The streets of Iran have stopped screaming. The Iranian regime has put down the demonstrations that shook the country after the death of the young Mahsa Amini last September at the hands of the morality police for wearing her veil incorrectly. She has killed more than 500 people, jailed thousands and executed seven, according to the organization Iran Human Rights. Since January, the protests have decreased dramatically. However, women keep the fight alive by showing their hair in public. The anthropologist Narges Bajoghli (Tehran, 1982), who is an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, where she lives, explains how the gesture, which is punishable by jail, has become a visible act of civil disobedience in the country.
Has the protest movement succumbed to the repression of the regime?
Social movements go through cycles. The street protest is just a demonstration. They need time to develop and gain power in society. Now there are no protests in the streets, but the movement does exist. It happens in the streets every day. There are more and more women who go out without the mandatory veil showing a daily form of resistance. And when they are attacked, other passers-by defend them. The state continues to try to suppress the movement by executing the prisoners. But what is really fascinating is that there is a visual form of protest.
How have the protests contributed to Iranian feminism?
In addition to what is happening on the street, all this movement has caused people to start talking about patriarchy in general. Women and other people talk about it at home, with their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, who have already brought about, even in this short period of time of seven to eight months, a great social change. I do not believe at all that this social movement has died out. In fact, I think it has entered one of the most fundamental phases, which is generating profound cultural changes.
Where is the movement headed?
I can't predict it. I see that it's specific to Iran, but it's also part of a much larger global discussion of self-control that advocates that women and gay people have the right to dress, look, or be however they want. I do not want to say that it was not talked about before in Iran. Iranian feminist organizations have been working for decades. It's just that now we see it explosively. The important thing now is that you have a slogan, “Woman, life, freedom”, which crystallizes all the demands. It's short and it talks about the future: about creating a society where women are at the center and that, without freedom for them, there can be no other kind of freedom. The difference now is that the slogan has permeated society so much that it has also reached ordinary people, in addition to feminists and student activists.
Has there been any progress in the freedoms of Iranian women?
Officially no. Hijab is still required by law. One of the biggest lessons from this movement is the way Iranian women have stood up to security forces in disobeying the laws from the very beginning of the street protest until now. And when the people en masse decide to disobey, power loses its power. The state first deployed paramilitaries, now facial recognition technology. Women simply don't pay the fines. When shops close because they cater to unveiled women, people flock the next day to shop. Little by little, the state realizes that it can't do anything about it because the women have collectively decided that they are going to pretend the law doesn't exist. Officially nothing has changed, unofficially everything has changed.
In the book How Sanctions Work, you and other authors take a critical look at the effect of sanctions on Iran.
The idea behind economic sanctions is that you put enough economic pressure on a society that people then pressure their own government to change course. But the problem is that we don't really have a success story around heavily sanctioned societies. During apartheid in South Africa the intended result was achieved, but in Cuba, for example, the sanctions drove the island into total poverty and yet the state is still there. The same with Venezuela and with Iran. Dodging penalties is an extremely expensive thing to do. You must enter the black market. And the only ones who can break the sanctions are the corporate apparatuses linked to the military and political elites. In these states, the military becomes really important because the sanctions are effectively economic warfare.
So, are you against sanctions?
I am against comprehensive sanctions. Because I think it is a collective punishment against the population and it is applied in states where we know that the population does not have much of a say over the government. The application of sanctions has become the number one foreign policy tool of the United States Government. As an American academic, I really think we have to start discussing the effects of sanctions. Right now it's just a knee-jerk reaction. We don't like China, let's sanction. We don't like Russia, let's sanction.
