Tomas Hirst
The Kremlin has decided to take a strong stance against Iran’s enrichment programme
China’s unwillingness to support sanctions against Iran may preoccupy the international community, but the discussion ignores a key development: the lack of a Russian obstacle.
To put the situation in perspective, Russia has the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, estimated to be in the region of 16,000 (although the Start II Treaty limits the number of operational warheads to 4250). It also has a traditional hostility towards America’s aggressive foreign policy and a vested interest in keeping US/Iranian relations frosty in order to knock out a major competitor in oil production.
Along with China, it has forced a watering down of three previous attempts at sanctions against Ahmadinejad’s regime. Their combined resistance to tough international measures has left many feeling that, to date, sanctions have been largely toothless.
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Christopher de Bellaigue
Iranians on the streets of Tehran marking the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Imam Hossein in 680
Iran’s electoral controversy of last June is starting to seem like a quaint irrelevance next to the conflict that the two sides are now waging for possession of the country—not simply its institutions and resources, but also its identity and culture. The end of the struggle will almost certainly mean defeat for one party, and not, as once seemed possible, co-existence. There will not only be political winners and losers, but moral ones too. Iranian tradition holds that fortune favours the righteous, and all the characters in this latest epic lay claim to that mantle.
The crisis is part of a struggle between Iranians who want their country to join the community of nations that is roughly in agreement on both the challenges facing the human race and the mechanisms for tackling them, and those who don’t. The supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s main challenger in the June election, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, present themselves as modern, plugged-in internationalists. Since the crisis began, they have adeptly used the internet to circumvent the state and publicise their cause to foreign media outlets. The state, on the other hand, has sought solace in principled isolation. Like Kipling’s cat, Iran walks on its own.
Iran withdrew into itself after the revolution of 1979. The Islamic Republic’s semi-democratic, semi-theocratic system of government, topped by an institution known as the Guardianship of the Jurist, is unique. Its participation in the world economy is largely restricted to trade: Iran sells oil and buys capital and consumer goods. Its role in world diplomacy is mostly confined to pursuing its own, anti-western agenda. Ideas and information must get around walls of censorship and official indifference, and sometimes never do. Few Iranians, for instance, seem to know about global warming.
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Clay Shirky
President Ahmadinejad: the Iranian regime is more than willing to temporarily prevent citizens from using social networks
In “Why the internet is failing Iran’s activists” Evegeny Morozov argues that the protests which took place in the streets of Tehran in November 2009 may not have been triggered by social media—a sentiment with which I am in complete agreement. Just as the printing press didn’t exclusively cause the Protestant Reformation, the source of those protests in Tehran, as with all protests, was the willingness of the people to defy their government. This does not mean, however, that those protests were like all previous ones, save for the slogan—which in 2009 was notably directed against dictatorship, rather than the traditional “death to America” sentiment. The crucial point to glean from the protests of 2009 is that, just as the Protestant Reformation was shaped by the printing press, the Iranian insurrection was and is being shaped by social media.
While the use of social media in the Iranian protests quickly garnered the label “Twitter Revolution,” the real revolution was the use of mobile phones, which allowed the original protesters to broadcast their actions to other citizens and to the wider world with remarkable speed and immediacy. This characteristic, of a rapidly assembling and self-documenting public, is more than just a new slogan.
The basic hypothesis is an updated version of that outlined by Jürgen Habermas in his 1962 publication, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. A group of people, so Habermas’s theory goes, who take on the tools of open expression becomes a public, and the presence of a synchronised public increasingly constrains undemocratic rulers while expanding the rights of that public (the monarchies of Europe, in Habermas’s telling, become authoritarian governments within the contemporary scenario). Put another way, even taking into account the increased availability of surveillance, the net value of social media has shifted the balance of power in the direction of Iran’s citizens.
As Evgeny notes, however, that hypothesis might be wrong. Or, if it is right, the ways in which it is right might be minor, or rare, or take decades to unfold.
Yet while the Ahmadinejad regime is clearly willing to use event-based internet filtering, whereby mobile network coverage or internet access is temporarily blocked—a strategy we might call a “temporary Burma”—I do not believe that Iran can become a “permanent Burma.” The kind of information shutdown required to keep all forms of public assembly from boiling over will be beyond the authorities in Iran. Such shutdowns, if widespread or long term, would amount to what we might call a ”technological auto-immune disease,” both because daily life in Tehran affords so many more opportunities for public assembly, and because however willing Ahmadinejad is to hold onto power, the Iranian state has gone considerably further than Burma in resting its legitimacy on both elections and nominally neutral theocrats. Both of these pillars are, however, being shaken.
