In this insightful article, first published on Eurasian GeoPolitics reader, on 12 January 2026, Murad Nasibov discusses the current crisis in Iran, and warns about a simplistic reading of a very complex country and situation. We reproduce the article in full.
The persistence of a large-scale protest wave in Iran - one that the Islamic regime has never faced before - has once again revived expectations of the regime's collapse. These expectations can be more hopes than a grounded reading of the situation. Certainly, we live in a time when almost every single person is a media carrier. On the one hand, this means nothing can be hidden from the world for too long. Yet, on the other hand, it means all can turn virtual rather than real. For any random observer, social media reels and limited news reports from studios create the impression that the Iranian regime is about to collapse at any moment. The limitations brought by the Iranian government to the internet in the country these days and the overall closure of the country to international media mean the lack of continuous, reliable and comprehensive information and quality analyses to soundly assess how justified this impression actually is. This is particularly true if you are not a Persian speaker. Yet in academia, what we do in such situations is to take a step back and think about what we already know and what this can tell us about the situation. At the end of the day, the situation cannot go too far away from what our existing knowledge implies if we are sure of our analysis. My overall knowledge of Iran, which is limited, suggests that the situation can be more complex than what social media or TV reports offer us. With the little fresh information we possess, but based on what we already know, the right question to address at the moment is how the Islamic Republic is structurally positioned to survive this wave of protests.
One starting point is scale. Iran's territory is vast and socially heterogeneous, and even intense protest waves do not automatically translate into a nationwide, coherent, and homogeneous movement of the sort that brought about the end of the Soviet Union. Neither does ethnic diversity immediately translate into independence movements in different provinces. This limits the capacity of protests to generate a decisive revolutionary moment. In recent decades, the Iranian population has also seen the cases of Syria and Libya in its neighbourhood, among others. Certainly, many in society might not wish to risk a total collapse while wishing for better.
Secondly, the protest movement itself lacks the coherence required to overwhelm this system. It would be a misreading to assume that protests in all cities are mobilising for regime change. Protest goals vary widely: economic relief, social dignity, reform, accountability, and systemic transformation coexist without convergence. Participation does not imply consensus. Nor does geographic spread imply revolutionary intent. These divisions are particularly pronounced across ethnic and regional lines. Azerbaijanis, who form a significant share of Iran’s population and dominate major cities such as Tabriz, have not mobilised uniformly behind Tehran-centred or monarchist narratives. For many, the legacy of linguistic repression under the Pahlavi era, symbolised today by Reza Pahlavi, makes restorationist projects unattractive. The Islamic Republic continued many of these restrictive policies, but the absence of a credible, inclusive alternative dampens revolutionary convergence.
More important than geography, however, is institutional design. The Islamic Republic was built from its inception as a revolutionary survival state. Its core institutions were designed early on to withstand internal dissent and external pressure. Since 2009, the state has seen numerous waves of protest spreading across the country. Hence, the coercive apparatus has undergone continuous stress-testing and has certainly gained significant experience in dealing with them. There is little doubt that not only protesters but also state institutions have developed institutional memory over the last two decades, but particularly since 2017: they know how to fragment movements, isolate radical actors, combine selective repression with calibrated restraint, and prevent protest coalitions from consolidating into revolutionary fronts.
Not only the potential for learning by the coercive state apparatus, but also the very design of the revolutionary regime can make it difficult for the protests to achieve regime change. By design, Iran’s coercive apparatus is intentionally multiple, overlapping and independent from one another, serving not only for the comprehensive oversight over society but also balancing each other. Such a layered command structure ensures that disruption in one part of the system does not cascade into collapse.
The Islamic regime has much deeper societal penetration. Its ideology is part of daily private life, which even the Soviets did not enjoy. The Pahlavi monarchy remained comparatively thin in its reach beyond the state apparatus. In contrast, the Islamic Republic has embedded itself in the narrowest veins of society. It has achieved this through neighbourhood organisations, religious networks, welfare provision, patronage systems, semi-state foundations, and everyday bureaucratic interfaces. This does not generate loyalty in any romantic sense, but it does generate familiarity, dependence, and caution. The regime is not simply above society; it is interwoven with it.
