Any account of Iran’s current political crisis that focuses only on clerics, generals, and politicians misses perhaps the most important political force in the country: the women and young people who have driven every major protest movement of the past decade and who represent the demographic future of Iran.
Women were at the forefront of the 2022 uprising sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody. They were present in large numbers during the January protests. They have been the most visible and internationally recognized symbol of resistance to the Islamic Republic’s repressive social codes. And they have paid an enormous price: imprisonment, torture, and in many cases death.
Young Iranians have grown up entirely under the Islamic Republic, with no personal memory of any other system. Their relationship with the regime is one of pervasive disillusionment — with economic prospects, with political freedoms, with the social restrictions that govern daily life. The brain drain that has seen hundreds of thousands of educated young Iranians leave the country is a stark measure of their alienation.
The current moment is one in which their agency is constrained by extraordinary security force presence, active war, and the brutal lessons of January. But their political consciousness is not. The death of Khamenei registers differently for a 25-year-old Iranian who has only known his rule than it does for an older generation that lived through the revolution.
How Iran’s new leadership chooses to engage with — or suppress — these constituencies will be a central determinant of the Islamic Republic’s long-term stability. A system that continues to respond to women and youth with force rather than accommodation is building its own future crisis.