Morozov pessimistic reading seems to suggest that the hold on power of any authoritarian state, and in particular Iran, is strong enough to withstand even long-term popular discontent. What’s more, the principal effect of such dissent will be that Iran (and by extension most authoritarian countries) will move successfully towards the Burmese model of steady control over communications and dissent, but that this will happen only to the degree that the public insists on self-assembly and self-expression. Though I doubt that this will be the case in Iran, I do agree with Morozov that it is a possibility.
Evgeny Morozov
Read Clay Shirky’s response to this exchange here
I am glad that Clay Shirky has offered such a balanced and much-needed rejoinder to the initial optimism that he espoused in his widely-publicised book of 2008, Here Comes Everybody. As I wrote in Prospect’s December cover story, “How Dictators Watch Us On the Web,” I, like Shirky, also view the ongoing events in Iran as a key test for social media’s growing prominence in the politics of authoritarian societies. Where I strongly disagree with Shirky, however, is in his upbeat interpretation of the current political developments in Iran.
I am much less impressed by the role that the social media has played there. The palpable digital enthusiasm surrounding the situation in Iran appears very similar to what we observed in the autumn of 2007, as the “Saffron Revolution” was getting underway in Burma. Similarly, that revolution was abetted by mobile phones and text messaging and was widely expected to loosen the junta’s tight grip on power. Today, however, one would need a powerful magnifying glass to notice any major democratic changes in that country.
One possible reading of the current situation on the ground in Tehran is that, despite all the political mobilisation facilitated by social media, the Iranian government has not only survived, but has, in fact, become even more authoritarian. The changes currently taking place in Iran are far from positive: a catastrophic brain drain triggered by the recent political repressions, a series of violent crackdowns on politically active university students who have chosen to remain in the country, the persecution of critical bloggers, journalists and editors, the appointment of more conservative ministers to the government, and mounting pressure on dissident politicians. From this perspective, the last six months could be taken to reveal the impotence of decentralised movements in the face of a ruthless authoritarian state—even when those movements are armed with modern protest tools.
Focusing on the frequency and the intensity of protests—as Shirky does in his response to my essay—may infuse us with unjustified optimism. Protests, after all, are very rare occurrences in authoritarian states. If anything, they are exceptions that often go together with elections; what happens between elections is often more important, and this is when we need to take a more holistic view of the internet’s influence on authoritarian societies. Protests in the streets of Tehran may not have been triggered by those using social media. Shirky himself acknowledges that the protests which took place in Iran on 4th November 2009—traditionally a day of anti-American protest in Iran—have happened in the past too, with or without social media. The only difference this time around is they had a different slogan: “Death to America” was replaced by opposition protesters with “Death to the Dictator.” But was it really the power of Twitter and Facebook that made Iranians stop hating America? Or was it the change of president in the White House?
Shirky’s other claim—that growing internet censorship in Iran signifies that the government is losing control—fails to persuade me as well. I see it as a logical reaction from a “rational-thinking” government concerned with a possible revolution. The regime may have tried to censor and slow down the internet simply because these are cheap and easily available options (in addition to all other forms of intimidation they are currently experimenting with). They do not have much to lose by over-censoring and, had they not engaged in censorship at all, they would also be perceived as “weak” and “ineffectual” for their very inability or reluctance to censor.
And while it is certainly true that “a modern economy simply cannot function if people can’t use their phones,” we have seen that authoritarian governments—those in Belarus, China and Moldova are good examples—are increasingly relying on what is known as “event-based internet filtering,” whereby they turn off mobile coverage in those public places where rallies are being organised. The impact on the economy is minimal. Furthermore, given that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has recently bought a 50 per cent stake in Iran’s newly privatised telecommunications company (costing $7.8 bn), profit considerations may not figure high on their list of concerns. They have much more to lose if they are thrown out of power. In other words, I simply do not see the “technological auto-immune disease” that Shirky alludes to.
Paying too much attention to who controls communication networks obfuscates the fact that the Iranian government has other ways to control the internet. One unfortunate consequence of limiting our analysis of internet control to censorship only is that it presents all authoritarian governments as technophobic and unable to capitalise on new technologies. This may have well been the case five years ago but this is no longer so.
According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, even Iranians abroad found themselves vulnerable to “social media” harassment by the overzealous Iranian police: any traces of online support that they expressed to the anti-Ahmadinejad protesters were carefully compiled by supporters of the regime and then used against them when they tried to enter the country. (Some even report being asked to log into Facebook at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport by the police). Those protesting in the streets found their photos posted to a series of pro-government Iranian websites, so that the “community” could help in identifying their names and abetting the authorities. We are also beginning to see a spike in fake videos—one, for example, showing protesters burning the portrait of Ali Khamenei—popping up on online, with the obvious goal of creating some internal confusion in the opposition.
