In this context, revolution was perceived through shortwave static, disjointed broadcasts, and oral hearsay. The study examines recurring mechanisms—rumor as authority, fear as governance, moral sorting, opportunism as survival logic, and necrocracy as rule through the dead—illustrating the co-evolution of state power and popular resistance amid uncertain sovereignty. It contends that blackout conditions serve as both tactical impediments to coordination and fertile grounds that amplify myth-making and satire, thereby influencing collective memory and enduring frameworks of resistance.
Keywords: protests in Iran; information blackout; mechanism-based analysis; rumor; necropolitics; necrocracy.
Introduction
Analysts frequently analyze Iranian protest cycles using consistent explanatory frameworks, such as economic crisis, youth mobilization, foreign intervention, elite fragmentation, and repression (Azizi and van Veen 2023). Although analytically beneficial, such categories may transform into ineffective tools if they remain merely descriptive rather than causal. A more stringent methodology involves the identification of recurring, transferable processes that transform micro-level interactions—such as fear, rumor, moral sorting, and quotidian opportunism—into macro-level political outcomes, including diffusion, polarization, and repression equilibria (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). This method, which is often called mechanism-based analysis, is very useful for comparing how protests work in different cases (Tilly 2001). Protest repertoires evolve in response to technological advancements and geopolitical circumstances; however, governing logics—coercion, moral policing, and narrative control—have exhibited remarkable continuity over decades in Iran.
This article looks at the protest wave that started in December 2025, first reported from Tehran's Grand Bazaar, and quickly spread across the country. A defining characteristic of the episode is not only coercive repression but also systematic information denial, exemplified by a near-total internet shutdown instituted in early January 2026 (Hafezi, 2026). This planned "digital silence" is more than just a technical problem. It changes the way people get information so that they can understand events, judge risk, and work together, creating a political climate of uncertainty and lack of interpretation. These circumstances prompt a comparison with the latter months of the 1979 Revolution, especially when that prior upheaval is examined from rural peripheries rather than metropolitan centers.
To cultivate this parallel, the study amalgamates a microhistory of winter 1979, reconstructed from the perspective of an observer in a remote village, where revolution was perceived not through televised crowds or official announcements, but via shortwave static, sporadic foreign broadcasts, and the erratic dissemination of oral rumor. These memoir materials have been previously utilized as a narrative dataset in a doctoral dissertation examining the emotional dynamics of the Iranian Revolution (Gholizadeh 2022), thereby enhancing both continuity and interpretive reliability in their current application. The microhistory is not employed as an external archive for factual reconstruction; instead, it is regarded as an analytical framework for examining the mechanisms through which uncertainty becomes politically actionable: the epistemology of silence, in which rumor assumes the role of authority in an information vacuum (Huang 2017); fear as governance, where visceral anxiety is transformed into compliance and social control (Young 2020); necrocracy, in which death is converted into a currency of legitimacy (Varzi 2006); and vernacular resistance, where satire serves as a persistent medium for articulating and sustaining opposition (Scott 1990).
This article does not seek to forecast regime collapse or enforce teleological narratives of revolution; rather, it aims to elucidate how the uprisings of 1979 and 2025–26 can be interpreted concurrently through common mechanisms such as rumor, visceral fear, brutality, moral policing, opportunism, and necrocracy. The main point is that blackout conditions are not just tactical problems for coordination. They also serve as effective political arenas that amplify myth-making and satire, mold collective memory, and ultimately affect the repertoire through which resistance is rendered narratable and enduring.
Data, sources, and methodology
This article employs a mechanism-based comparative design to examine similarities between the December 2025–January 2026 protest cycle and the late-stage dynamics of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Using verifiable, time-stamped reports (mostly from Reuters and AP), we put together the modern case to show the order of events: when the protests started, spread, were put down, and when communication was cut off. The historical case is operationalized through a rural microhistory of winter 1979, previously utilized as a narrative dataset in dissertation research on the emotional dynamics of the revolution (Gholizadeh 2022) and presented in the Appendix.
