THE BROKERED EXUBERANCE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS:

AN ETHNOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF IRANS 2009 GREEN MOVEMENT*

Kevan Harris

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation, this article moves from a
microscopic to a wide-angle view to explain the dynamics of the 2009 post-election Green
movement in the Islamic Republic of Iran: how it manifested, why it weakened, and who
participated. After mapping out the protest wave, I make three main arguments. First, preelectoral campaigns created spaces for interaction rituals of brokered exuberance among
participants in public rallies that lowered perceptions of risk and spilled over into contentious
protest after the election. Second, ordinary, non-networked Iranians utilized face-to-face
interaction to broaden and recharge the protest wave, while Internet activism confused as
much as coordinated the organization of street protests. Third, the social power and political
orientation of Green protestors were connected to the increased relative size of the middle
class in Iran, which had been empowered and enlarged through the states developmental
efforts over the past two decades.

On the morning of June 13, 2009, the day after the tenth presidential election of the Islamic
Republic of Iran, I was at a conference in nearby Yerevan, Armenia. I recognized an Iranian
professor and asked if he had any news of the preliminary results. Fraud, he said. They stole
it. One day later, I flew into Tehran for a planned year-long research trip, and ended up
witnessing the largest street protests in Iran since the 1979 revolutionwhat became known as
the Green movement. Recalling Craig Calhouns experiences in China (1994), when a teaching
stay in Beijing fortuitously allowed him to observe the Tiananmen uprising, I did what any
right-minded sociologist is supposed to do: look for trouble. Over the next ten months, I
attended rallies, observed protest dynamics, interviewed participants and non-participants, and
traveled to provinces beyond Tehran for further inquiries.
The Green movement surprised not just outside onlookers, but also many Iranians
themselves. The Islamic Republics 2009 presidential election campaign, though predicted to be
scripted and formulaic, mobilized networks of activists and created a rare carnivalesque
atmosphere of public participation in the weeks leading up to the vote. Early election returns
announced by former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavis campaign showed him in the lead
with at least a runoff vote expected, but news quickly shifted to the Interior Ministrys official
declaration of a landslide for the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Shock and dismay among
Mousavi supporters turned into small protest gatherings of hundreds on election night in Tehran,
with sporadic violence by both government backers and opponents. The next day, June 13, the
unrest involved thousands. Evidence of fraud was circumstantial but widely perceived. If true,
vote rigging of that scale was unprecedented in post-revolutionary Iran.
Three days after the election, on June 15, over a million people marched in Tehrans
Freedom Square, with nonviolent rallies continuing each day for the next week. The states
_______________________________
*

Fieldwork for this article was carried out from June 2009 through May 2010 in Tehran as well as several other
Iranian provinces, with an additional visit in May 2011. My work was assisted by a fellowship from the International
Dissertation Research Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council, with funds provided by the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Thanks to Ben Scully, Dan Pasciuti, Ali Reza Eshraghi, Arang Keshavarzian,
Farideh Farhi, and Charles Kurzman for helpful comments and suggestions.

Kevan Harris is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University in the Department of Near Eastern Studies.
Please direct correspondence to kevanh@princeton.edu.
2012 Mobilization: An International Journal 17(4):435-455