The big question that I posed in my essay still remains: what do we really gain if the ability to organise protests is matched (and, perhaps, even dwarfed) by the ability to provoke, identify and arrest the protesters—as well as any other possible future dissidents? Shirky’s response, while offering some extremely useful clarifications on the potential of social media, does not answer it conclusively.
Read Clay Shirky’s final response to this exchange here
Clay Shirky
Now online: listen to a joint Demos/Prospect podcast, with Prospect’s Tom Chatfield interviewing Evgeny Morozov about the relationship between the internet and politics, by clicking here.
Read Evgeny Morozov’s response to Clay Shirky’s essay here
In Prospect’s December cover story, “How dictators watch us on the web”, Evgeny Morozov criticises my views on the impact of social media on political unrest. Indeed, he even says I am “the man most responsible for the intellectual confusion over the political role of the internet.” In part, I would like to agree with some of his criticisms, while partially disputing some of his assertions too.
Let me start with a basic statement of belief: because civic life is not just created by the actions of individuals, but by the actions of groups, the spread of mobile phones and internet connectivity will reshape that civic life, changing the ways members of the public interact with one another.
Though germane, this argument says little to nothing about the tempo, mode, or ultimate shape such a transformation will take. There are a number of possible scenarios for changed interaction between the public and the state, some rosy, others distinctly less so. Crucially however, Morozov’s reading is in response to a specific strain of internet utopianism—let’s call it the “just-add-internet” hypothesis. In this model, the effect of social media on the lives of citizens in authoritarian regimes will be swift, unstoppable, and positive—a kind of digitised 1989. And it will lead us to expect the prominence of social media in any society’s rapid democratisation.
While this argument is overtly simplistic, I have nonetheless helped fuel it by discussing mechanisms through which citizens can coordinate group action, while failing to note the ways that visible public action also provides new counter-moves to repressive regimes. Morozov is right to criticise me for this imbalance, and for the resulting (and undue) optimism it engenders about social media as a democratising force; I stand corrected.
Nevertheless, I want to defend the notion—which Morozov goes after in the “man most responsible for intellectual confusion” section of his essay—that social media improves political information cascades, as outlined by the political scientist Susanne Lohmann. It also represents a new dynamic within political protest, which will alter the struggle between insurrectionists and the state, even if the state wins in any given clash. Where this will lead to a net advantage for popular uprisings in authoritarian regimes is an open question—and a point on which Morozov and I still disagree on—but the new circumstances of coordinated public action, I believe, marks an essential change in the civilian part of the “arms race.”
Lohmann’s mechanism for how information cascades operate is simple: when a small group is willing to take public action against a regime, and the regime’s reaction is muted, it provides information about the value of participation to the group of citizens who opted not to participate. Some members of this group will then join in the next round of protests.
In turn, further non-reaction by the regime will provide additional information to the next group of “fence-sitters,” thereby increasing participation. Consequently, strong reaction by the regime can be effective in putting down insurrection, but at the same time risks constraining and, in extreme cases, delegitimising the regime itself. If the regime acts late, it can thus lose in one of two ways: the insurrections can win, or the state can win, but at Pyrrhic costs. Between those two cases, the state can also succeed in putting down the insurrection at low cost to itself.
Prior to the spread of social media, a typical classic case of late and failed reaction by the regime to an information cascade is the one documented by Lohmann, around the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. The classic case of late and successful reaction by a regime is Tiananmen Square and, even there, the subsequent alteration of the Chinese state continues to be driven in part by the recognition that without continued economic improvement, the same forces that drove insurrection might return. Though the regime always holds most of the power, insurrections that take advantage of the dynamics of information cascades thus offer protesters both offensive and defensive capabilities that they wouldn’t otherwise have.
But both these examples took place prior to the invention of the internet and widespread use of mobile phones. The question, today, is what the increased ability on the part of citizens armed with those tools can do to achieve shared public knowledge and coordinated action.
Morozov introduces both the Belarusian and Iranian protests as examples of places where this struggle can be seen. The October Square protests in Minsk in 2006 did not, however, destabilise the Lukashenko government, and surveillance of the mob on LiveJournal helped limit use of flash mob techniques by protesters. The flash mob participants were not able to use either the offensive or defensive capabilities of social media to permanent advantage—there is not enough discontent in the rest of the population to cause them to join in, the government’s reaction was sufficiently swift and harsh, and documentation of those events did not resonate outside the country.
