Urban Collective Action and Political Transformation: Tracing the Trajectory of Protest Strategies in Iran (1921-2020)

Social movements in the contemporary Middle East have driven political and social transformations, leading to structural political changes and 'social revolutions.' In modern Iran, social movements and collective actions have been primary tools for resisting authoritarian regimes. These actions have brought significant changes to Iranian society. The ongoing struggle between the state and society shapes the ‘politics of protest’ in contemporary Iran. This paper explores how collective action strategies in public spaces have changed and how Iran’s political and social transformations have influenced shifts in street protest strategies over the past century. Protest Event Analysis (PEA) is employed to answer these questions, a systematic approach to analyzing protest events across time and space. One traditional data source for this method is newspaper reports. We collected and analyzed news reports from a selected newspaper covering protests from 1921 to 2020. In total, 2075 reports were collected and analyzed in two stages. Content analysis was used to categorize the protests, while topic modeling was employed to analyze the temporal dynamics of protest representation. The collected news was classified into seven protest strategies: political demonstrations, non-political protests, urban violence, political meetings, public funerals, sit-in, and strikes. The findings show that the representation of protests increased during social and political crises. Specifically, the 1979 Revolution marked the peak of resistance representation in Tehran. Furthermore, the emergence of dual-state or statelessness in society enhanced the ability of the public to display urban resistance. This political opening also facilitated the emergence of civil and labor protests. In contrast, during periods of state consolidation, public protests were predominantly represented as urban violence. Ultimately, this study suggests that the representation of resistance in urban public spaces can highlight key aspects of the evolving relationship between the state and society and their ongoing struggles.