Methodologically, the analysis involves coding the microhistory for recurring causal processes—rumor as authority amid informational scarcity, fear as governance through anticipatory compliance, moral sorting and opportunism under unstable sovereignty, necrocratic legitimacy production, and vernacular resistance through satire—and subsequently employing these mechanisms as analytical comparators for interpreting the 2025–26 sequence. This method maintains historical specificity while facilitating causal inference regarding the interplay between informational disruption and coercive governance in influencing protest dynamics, collective perception, and the cultural resilience of resistance.
A brief overview of the microhistory
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 is usually told through the amazing protests in Tehran and other cities. However, a similar revolutionary experience happened in rural areas, where political change came through sensory confusion instead of direct observation. In this context, the disintegration of Pahlavi authority was perceived as a “labyrinth of the senses,” influenced by seasonal seclusion, the infrastructural vulnerability of communication, and the political potency of rumor in situations of informational scarcity. The village observer did not experience revolution via crowds, speeches, or institutional announcements, but rather through the disruptive mediation of shortwave radio, the sporadic authority of foreign broadcasts, and the unpredictable dissemination of oral narratives. The microhistory elucidates the interpretation of coercion and grievance in the context of distorted dominant informational channels and the physical landscape's utilization for ideological projection and symbolic retribution.
In this peripheral setting, the winter of 1979 produced what can be characterized as an epistemology of silence and stasis. As the state's presence diminished, the BBC World Service and Radio Moscow emerged as the principal mediums for perceiving reality, resulting in a skewed authority where political truth relied on reception quality, interpretative conjecture, and repetition rather than substantiation. Disconnection from the Persian-speaking center also caused a linguistic disaster: revolutionary words were translated into Turkish-speaking village life in a way that made them meaningless and weakened perceived hierarchies. For example, the word sarbāz (soldier) was mistranslated in a way that took away the military's supposed intelligence and sacred status. In the resulting informational void, tactical realities were supplanted by mythological narratives, including tales of "seven-souled" Palestinian guerrillas performing supernatural acts—stories that restructured perception, disseminated fear, and justified the disintegration of state authority without necessitating coherent military evaluation.
The microhistory indicates that revolutionary alignment in the village was infrequently motivated by abstract democratic ideals; instead, it was mediated by political economy and the local recollection of state interference. The Tobacco Prohibition Law and other policies that the narrative frames as a violent suppression of local cultivation in favor of monopoly structures made people angry with the Shah. As a result, the Shah's escape was seen more as a practical way to free people from their basic needs than as a sign of freedom. In this context, satire became a way to fight back and turn society upside down. Marginalized urban youth, referred to as the Daruğeh-Šāgerds, imported crude rhymed slogans that ridiculed royal dignity and redefined revolution as a cultural rupture. This shift replaced traditional village hierarchies based on ancestral propriety with what the narrative describes as a “vulgar magnetism” rooted in confrontation, public shaming, and transgressive laughter.
As revolutionary power grew stronger, the microhistory shows a move toward necrocracy, a political system based on death in which respect and symbolic ownership of the dead give legitimacy to the system. Cultural icons were quickly replaced by "dead celebrities," whose only qualification was how and when they died. This was a sign of a larger trend toward martyr-centered legitimacy. This political change also showed up in the real world as environmental revenge. In the village of Aqi, the Arkhashan forest was cut down in what the story calls "ritual purification." The forest was seen as a symbol of state power and a barrier between the present and the "old time." Cutting down trees became a ritual act of revenge, with trees symbolically linked to SAVAK and the monarchy. This turned ecological destruction into a physical political statement.
Finally, the story shows how the regime changed not only through open violence but also through changes in the senses and morals. For example, the sudden silence of music on Radio Tehran was a "sensory death knell" that came before executions and moral policing. The microhistory provides a mechanism-rich comparative framework for the current unrest in Iran: when the state disrupts communication infrastructures, uncertainty amplifies rumor, opportunism, and symbolic violence, while cultural expressions like satire and myth emerge as enduring forms of resistance. In this context, the rural experience of 1979 foreshadows the political ramifications of subsequent digital blackouts, illustrating how informational scarcity transforms into a condition of repression and a generative space where legitimacy, fear, and collective memory are restructured.