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Mobilization

coercive efforts to contain the protests were coupled with organizational disarray within
oppositional forces. Almost all of the contention occurred in the capital of Tehran, though
notable protests occurred in other cities for one or two days. Eventually, the numbers
dwindled. Ahmadinejad was sworn in as president on July 30, and the recognized leaders of
the Green movementMousavi and another presidential candidate, the former speaker of
parliament Mehdi Karroubibegan to call for public rallies on holidays with symbolic
revolutionary and religious significance. These rallies kept the movement in the news, but did
little to convince fence sitters to participate. Eventually, with the exception of a massive
December rally in the city of Qom for the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri,
an oppositional icon for many in Iran, self-identified Green activism moved almost wholly to
the online sphere by spring 2010.1 In figure 1, I combine newspaper reports, my own estimates of crowd sizes, and interviews with movement participants to graph out the protest
wave (in logarithmic scale so that the June 15 demonstration does not crowd out the Y-axis).
A box in the figures upper-right corner lists protest events and estimated sizes from late July
2009 to February 2010, which are excluded from the graphs time frame.
While these are rough estimates, the trend in figure 1 is clear enough. The post-election
uprising quickly spread beyond initial protest participants, peaked only a few days after the
election, and then narrowed to a generally consistent size that continued to sporadically
punctuate the post-election order. If a single moment during the Green movement most
exhibited the broad cross-class power to mobilize that can force democratization onto a state
with divided elites (Luebbert 1991; Slater 2010), it was early in the protest wave. Any
consideration of the 2009 protests in Iran, then, needs to take into account quieter processes of
demobilization as much as the dramatic and unexpected outbreak of protest which briefly
captured world attention. The standard account of the Green movement characterizes it as a
rejection of theocratic dictatorship by cosmopolitan urban youth catalyzed by Internet tools.
This account must be subjected to ethnographic scrutiny. The protest wave seemed to emerge
out of nowhere. But state repression alone cannot account for its rapid decline.
In this article, I move from a microscopic to a wide-angle view by analyzing tiny and
large social processes at work in Irans Green movement: how it manifested, why it
weakened, and who participated. My analysis utilizes and builds on several lines of research
in the study of contentious politics: mechanisms of micro-interaction and emotional resonance
(Collins 2001; Jasper 2011), the structuration of contingent turning points (Beissinger 2011),
the relation between face-to-face and facebook-to-facebook activisms (Earl et al. 2010),
and the impact of class and social structure on political orientation and movement participation (Walder 2009). I give evidence for the following points. First, the pre-electoral
presidential campaigns in May-June 2009 created public spaces for interaction rituals of high
emotional energy. These crowds and rallies generated a brokered exuberance which lowered the perception of participation costs and overcame free-rider dilemmas. This preelectoral mobilization spilled over into contentious protest after the last straw of perceived
electoral fraud. Second, there was no technological fix. Ordinary, non-networked Iranians
utilized face-to-face interaction to broaden and recharge the protest wave, while Internet
activism confused as much as coordinated the organization of street protests. This facebookto-facebook activism could not substitute for offline forms of activism. While online protest
served to clarify and funnel oppositional grievances and demands to international supporters,
it could also demobilize potential participants inside Iran. Finally, the social power and
political orientation of Green protestors were connected to the increased relative size of the
middle class in Iran, as defined by occupational and educational characteristics as well as
social disposition. While the peak of the protests featured broad, cross-class participation, the
movements main constituency was the middle class, whose empowerment stems from the
developmental push of the Islamic Republic over the past two decades. The Green movement
was therefore shaped in part by the modernizing efforts of the post-revolutionary state itself.

Millions

Estimated Protest Size

100,000s

10,000s

1,000s

100s

Key Incidents

Subsequent Days with Protests (Estimates)

June 12. Election Day

June 15. 1-3 million march at Freedom Square; reformist
intellectuals and politicians arrested
June 16. General strike called by opposition
June 17. Tehran University dormitories attacked
June 19. Mousavi asks for a day without protest; leader Ali
Khamenei gives Friday sermon declaring Ahmadinejad
the elections winner, warning protesters to stop.
June 20. Neda Agha-Soltan is shot near Worker Avenue
June 25. Demonstrations near Tehrans Parliament
June 28. Protests near Qoba Mosque
July 9. Protests on anniversary of 1999 student unrest
July 17. Hashemi Rafsanjani gives Friday sermon stating
doubt exists about election results

July 30. Ahmadinejad is sworn in as president

(1000s)
September 18. Qods Day (10,000s)
September 28. First day of university (1000)
November 4. Anniversary of US Embassy
takeover (1000s)
December 8. Student Day (1000s)
December 21. Grand Ayatollah Montazeris
funeral in Qom (100,000s)
December 27. Ashura (1000s)
February 11. Revolution Day (1000s)