Political authority further reinforces this resilience. The presidency, often underestimated, plays a stabilising role. The current president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is not fully embedded in the old conservative guardianship of the revolution. That he is comparatively distanced from the causes of protests gives him further political capital. This relative distance allows him to act as a buffer figure, absorbing social pressure, reframing protest demands as reformist rather than revolutionary, and using unrest to rebalance power within the system itself. In such contexts, protests do not automatically weaken the executive; they can be instrumentalised to strengthen it vis-à-vis harder-line elites.
Underlying all of this is a dense structure of shadow stakeholders. The Islamic Republic functions not only as a political order but as a corporate-like network of interests, a major reason for the economic situation it is facing today. Large numbers of actors across security institutions, bureaucracy, semi-state foundations, and economic networks have material stakes tied to regime survival, and these stakes can hardly be moved elsewhere. For these groups, not only regime collapse but also regime change - two outcomes that need to be differentiated - would not mean renewal; it would mean loss, exposure, and retribution. This creates a powerful bias toward continuity, even amid elite competition.
The question of US and Israeli strikes targeting senior figures, including the Supreme Leader (such an attack on Iranian senior figures can also be organised from within), further illustrates why survival remains plausible. Even if they are removed through external action, this would not automatically dissolve the system. The Islamic Republic is not a personalist regime held together by one individual. Its institutions are large, routinised, and coordinated precisely to ensure continuity. Formal and informal succession mechanisms exist, and elite networks have strong incentives to preserve order. Earlier strikes in the summer of 2025 demonstrated that Iran has a deep elite bench and is capable of replacing senior figures even if they are targeted in large numbers. Nevertheless, the installation of a new Supreme Leader is by no means an easy job. Khamenei acts as the primary arbiter for intra-elite factions. His removal can certainly make cooperation between different factions difficult and intensify rivalry among them; however, they all certainly understand well that all of them are on the same board. Failing to replace the Supreme Leader for too long can cost them all. Moreover, the duality of religious-revolutionary and republican institutions recognises a greater chance of survival in case the former's elite is targeted. Therefore, intra-elite conflict should not be mistaken for systemic failure. Leadership shocks may intensify intra-elite struggles, but in revolutionary systems, such struggles more often lead to re-composition and new leadership arrangements than to institutional disintegration. Competition functions as a mechanism of adaptation rather than collapse.
Paradoxically, the removal of the revolutionary elite figures can reinforce regime strength. In this scenario, if Iran manages to timely install a new Supreme Leader, for which the chance is not small, the incumbent regime can find a fresh breath. A new Supreme Leader, however familiar his name may be to society, would benefit not only from a powerful rallying narrative centred on sovereignty under attack but also from fresh authority. Such a moment can open space for controlled reform, but even if it does not do so in reality, it would renew expectations and hopes in society. This latter point can also mean that a within-regime coup can be possible should it approach an irreversible moment for the regime.
These discussions do not necessarily promote the view that regime survival is the most likely scenario. It aimed to explain how the regime can survive this protest wave, and how even under severe pressure and external attack, the incumbent regime may retain multiple pathways to endure the protests. The belief that survival depends on social consensus, which sees its lowest in Iran's case today, is rooted more in normative assumptions about legitimacy than in an analysis of regime durability. Yet even if it survives, this is unlikely to be the last wave of mass protest faced by the regime or its current guardians. Risks such as long progressive regime breakdown, fragmentation driven by ethnic separatism, external intervention, intra-elite coup or a combination of these become increasingly plausible, especially if the current leadership survives as it is not capable of undertaking meaningful recalibration or reform.
Source: Dr Murad Nasibov is based at Justus Liebig University Giessen, in Essen, Germany
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