From the 1906 Constitutional Revolution to the 2009 pro-democracy Green Movement, modern Iran has been one of the pioneers of progressive political changes in the region. Nonetheless, Iran’s long quest for social justice and democracy has yet to succeed.
The quest for a grand theory of socio-political change has given way to more specific theories based on particular context. Iran’s distinctive historical legacy and socio-political settings will shape its path toward social justices and democracy. This paper historicizes and contextualizes such legacies and socio-political settings. The paper problematizes the complex and dialectical relationships between structural and agential factors and how they help or hinder democratization in contemporary Iran. It provides an operational definition of structure and agency by subdividing each into three levels of analysis. The structural factors are measured by the nature of the Iranian state (political level), Iran’s uneven development (socio-economic level), and the global structure of power (international level). The agential factors, both in democratic and anti-democratic forces, are examined in terms of the leadership capability (individual level), the organizational strength (institutional level), and the intellectual discourse (cultural/ideological level).
The findings suggest that Iran’s future prospects for democratization equally depend on the structural “causes” and the socio-political “causers”. Iran’s long quest for social justice and democracy is surrounded by a number of domestic and international obstacles: they include Iran’s oil-centered rentier state, uneven social development, and the structure of the hegemonic global realpolitik. Moreover, the paper examines the weakness of the leadership, well-organized civil society institutions, and inclusive and engaging political discourses. Nevertheless, the radical changes in social structures, the epistemic shift in Iran’s political culture, the rise of pots-Islamist trends, and the factional politics at the top of the political establishment may well contribute to the birth of democracy from within.