Mobilization

438

FROM ANOMIC APATHY TO BROKERED EXUBERANCE

Iran is usually placed in the middle of the linear, numbered scales of procedural democracy
common to cross-national studies: a hyphenated regime of semi-democracy (Diamond,
Linz, and Lipset 1988) or competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky and Way 2010). Ever since
the Khomeinist post-revolutionary consolidation and onset of an eight-year war with Baathist
Iraq, political elites grouped loosely within factional associations have continually contested
for power. These elite struggles occur both within the institutional framework of the state as
well as through print and televised media. Voter participation, while highly uneven, is encouraged by the regime for symbolic purposes of legitimation. While a House-of-Lords-styled
Guardian Council vets candidates, the contrasts in candidates open for voter consideration are
often stark enough to produce robust campaigns and surprising results (Keshavarzian 2005).
In addition, or in tandem, contentious politics have been endemic to post-revolutionary Iran:
sub-proletarian unrest over land and housing (Bayat 1997), recurring student demonstrations
over political rights and civil liberties (Mahdi 1999), and vigorous womens rights campaigns
by social movement organizations (Hoodfar and Sadeghi 2009). These bottom-up
mobilizations have continually forced the fractious political elite to refashion their own mass
appeals for electoral participation.
During my previous visits to Iran over 2006-08, however, the popular climate was
unmistakably apathetic, almost Brezhnevian in tone. The agenda of a self-described reformist
administration and liberal intellectual currents of the late 1990s under President Mohammad
Khatami had been thoroughly blocked by state institutions dominated by regime conservatives. Moreover, the reformist political movement had become increasingly divided into
tendentious internal schisms and relied on a narrowing social base of support. The new
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had skillfully flanked the reformists by re-engineering the
conservative brand with renewed attention to quotidian, socioeconomic issues. His 2005
election, as well as the hostile geopolitical environment generated by ongoing U.S. wars in the
region, dampened the spirits of those hoping for incremental political change. Above all, the
commodity-linked economic boom of 2006-07 set off a speculative binge by an upwardly
aspirant middle class in land, housing, or any other activity with which one could arbitrage
social connections. A well-publicized but highly ineffective state effort at policing dress
among women and men in Tehrans main squares during the hot summers generated mild
grumbling but was easily evaded. Religious head coverings continued to creep revealingly
upwards among women, and hairstyle and dress continued operating as main sites of status
and class distinction for both sexes. Those who could afford luxury-clothing brands displayed
them, while innovations existed for conspicuous consumption by the less wealthy. A short
visit to any of Tehrans bazaars and malls could obtain a metal Gucci emblem to be
subsequently fastened onto a Chinese pair of blue jeans. The import of expensive European
cars100 percent tariff includedwas a notable topic of interest at cafes. Outside Iran,
scholars looked desperately for signs of resistance: teenage hedonism, rap music, and brain
drain were posited as weapons of the weak. Inside the country, intellectuals lamented the
publics lack of social capital, since popular sociological texts by internationally prestigious
publishers informed them that a narrow ideal-type of civil society identified in the early
nineteenth century by de Tocqueville was the only modern pathway to democracy.2 Philosophers maintained in newspaper op-eds that Iranians were anomic and materialist, yet still
trapped between tradition and modernity due to exceptional circumstances of history and
culture. Or so it seemed. Then, as Joseph Heller might put it, something happened.
According to one Iranian reporter familiar with domestic elections, the truncated length
of the countrys political campaigns, which usually begin one to two months before the
election date, makes for compressed excitement. In Mashhad in 2001, he told me, during
the re-election campaign of former President Mohammad Khatami, most people proclaimed
their abstinence from voting but then showed up in a remarkably high turnout (see Sohrabi and

