The end of 2025 saw Iran plunge back into national-scale protests. On December 28, the strike by merchants in Tehran’s bazaars, triggered by the collapse of the currency and the surge in prices, quickly spread. Like the repression carried out by the security apparatus of the Islamic Republic: according to the organization Human Rights Activists in Iran, it has already left 3,308 civilians dead and led to the arrest of more than 24,000 demonstrators (figures as of January 17, editor’s note).
Post-doctoral researcher in political science, Dorna Javan has worked for more than twelve years on the responses of authoritarian regimes to ecological crises.
Iranian, trained at the University of Tehran before continuing her research in France, she devoted her thesis to the mechanisms of invisibility of environmental disasters in Iran. Reporterre questioned her about the ecological, political and social drivers of the current crisis.
What does this strong popular mobilization and the terrible repression of the regime inspire you?
Dorna Javan: Much of what is happening today is unfortunately well known to the Iranian population. This is neither the first revolt nor the first time that the regime has mobilized its entire repressive apparatus: police, justice, military and paramilitary forces, notably the Revolutionary Guards and the Basijs.
What is striking, however, is the speed of the escalation. The police, relatively in the background at the start of the movement, shifted in less than a week to much more direct violence against the demonstrators. The almost total cutting off of means of communication is also an old strategy, but it has never lasted so long. In 2009, then in 2022, despite internet blockages, telephone communications with our families remained possible.
Also last June, during the attack on Israel. Today, people living in the same city struggle to reach each other, and some bank ATMs no longer work. We wonder concretely how the country is holding up.
Residents are trying to cross the Turkish border simply to contact their loved ones. The figures circulating are terrifying, with estimates of several thousand deaths. And it is likely that the real toll is much heavier.
How does the ecological crisis in Iran manifest itself on a daily basis? Does it partly explain the surge in prices and the current protests?
The ecological crisis is not the direct cause of the current crisis, but it acts as a powerful accelerator of an already very deep economic crisis.
Iran is a country rich in resources but deeply plagued by corruption. Parastate and paramilitary groups, intertwined in a system of complex hierarchies, exercise quasi-monopolistic control over the main foodstuffs, through companies they own. They decide to put these products on the market or withdraw them, depending on their interests.
These same actors also control natural resources, notably water, through the construction and management of dams. I spoke of “grabbing” and “militarization” of resource management.
“Ecological claims are not just ignored, they are denied”
Via modern private cartels, they also hold oil revenues and therefore foreign currencies, which they share with other actors: foundations and parastatal institutions. Some analysts estimate that these networks were able to control up to 40-50% of exports through unofficial channels. In this context, the government was not even able to complete the 2026 budget. The surge in prices is above all the product of this economic control.
Environmental crises worsen the situation. Daily and repeated water and electricity cuts, the official recognition of a water crisis and the persistent inability of the State to guarantee sustainable access to drinking water, including in large cities, are fueling the recent protests.
What political and institutional mechanisms are aggravating the ecological crisis?
The first problem is the almost total absence of public data – and the absence of effort to produce it. When I began my research in 2015, simply compiling a list of the country’s top environmental problems was impossible. Of more than 1,400 works using an environmental grid, only 5 were in the social sciences. It was empty, empty, empty!
This invisibility is linked to the fact that so-called environmental policies are facades. This is a blind spot in public action. The only agency dedicated to these issues only has formal power and receives its directives directly from the Supreme Guide.
Climate change is often exploited: presented as an inevitability, it serves to depoliticize social difficulties and to absolve the authorities of their inaction.
The drying up of Lake Urmia, in the northwest of the country, is at the heart of your work. What does it reveal about the State’s relationship to natural resources?
For sixteen years, between 1998 and 2014, the drying of Lake Urmia was not recognized as a public problem, neither by the State nor by intellectual elites. I was told that 70% of the drying was due to climate change. The subject did not exist in public debate.
Local criticism was systematically repressed. Scientists have been threatened with imprisonment for speaking out on the issue. The data has been manipulated in order to present the drying up of the lake as an almost exclusive consequence of climate change – without mentioning the political and economic choices adopted by successive governments since the 1960s. The roots of the problem are however old: they go back to the major agrarian reforms of the 1960s-1970s, the nationalization of water and the industrialization of agriculture, which led to the proliferation of dams.
“Environmental protests are concentrated in the peripheries”
This invisibility of the struggles has affected other peripheral regions, such as Khousestan, where populations lack drinking water even though the province supplies most of the country’s oil. Local mobilizations have long been ignored, in part because they came from historically marginalized Turkish and Azerbaijani minorities. For more than a century, these movements have had demands, particularly anti-racist, swept aside by successive regimes.
How do environmental movements still manage to organize themselves?
The fight for Lake Urmia constitutes the first real movement for environmental justice in Iran. From 2006, demonstrations took place, followed by extremely severe repression: around thirty activists were sentenced to heavy prison sentences.
The strength of the movement lay in the diversity of its actors: intellectuals, scientific experts, environmentalists, environmental NGOs, Turkish Azerbaijani ethnic rights activists – who represent the majority of those arrested. Added to this were supporters of the Traktor football team, a regional Azerbaijani club which played a major role in publicizing the drying of the lake between 2009 and 2013. The lake, although salty, held a strong emotional place in the region.
Environmental protests in Iran are concentrated mainly in the peripheries: industrial pollution in the north, mining in the west, fires in the Zagros region, where some activists have lost their lives trying to put out the fires themselves. This is also where they are most repressed.
What types of pressures, threats or risks face researchers and activists who document these environmental and social crises?
Like many opponents, environmental activists are frequently equated with disruptors of public order, threats to national security, or even spies. This is particularly the case of the eight environmentalists arrested since 2018, accused of espionage and activities against national security, then convicted in 2019. In peripheral areas, this criminalization manifested itself earlier and more systematically.
What lessons can the Iranian situation offer about how authoritarianism and the ecological crisis interact elsewhere in the world?
This is precisely what I am working on today. In Iran, the regime does not just mismanage environmental problems: it refuses to recognize them as such. Theoretically, these issues are taken into account in the five-year development plans as well as in the Constitution, but in practice we are faced with real constitutional hypocrisy. Ecological claims are not only ignored, they are denied. This is what sociologists call the construction of a “non-problem” – a notion developed by researcher Emmanuel Henry.
As an Iranian living in France, how do you feel about these events from a distance, particularly the repression that accompanies these mobilizations? What is possible to do remotely?
I am very worried. The priority is to hear from my loved ones. I am the only one in my family who lives abroad. Sometimes we no longer even dare to look at the images, for fear of recognizing a familiar face.
I managed to get some background information from Tehran through a friend using Starlink, but he doesn’t know my family. The variability of information published on the number of deaths, which could amount to more than 12,000 people, does not exclude the hypothesis of a real massacre in progress. The anxiety is permanent.