Sadly for residents of Belarus, leaders of countries with low geopolitical importance will always find it easier to deflect democratic movements, social media or no, than leaders in more strategically vital countries. The case of Belarus is therefore one in which protesters have been given new capabilities for organising, but where the state’s reaction has remained effective. In the arms race in Minsk, the tools have changed, but the end result resembles the old equilibrium state. This is the kind of outcome whose strategic ramifications Morozov has highlighted better than anyone.
The Iranian situation, which Morozov also mentions, is much more complex: the government relies more on its perceived legitimacy, both democratic and theocratic, than Belarus. Moreover, Iran’s geopolitical importance is paramount on many fronts at once. Clearly, the protests following the 12th June elections were aided by social media. Although Twitter got top billing in western accounts, the most important tools during the Tehran protests were mobile phones, whether to send text messages, photos, or videos. Twitter, predominantly, was a gateway to western attention.
By the time the regime managed to shut down the various modes of communication available to the Tehran protesters, they were retiring to rooftops and shouting slogans into the night. Although this act of coordination did not use technology per se, it was made possible by the visible evidence provided by users documenting and broadcasting the earlier solidarity of the street protests. This is why figures showing how few people use social media for political change are red herrings. Insurrections, even pro-democracy insurrections, always begin as minority affairs, driven by a small, young, and well-educated population before they expand more widely. In the Iranian case, once the information about general discontent had successfully cascaded, the coordination among the populace remained intact, even when the tools which helped disseminate that information were shut down.
This makes the situation in Tehran a key test. As usual, the state has more power than the insurgents, but the insurgency has nevertheless achieved the transition from distributed but uncoordinated discontent to being an actual protest movement, and part of that transition was achieved with these tools. Mousavi, and other opposition figures, now know that when they speak out, they do so representing a public, rather than an aggregate of discontented individuals. And when mass action does become possible, it again unleashes protests, as seen in the incredible outpouring of anti-Khamenei sentiment on 13 Aban (4th November), usually a day of anti-American protest—an outpouring documented hundreds of times via videos posted to YouTube.
It is impossible to know how the next few months in Iran will unfold, but the use of social media has already passed several tests: it has enabled citizens to coordinate with one another better than previously, to broadcast events like Basij violence or the killing of Neda Aga Soltan to the rest of the world, and, by forcing the regime to shut down communications apparatus, the protesters have infected Iran with a kind of technological auto-immune disease. However great the regime’s short-term desire to keep the protesters from communicating with one another, a modern economy simply cannot function if people can’t use their phones. The regime may yet crush protests, but even if they do, the events of June to November this year will still have broken the old illusion of a happy balance between democratic, theocratic, and military power in Iran.
I accept Morozov’s criticism of Here Comes Everybody. That book was about social media rather than politics—it was an imbalanced account of the arms race between citizens and their governments. However, even within the logic of the arms race, the easier the assembly of citizens, the more ubiquitous the ability to document atrocities. And the more the self-damaging measures which states take—like shutting down mobile phones networks—will resolve themselves as a net advantage for insurrection within authoritarian regimes. Net advantage, in some cases, is a far cry from the “just-add-internet” hypothesis, but it is a view that is considerably more optimistic about the balance of power between citizens and the state than Morozov’s.
Read Evgeny Morozov’s response to Clay Shirky’s essay here
Elizabeth Kirkwood
Citizen photo-journalism in action. Photo: AMIRPIX, Demotix
4th November has been an important day in Iran for several decades, and today marks the the 30th anniversary of the storming of the US embassy in Tehran by “students following the imam’s line”—one of the most memorable moments during the Islamic revolution of 1979.
Opposition protesters have marked today’s historic significance by taking to the streets. While the scale of the anti-government protests—and the regime’s crackdown—remains unclear, wire services and state-controlled media have reported police using tear gas and clashing violently with protesters.
Though Iran has banned nearly all media coverage of non-sanctioned rallies and protests, the citizen photo-journalism website Demotix has published a fresh collection of images from today’s events, including a picture of what looks like a protester kicking away a smoking teargas shell. Keep up with the latest news from Demotix here; they will continue to upload photos, eyewitness accounts and comments as the situation develops.
Jonathan Power
Iran could become another Turkey: "democratic, pro-western and bomb free"
As the possibility of a UN-backed plan aimed at limiting Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons has been given a glimmer of hope—in not being rejected outright by the Iranian government—it is worth considering why Iran is being singled out so acutely and unfairly over its nuclear policy.