The Brokered Exuberance of the Middle Class

439

Keshavarzian 2001 for similar observations). For the events of 2009, the dynamic that
Beissinger described in the Orange protests in Ukraine, where heightened organization that
emerged during the electoral campaign . . . spilled over into protest after a perceived stolen
election (2011: 28), is strikingly similar to the Iranian case. One individual said that he had
returned to the country 25 days before the election, but felt no sense that any popular mobilization was happening until around 10 days prior to the voting. To a degree, then, the most
familiar setting for the 2009 election was the late 1990s apogee of the reformist movement
and its promises of social laxity and democratic renewal.
Unlike the Ukrainian case, however, mobilization for oppositional candidates, in the
capital of Tehran at least, mainly occurred outside of existing campaign organizations. I
interviewed a reporter from Irans Press TV who had traveled widely with the campaigns of
Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubithe two candidates most associated with the
reformist movement. Outside of Tehran, their events generally were routine and rested on
appeals to revolutionary status groups: war martyrs, university student associations, local
clerics and their mosque networks. The divisive incumbent president, Ahmadinejad, was
labeled as incompetent, and reformists promised to be better stewards of the state. These preelection rallies, the reporter noted, tended to attract big crowds, but it was uncertain if the
organizational power of the candidates campaigns could produce the high turnout needed for
a repeat of the electoral outcomes during the late 1990s. Indeed, the president was also being
challenged on similar grounds by the candidacy of Mohsen Rezai, a man impeccably
credentialed as former Commander of the Revolutionary Guards during the Iran-Iraq war. The
apparent apathy and routinized behavior of the electorate portended that, even if opposition
candidates wished for an electoral model of democratizationwhereby elections are used
by democratizing opposition forces to overcome the structural advantages of elites in semiauthoritarian regimes (Bunce and Wolchik 2011)there was little chance of its implementation. Well before the Iranian election, a 2008 Gallup poll (2009) found only 50 percent of
respondents expressing confidence in the honesty of elections. Urban respondents were less
confident (36 percent) than rural respondents (66 percent) and younger respondents were less
confident (43 percent) than older ones (56 percent). These numbers are all the more striking
when one considers that they were conducted in a more reliable face-to-face format.3
The first week of June 2009, however, changed the stakes of the coming election for
many Iranians. One-on-one debates took place between each of the four candidates on live
television, beginning with a heated debate between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi over the
incumbents record in office as compared with his predecessors. Mousavi had previously been
remembered as a rather skinny lay-Islamist revolutionary who steered the country through the
Iran-Iraq war as prime minister in the 1980s, but then retired to a mostly apolitical existence
of painting, poetry, and architectural design. Suddenly he was reborn as a symbol of challenge
to the status quo and the best chance for toppling the polarizing incumbent. One young
woman told me that a group of her friends had attended an exhibition of Mousavis collected
paintings a week before the election in one of the dozens of art galleries that pepper Tehrans
north central neighborhoods. Instead of grandfatherly and jejune, the sexagenarians abstract
pen work and calligraphy was considered sexy.
This libidinal resonance was related to an increasing mobilization of fun that emerged
during the week of the televised debates. Some debates were projected onto large screens in
public parks, generating peaceful but competitive sloganeering among crowds on streets and
highways. Ahmadinejads campaign events were slickly organized and well-funded, utilizing
existing institutional networks of state supporters, such as locals of the paramilitary Basij
corps. Yet the presidents backers and campaign workers also moved throughout the capitals
neighborhoods in force, arguing with impromptu critics on the street. Mousavi and Karroubi
events could either fall apart before they even beganone Karroubi rally in Vali Asr square
had the electricity cut offor they could be intense and galvanizing, surprising many of their
own participants. Mousavis campaign was backed by wealthy supporters and reformist

