Published June 30th, 2009 by Future Atlas
Iran’s Trajectory
Events of the last three week’s have unsettled Iran’s future, and the range of potential outcomes is now broader than it was before.
Regardless of how Iranians actually voted, “Iran is a divided country now,” as one analyst put it to the New York Times, with different forces backing more starkly competing visions of the world. As a result, all of these outcomes have become more likely:
- A shift to straight authoritarianism, unleavened by the partial democracy that had characterized post-revolution Iran, with the security forces and hard-line conservatives at their core
- A rapid transition to a less authoritarian version of Iran’s religiously based governance system, an idea supported by “many prominent first-generation revolutionaries”
- An outright collapse of the theocratic system, though this might plunge Iran into civil conflict
The forces driving these futures are quite complex. These are a few factors that have emerged:
- Some grand ayatollahs have expressed sympathy with the dissenters and have not sided with supreme leader Khamenei, the Washington Post notes.
- Powerful establishment figure Rafsanjani may be abandoning opposition candidate Mousavi, Juan Cole reports.
- The Basij volunteer militia, other security forces, and even the Revolutionary Guard may be less monolithic than thought, and might balk at some kinds of repression, analyst Afshin Molavi suggests.
- An Iranian student has suggested that Ahmadinejad could be in a position to do a “Nixon-to-China,” improving relations with the US on the basis of his conservative credentials.