Clearly, the west and Russia are engaged in discriminating against it. Brazil has had a nuclear-enrichment programme for decades (including a large ultracentrifuge enrichment plant, several laboratory-scale facilities, a reprocessing facility to make plutonium, and a missile programme). In the 1980s it built two nuclear devices.
Three years ago I asked the chief of mission at the US embassy in Brasilia if Washington was worried about Brazil. “Not at all,” he replied. “In the early 1990s Brazil dismantled its nuclear weapons’ programme, and Argentina, its supposed enemy, has done the same.” “But,” I insisted, “Brazil still has its enrichment programme and a reprocessing facility.” His answer: “We have no worries about Brazil. We see eye to eye.” However Brazil still resists, in part, the probing eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear watchdog.
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Christopher de Bellaigue
Shia Muslims believe that the reappearance of the twelfth imam, who vanished in the ninth century, will herald an era of peace and justice. But nowhere do Islamic texts explain clearly how people should rule themselves in the meantime. Instead, Iran’s 1979 revolution conferred temporal power on the religious scholar who best combined qualities of theological learning and political acumen—the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The resulting arrangement, known as the “guardianship of the jurist,” has always been contentious. Now, as the dust settles on Iran’s worst unrest in a quarter of a century, a long-dormant dispute over the system shows signs of a revival—with potentially dramatic ramifications for the world’s only Shia theocracy.
Reformist presidential candidates Mir-Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi continue to allege vote rigging in June’s election, which was officially won by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But both remain loyal to Khomeini’s system, even if they are critical of the alliance it has engendered between Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader. By taking sides in the election, they say, Khamenei has abandoned his traditional position of grandfatherly neutrality in internal politics. Crucially, a number of Iran’s 20-odd grand ayatollahs, based in the seminary town of Qom, 90 miles south of Tehran, seem to agree. Several have emerged as cheerleaders for the opposition since the poll.
This is an important departure. Grand ayatollahs, whatever their private beliefs, rarely interfere in day-to-day politics. But in an exceptionally strong statement in mid-June, Ayatollah Asadullah Bayat-Zanjani advised Moussavi to regard his opponents as the representatives of an “erroneous and deviant type of thinking” that is the “enemy…of god’s religion,” while Ayatollah Sanei, perhaps the most progressive of the grand ayatollahs, declared “morally and legally redundant” some of the “confessions” extracted from jailed election protestors.
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Christopher de Bellaigue
“However this struggle ends,” said a perspiring middle-aged woman at the first of the monstrous anti-government demonstrations in Tehran on 15th June, “something in Iran has changed forever.” She gestured over her shoulder, back along the broad, sun-baked Azadi Street, at the solid mass of Iranians behind her, marching, chanting and showing the victory sign. This event, many participants said, was easily the biggest show of popular discontent since the Islamic revolution of 1979. Unlike other rallies of recent years—state-sponsored affairs dutifully attended by government employees— this one was illegal, self-policed, and exuberantly good-humoured.
I walked with the marchers for much of the three-mile route. To begin with, concerned to deter possible attacks by armed anti-riot police or members of the Basij—a big, highly ideological force of reservists—nervous-looking organisers husbanded the crowd into compact blocks. Then, as the afternoon wore on, and people kept arriving in their thousands and the slogans grew in wit and ribaldry, so the participants’ sense of their own invincibility seemed to increase. As the day ended, vendors of ice cream and faludeh, an Iranian sweet, did brisk business. The crowd, one policeman was quoted as saying, was well over 1m strong. Of the riot police and the feared Basij, there was as yet no sign.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president of the past four years, stands accused by these and many other Iranians who took to the streets in the following days, of perverting the presidential election of 12th June, which—so his interior ministry announced—he won by a landslide. For much of a generally lacklustre campaign, Ahmadinejad, a polarising populist admired by many poorer Iranians for doling out loans and handouts, and proclaiming his desire to serve the common man, had been the candidate to beat.
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Jeffrey Henderson
Discuss this at Prospect’s blog, First Drafts
South Asia has been dominated by two military conflicts in past months: Pakistan pounding of the Taliban in the Swat Valley, and the obliteration of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Disturbing as these conflicts are, both may be dwarfed by a wider and more significant trend in the region—the rise of a newly assertive China.
At Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Chinese companies are building a new port that could serve as a refuelling and docking facility for the Chinese navy as it extends its presence (presently confined to helping police pirate activities off the Horn of Africa) across the Indian Ocean. China has also provided much of the military hardware that underpinned the Sri Lankan victory.
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