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Mobilization

organizations, and drew on support from impromptu workshops that created slogans and
glossy posters. Rumor had it that Tehrans moderately conservative mayor, Mohammad
Qalibaf, was involved in such support activities. Yet according to Mousavi campaign
volunteers, individuals with no ties to the campaign also improvised slogans and signs that
were both picked up by the campaign and also used informally in popular gatherings.4
After each nights televised debate, small and medium-sized groups, mostly young
people, would congregate on Tehrans main streets and square off in raucous yet civil debate.
Chanted slogans were colloquially crafted and passed along via cellphone text message or by
face-to-face contact. Spontaneous political gatherings of this size are rare in contemporary
Iran, and the carnivalesque egalitarianism (Auyero 2004) experienced in the nocturnal
mixing of politics with sexual and fraternal contact attracted thousands of participants and
perpetrators. These scenes were reminiscent of extemporized street celebrations after Irans
soccer team won several World Cup matches in 1997-98, celebrations which had flouted the
states normative and declared codes of public social conduct. Police presence grew throughout the week of debates, but mostly acted to keep opposing campaign supporters apart. The
peak of this pre-election mobilization was arguably a pro-Mousavi human chain that formed
along one of Tehrans longest streets on June 8, four days before the election. On the same
day, a large Ahmadinejad rally was held at the enormous Mosalla mosque in Tehran. These
events were the result of organizational efforts, to be sure (see Ehsani et al 2009), yet the campaigns were collectively aiming to increase electoral participation, not rambunctious crowds.
In sum, the apathy of 2006-08 was gone and belief in a sort of rump democracy emerged.
Certainly, in the Iranian milieu, public gatherings sanctioned as election-related events
reduced the costs of individual participation. Yet the forms of mobilization that emerged did not
fall within a dichotomous conception of state and civil society, although this is how scholars
and participants alike reified the outcomes after the fact (e.g., post-election reflections by
Iranian journalists collected in Michaelsen 2011). Instead, the pre-electoral mobilization
resembled the boundary-spanning contention that OBrien (2002) observed in Chinese village
elections, where the demarcation between institutionalized and unconventional political
behavior is more fluid. Mildly transgressive public acts of contention can sometimes produce
disproportionate social-structural change when the political routines are in flux.
Still, how did anyone actually know participation costs would be lowered and risks
minimized? It was hardly the state-sanctioned events that generated the most momentum, but
rather the informal spillover of mobilization into new arenas of public interaction. There were
few pre-existing activist networks that could reduce the free-rider problem of participation
through reciprocal understandings of social trust. Instead, as blog posts of participants in preelection rallies and gatherings attest (Kadivar 2011), it was the very act of attending these
interaction rituals that gave rise to the collective solidarity and emotional effervescence that
generated the perception of low participation costs (Collins 2001). Initially skeptical
attendants stood outside the crowds, were handed a placard or a ribbon, and then later
remarked surprisingly in online testimonials at their own feelings of exhilaration and optimism. To introduce one more neologism into the crowded terminology of social movement
studies, this mechanism could be called brokered exuberance. If brokerage alters relations
between specifiable persons or sites, allowing collective action to spread along the newly
created network pathway (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2008: 322), brokered exuberance is
the micro-interactional process through which emotional transformation occurs, generating
feelings of group solidarity and belonging that can temporarily paper over the inherent and
palpable feelings of uncertainty present in collective action.
Using the case of post-9/11 Philadelphia, Collins (2004) showed how interaction rituals
went through a period of creative improvisation and then a subsequent homogenization. The
same can be said of the slogans, banners, and clothing items utilized by Iranians (e.g., green
ribbons, headbands, hand signals, face paint). As certain symbolic forms of social solidarity
become more acceptable than others, Erving Goffman once noted, a shared repertoire of action