Discussion
To analyze the upheaval from December 2025 to January 2026 in a comparative context, this section utilizes the mechanism-based framework established previously (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Tilly 2001; Tilly and Tarrow 2015). People often talk about Iranian protest cycles in terms of economic pressure, youth mobilization, elite splits, and repression. However, this analysis focuses on the ways that micro-level interactions affect macro-level outcomes (Tarrow 2011).
The comparative advantage of the 1979 microhistory resides in its portrayal of lived experiences amid informational scarcity. It shows how people change the way they think about their neighbors, calling them "brothers" or "traitors," how fear turns into compliance with the law, and how death can be useful for politics when sovereignty is unclear (Scott 1990; Young 2020; Varzi 2006; Mbembe 2003). The 2025–26 uprising can be analyzed through this framework, delineating a progression from provocation and dissemination to information suppression and cultural defiance. The information blackout is what makes it unique; it creates an epistemic environment that is similar to the rural periphery of 1979, where events are not "seen" but heard, repeated, and distorted (Huang 2017). In both instances, crisis is concurrently political and epistemic: uncertainty transforms into a governing state rather than a transient disturbance (Tilly and Tarrow 2015).
The uprising in December 2025 is said to have started in Tehran's Grand Bazaar, where prices were rising quickly and the currency was unstable (Hafezi 2026; Elwely 2025). Mechanistically, the bazaar is not just a place for business; it is also an organizational structure made up of dense trust networks, informal credit, and distributive chains (Keshavarzian 2007). When bazaar nodes strike, halt commerce, or reject price formation, economic activity undermines the state's assertion of normalcy (Keshavarzian 2007). These kinds of disruptions speed up collective action by linking subsistence grievances to coordination capacity (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Tarrow 2011). The critical transformation is not solely inflation, but the belief that the moral principles of survival have deteriorated: currency devaluation breaches the unspoken social contract of predictability and transforms protest from a political preference into a defensive response to economic turmoil (Bayat 2010). Once contention permeates this intricate infrastructure, diffusion can swiftly advance through workplaces and adjacent neighborhoods where adversity is most pronounced (Bayat 2010; Tarrow 2011). Informational cascades, such as "shops are closed," "they shot people," and "arrests are mass," often come before a clear ideology and can get people to join in even if there is no leader (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001).
As conflict grew, the government's response turned into mass coercion, which included deadly crowd control and mass arrests (OHCHR 2026). People who protested were often called "terrorists," and detention was used as a way to get people to stop participating by changing the costs of doing so (Davenport 2007). Repression aims at both active protesters and the broader "silent" populace assessing their chances of survival (Young 2020). The "execution regime" of microhistory shows how coercion can shape society: once killing can be openly justified, everyday life changes to fit the fear of what might happen (Young 2020; Davenport 2007). Citizens engage in preemptive compliance by minimizing speech, retreating from public visibility, and eliminating evidence of political opinion (Young 2020). Modern protest cycles create digital versions of older ways of hiding things, like deleting chat histories, wiping mobile devices, turning off location services, and making it harder to leave a trace. Fear becomes part of the infrastructure over time, ingrained in daily life and trust between people, and stays even after street fights are over (Young 2020; Davenport 2007).
The communications blackout in January 2026 was the most important change in the uprising's structure (Hafezi et al. 2026; Access Now 2026; Amnesty International 2026). External monitoring showed that internet traffic was almost nonexistent, which broke the social verification infrastructure (Belson 2026). Mechanistically, blackout attacks involve coordination (determining where to assemble, how to maneuver, and how to maintain action across distances) and witnessing (the documentation of violence and the creation of credible narratives that can limit state power) (Tilly and Tarrow 2015; Amnesty International 2026). In this regard, blackout operates as epistemic warfare. It creates a way of knowing through silence that makes it hard for people to accurately judge risk. As risk becomes unclear, the perceived threat often outweighs the measurable danger, which allows for repression by making things less visible and less accountable (Huang 2017; Davenport 2007). The similarity with 1979 is not in technology but in the way knowledge is structured: shortwave broadcasting with static and oral rumors both made things scarce by making repetition stand in for verification (Huang 2017). Informational scarcity, however, does not paralyze society; it restructures it around distorted signals and interpretative conflict (Tilly 2001; Tilly and Tarrow 2015). Blackout also serves as a political confession, revealing a regime's dependence on collective ignorance as a prerequisite for governance (Access Now 2026).
