Military Intervention Will Not Liberate the Iranian People

The scale, persistence, and geographic spread of these protests mark a qualitative shift. According to data compiled by the Human Rights Activists News Agency, or HRANA, at least 544 people have been killed in the course of the protests so far, with hundreds of additional deaths still under investigation. More than 10,600 people have been arrested, and demonstrations have been recorded in over 180 cities across all 31 provinces. These figures have emerged despite a near-total internet shutdown since the evening of January 8, which severely hinders independent verification. They point to a sweeping campaign of repression aimed at extinguishing dissent rather than addressing its causes.

Yet the scale of repression cannot restore the previous, already volatile balance between state and society. The protesters’ message to the ruling elite is unmistakable: Coercion can no longer compel consent. Iranians breached the fear barrier, and are risking bullets en masse to demand change. The Islamic Republic may succeed in suppressing this round of protests, but without meaningful political and economic transformation, the conditions that produced this upheaval will persist, and the regime will merely limp forward—more brittle, more unstable, and increasingly vulnerable to the next eruption of public anger.

This dynamic is not without precedent. One of us witnessed it firsthand in Egypt in 2011, while working alongside civil society actors during the uprising against Hosni Mubarak. The regime responded with killings, internet shutdowns, and claims of foreign conspiracy, believing repression would restore order. Instead, it accelerated Mubarak’s downfall by alienating a broader spectrum of society and destroying what remained of the regime’s legitimacy. While the Iranian and Egyptian systems are profoundly different, once a regime crosses a certain threshold of violence and denial, coercion alone cannot reconstitute the political order it seeks to preserve.