The Brokered Exuberance of the Middle Class

441

emerges. These became important during subsequent protests as markers of trust, mechanisms
of cohesion, and indicators of political orientation. Furthermore, the countermobilization of
Ahmadinejad supporters, with routines of catcalling and teasing between small groups in
streets and squares each night, were not simply the expression of authoritarian clients squaring
off against lifelong democrats. Rather, it was a simultaneous escalation (Collins 2001: 39)
of emotional effervescence on both sides. This escalation produced an unexpected
mobilizational momentum before the elections had even taken place. The sociologist Hossein
Ghazian (2010) contended that this relational dynamic generated an ever-increasing belief on
all sides that their favored candidate would assuredly win. If Mousavi had been announced as
the winner, Ghazian argued, Ahmadinejad supporters would have conversely protested the
results in the public arena as well. Voter turnout, according to both state and opposition
accounts, reached 80-85% of the electorate. The reported outcomeAhmadinejad with 64%
of the vote compared to Mousavis 34%bewildered the latters supporters. The state
response to the election evenings unrest was swift. Over the next two days, Mousavi and
Karroubis key strategists were arrested. This largely crippled the organizational apparatus of
opposition. Yet, unexpectedly, the mobilizational wave then began to surge.
By attending to the role of transient yet rechargeable cycles of emotional effervescence,
Collinss interaction rituals are a Durkheimian solution to the free rider problem in contentious politics (see Collins 2010 for a useful synthesis of Tilly and Goffman). In addition, they
may operate as modular mechanisms that can shed light on the complex of relations between
long-standing affective commitments or moral emotions and short-run reflex emotions
(Jasper 2011: 297; also see Emirbayer and Goldberg 2005). These tiny social processes are at
times, fortunately, observable. Take, for example, New Yorker journalist Laura Secors (2009)
account of her phone conversation with a female protestor on June 15, the peak day of the
post-election protests:
She is not an activist, just an ordinary citizen whose family has been harassed by the Islamic
Republic for nearly thirty years. Last night, when she got through after two hours of trying [to
make a cellphone call], her voice sounded lighter than ever. Not giddy; lucid, bright,
unburdened. She had spent the last days in the streets. She was one of the millions in Azadi
Square on Monday. The energy, she told me, was indescribable. You could not feel afraid; the
sense of common purpose was too powerful, and it had left her with a profound and nearly
serene certainty that this movement would succeed.

This sentiment, relayed at the height of the protest wave, continued to be felt by protesters
well after the Green movement had arguably entered its demobilization phase (indeed, my
own field notes after attending protests contain several personal observations with a similar
tone). As Collins noted, successful interaction rituals can prove to be cathartic, transforming
feelings of anger and fear into enthusiasm and moral certitude (2001: 29).5
During the first week of post-election protests I witnessed numerous displays of moral
shock when an unexpected event or piece of information raises such a sense of outrage in
a person that she becomes inclined towards political action (Jasper 1998: 409)at the microinteractional level. Moral shocks in face-to-face settings served to recharge emotional energy,
even in leaderless crowds of hundreds of thousands. For instance, individuals printed out
pictures of dead or wounded participants of earlier protests and held them aloft during
marches. Since most protesters were not Internet users, they had not heard of these casualties.
Individuals then used their cellphones and cameras to take pictures of the printed photos in
order to show them to relatives and coworkers who had not attended the rallies. People took
pictures of pictures, of crowds, of themselves in crowds, and of other people taking pictures.
This was not a postmodern exercise but a highly emotional interaction ritual that drew in
participants and convinced them to convince others to join.
The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, in his inimitable style, drew attention to these
crowd dynamics from his own experiences in the largely nonviolent 1979 Iranian revolution.

