Exploring the Role of Youth in the “Woman, Life, Freedom” Movement in Iran: The Politicization of Youth Collective Identities and the Emergence of Novel Configurations of Dissent in Post-Reform Iran

• Applicant: Dr. Abbas Jong
• Subject Area: Political Science ; Asian Studies ; Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 572626407

This research interrogates the emergence, politicization, and mobilization of new youth collective identities in post-reform Iran, culminating in the 2022–2023 Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) uprising. It critically departs from dominant scholarly trends that reduce the movement’s distinctiveness to symbolic, genealogical, isolated structural or temporal factors, or aesthetic dimensions—arguing instead that the WLF constitutes both a structural and subjective rupture in Iran’s post-2009 protest landscape. Drawing on the Politicized Collective Identity (PCI) model and the meso-level theory of collective identity, the study treats “novelty” not as an assumed trait but as an empirically traceable and historically situated process—emerging through the evolving interface of authoritarian restructuring, socio-spatial marginality, affective solidarities, global entanglements and informal infrastructures of dissent. Through a two-phase empirical investigation, the study first examines the emergence and consolidation of informal socio-spatial configurations in Iran’s urban margins during the 2010s—spaces shaped by the exclusion of youth and women from formal public life, yet embedded in global circuits of culture, consumption, and digital exchange. Within these formations, new identity practices materialized through everyday negotiation of power, exclusion, and subversion. The second phase investigates how these emergent collective identities became politicized under intensified repression between 2021 and early 2023, culminating in their public actualization through the WLF uprising. Through 45 in-depth, biographical interviews with young activists (25 women, 20 men), discourse-historical analysis (DHA), event and protest catalogue construction, and multi-source empirical data (including digital archives and visual materials), the research reconstructs how these identities moved from marginal informality to revolutionary articulation. In doing so, it offers a comprehensive and rigorous framework for understanding the WLF not as a linear extension of past protest cycles, but as a paradigmatic reconfiguration of political subjectivity, urban contestation, and collective resistance in contemporary Iran.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants