Iran protests are not just about economics – they’re a full-blown ideological crisis

Iran’s latest wave of unrest is often explained in familiar terms: economic collapse, sanctions, inflation, or sudden political anger. But this framing misses what is actually unfolding.

What we are witnessing is not simply another protest cycle. It is the result of a decades-long erosion of belief in the ideological foundations of the Islamic Republic. It is about the slow disintegration of a worldview that once claimed to explain everything: how people should dress, think and live.

Totalitarian systems rarely fall through dramatic revolutions alone. More often, they unravel from within, as the distance grows between what the state demands and what people actually live by.

Today, if you walk through Tehran, you’ll see many women not wearing the hijab. Even when they walk past morality police – who, by law, should enforce its wearing – nothing happens.

I’m a researcher who looks at how the relationship between socio-cultural conditions and consumer behaviour in Iran leads to social conflicts. My work has suggested that, as in the situation described above, where overt acts of actual resistance are brutally suppressed, people rely on mundane and everyday small acts of defiance to navigate or moderate their institutional restrictions.

In healthy societies, laws, norms and everyday practices tend to evolve together. But in totalitarian systems this is not possible. As political philosopher Hannah Arendt argued in The Origins of Totalitarianism, ideology replaces facts. Once that ideology is challenged, it cannot be revised – because revising it would jeopardise the state’s legitimacy.

We see this clearly in Iran. When there is drought or economic hardship, people are told that God is testing them, rather than being given structural or political explanations.

In this way in Iran, the hijab takes on a particular significance. The regulations around how this head covering should be worn are not simply a dress code, but a political apparatus of control.

Despite growing public demands to relax the mandatory hijab rules, the state remains reluctant to do so because any such reform would threaten its own claim to be an Islamic state where people adhere to the rules.

This is where the contradiction becomes clear. On the one hand, people are becoming more educated, more connected, and more able to compare different ways of living. They can see how people in other countries dress, work and live. This exposure can challenge the ideology.

On the other hand, the state cannot revise its ideology without undermining its own legitimacy. It cannot admit that its foundational beliefs were wrong, because those beliefs are what justify its right to rule.

As a result, the legal pillar of the system becomes increasingly rigid. But this rigidity produces something very important – plasticity within institutions.

My research in how this has worked in Iran shows it has created a growing gap between different layers of social life: between what is legally required, what feels socially normal, and what people cognitively accept as reasonable. In other words, the system gets out of sync with itself.

Over time, this introduces a kind of malleability. People begin to sense this gap. They learn how to navigate it, bend it and quietly push against it. This is often where change begins, not with dramatic revolutions, but through everyday acts of adjustment and defiance.

At the same time, this legal rigidity leaves state authorities with no choice but to rely on coercion and force to safeguard their institutions.

Violence is not power

This brings us to another key insight, also from Hannah Arendt: the distinction between power and violence. Power, she argued, comes from collective legitimacy, from people believing in a system. Violence is what is used when the legitimacy is gone.

So, when a government increasingly relies on surveillance, intimidation and punishment, it’s is not a sign of strength. It is a sign of weakness.

This can be seen in what the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, recently said about Iran: “If a regime can only stay in power through violence, then it is effectively finished.” And over time, the use of force tends to backfire

Some state custodians begin to doubt. Some begin to disagree. Some begin to resist internally leading to fragmentation within the system. When coercive measures are coupled with wrongdoing, such as corruption by state custodians, it further widens this fragmentation.

This tends to create uncertainty inside the system itself. People no longer trust their custodians. And when trust disappears, institutions become fragile. And any shock – economic, political, environmental – can cause societal rupture.

This pattern is not unique to Iran. In China, for instance, secondhand luxury consumption has become a way to challenge hyper-capitalist hierarchies.

In totalitarian systems, everyday life becomes a political arena. And that is existentially dangerous for a totalitarian system. Eventually, a point will be reached where people no longer follow rules because they believe in them. They may still comply, but only under threat of punishment if they don’t.

Across the world, totalitarian regimes face a similar challenge: how to control educated, connected populations who can compare realities. Ideological control becomes harder when people can see alternatives. This is why such systems obsess over the internet. Education destabilises ideologies.

Iran shows that totalitarian ideologies do not crumble overnight. They erode through decades of quiet resistance. Through what might be called the politics of ordinary life.

This is what makes this moment historically significant. The crisis in Iran is not merely economic. Economic hardship exists everywhere. What makes Iran different is that the institutional trust has already collapsed.

What we are witnessing is not simply unrest. It is the slow death of an ideology. And once belief is gone, no amount of force can bring it back.

Mahsa Ghaffari is affiliated with University of Portsmouth