In blackout situations, people deal with uncertainty by spreading rumors and positioning themselves strategically. Rumor functions as a coordination technology by disseminating fear, attributing blame, and providing moral interpretation irrespective of factual accuracy; it is not merely an informational deficiency but a constitutive process that generates actionable maps of peril and opportunity (Huang 2017). Uncertainty simultaneously heightens moral categorization, condensing complexity into dichotomies—“brothers” versus “traitors,” “patriots” versus “terrorists”—that diminish ambiguity, decrease empathy costs, and facilitate the portrayal of violence as purification (Scott 1990). Opportunism manifests as survival rationality: the microhistory's performative revolutionary allegiance and late-stage piety are most effectively interpreted as risk management amidst unstable sovereignty (Scott 1990). In 2026, the similar pattern is seen as outward neutrality and muted speech—quiet streets hiding unresolved complaints—so silence should not be taken as agreement (Bayat 2010).
Another similarity between 1979 and 2026 is the rise of necrocracy, which is a type of government that is based on getting the dead involved in politics. After 1979, "dead celebrities" took the place of cultural icons, creating legitimacy based on martyrs (Varzi 2006). This aligns with necropolitical logics wherein sovereignty is manifested through the regulation of which deaths attain public significance, which are obliterated, and which can be transformed into authority (Mbembe 2003). The 2026 blackout exacerbates this conflict by facilitating undocumented deaths and intensifying competition for symbolic ownership of the deceased (Belson 2026; Amnesty International 2026). According to the microhistory, having a "martyr" can be used as a form of moral currency to shame groups that are not seen as loyal or revolutionary enough (Varzi 2006). Violence in situations where people can't see it creates a world where the dead are both scary and a way to prove legitimacy (Mbembe 2003).
But silence doesn't get rid of resistance; it just changes its cultural form. The state's "digital silence" is countered by vernacular noise, including satire and mythopoeia. Satire is a powerful way to fight back because it is hard to deny, makes people feel better, and undermines legitimacy, allowing people to keep their oppositional identity even when they have to follow the rules (Scott 1990). During a blackout, resistance culture becomes more mythic because it's harder to prove things and stories that make people feel things take over (Huang 2017). Blackout functions as both a method of tactical suppression and a cultural greenhouse where defiance is reborn (Scott 1990). The state can silence coordinated protests, but it can't easily fix the deeper social problem where survival has become political and dignity is worth less than a collapsing currency (Bayat 2010).
Conclusion
A mechanism-based analysis of the December 2025–January 2026 upheaval indicates that the most significant aspect of this protest cycle is not solely repression, but the intentional reconstruction of uncertainty through the denial of information. The internet shutdown created an epistemic environment that was structurally similar to the rural periphery of 1979, where political reality was not confirmed but put together through static, rumors, and repetition. In these circumstances, fear becomes a part of the infrastructure, changing the way people live their lives by making them comply with rules and disappear. At the same time, moral sorting simplifies complex situations into two groups so that violence can be described as purification. But a lack of information doesn't stop society; it just changes the focus of conflict to symbolic levels, making satire, myth-making, and the necrocratic struggle over who owns the dead even more intense. The similarity between 1979 and 2025–26 is not so much that history repeats itself, but that a governing repertoire—coercion, moral policing, and narrative control—keeps coming back. This happens when verification fails and sovereignty depends on collective blindness.
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to Dr. Samad Talebpour, a Canadian-Iranian scholar, for granting permission to use a chapter from his hitherto unpublished diaries on the revolutionary period of 1977–1981. You may follow this link to read the chapter.
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