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Mobilization

He recalled a scene, for instance, where the action of a single person created a sense of
emboldened bravery which charged through a demonstration and forced the police to back
down (1992: 109). I often saw a combination of transitory curiosity and emotional resonance
draw in individuals who were walking in the opposite direction going about their daily
business. Successful mobilization arguably contains thousands of these tiny Kapuscinski
moments. Although the first two nights of the post-election protests involved a few sporadic
instances of violence and property damage, which were immediately highlighted by state media,
the large crowds on subsequent days shifted the symbolic and strategic repertoire towards
nonviolent forms of protest.
The Green movement, to be sure, did not happen in a vacuum. The crowds drew on the
historical memory of the 1979 revolution, consciously engaging in a variety of public actions
such as daytime mass rallies and evening chants of God is Great. Yet this time, three
decades later, the marches centered on the issue of rectification of electoral fraud, using the
phrase, Where is my vote? The slogan may have seemed insufficiently denunciatory for the
most diehard critics of the Iranian government, yet it was this symbolic and strategic repertoire that convinced many individuals to participate after the election results. The unexpected
upsurge that ensued paralyzed the coercive arm of the state over the first protest week. During
this post-election mobilizational phase, pre-electoral symbols also re-emerged with an even
more resonant signification, though hardly planned in advance. For example, the use of a long
green string during the human chain event on June 8 before the election, symbolizing the
connectedness and breadth of Mousavi supporters, showed up in the repertoire of a rally I
attended on June 16. I watched hundreds of people wearily hold up a green string for a march
of nearly three hours. It was through these tiny, cumulative symbolic actions, face-to-face,
that the unexpectedly large protest sizes quickly materialized.
The suspicion with which Beissinger (2011) approaches grand causal arguments for
explaining the 2004 Orange revolutioncivil society as autonomous force or generational
change in youth valuesis equally apropos for the Iranian case. Unfortunately, unlike in
Ukraine, we do not possess the survey polling data to parse out the social characteristics of
Green movement participants and their frequency of protest. But according to opposition
accounts, 107 individuals died as a result of repression in post-election protests from June
2009 to March 2010, whether on the street, in jail, or in hospital. Of this total, 13 percent were
women and at least 22 percent were active university students (Sahimi 2010). A smaller,
perhaps less representative, sample of 20 victims from another source revealed 52 percent
students, 14 percent white collar employees, 19 percent shopkeepers, and 14 percent workers
(Parsa 2009). In either accounting, this is certainly a broader coalition of social actors than in
previous instances of public protest in post-revolutionary Iran.
One hundred and seven fatalities are a serious matter, but they are far fewer than the
number of deaths recorded by Human Rights Watch (2011) in the first week of Egypts 2011
uprising302, with 232 in the capital Cairo. Amnesty International (2011) later reported that
at least 840 people had been killed during the entire Egyptian uprising. In other words, at their
height the Green protests in Iran were broad, cross-class, and seemingly repressed by the state
to a lesser degree than in the Tahrir uprising in Egypt.6 Yet the Green movement soon
experienced downward scale shifts in public presencea reverse of the mobilizing process
whereby a change in the number and level of coordinated contentious actions [leads] to
broader contention involving a wider range of actors and [bridges] their claims and identities
(McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001: 331). Instead, participants in the pre and post-election
rallies mostly morphed into a set of networked groups that communicated online.
In short, these findings suggest that the Green movement exhibited protest characteristics
similar to those seen in Ukraine and perhaps many other instances of contentious politics in
semiauthoritarian states. Irans 2009 protest wave was a conjunctural phenomenon consisting
of the rapid emergence of an oppositional culture in the pre-election period, the last straw of
a perceived stolen election triggering deeper sets of accumulated grievances, and a quick up-

The Brokered Exuberance of the Middle Class

443

surge in public protest that joined together a weakly tied but broad coalition of actors in a
more or less unified emotional space of high ritual density. Yet this contention escalated to a
peak quite early in the protest wave, as figure 1 illustrates. The remaining protests over the
next several months, occurring mostly on symbolic revolutionary holidays, were attempts to
rekindle the earlier emotional energy of the post-election weeks. The organizational apparatus
that had created momentum for the unexpected spillover of post-election protest was no
longer present, and was thus unable to harness and direct this effervescent wave of protest. As
participants admitted to me, demonstrations generated less and less momentum over time, and
only those with strong ties to the movement remained. Still, given the fluid nature of the
Green movements high point, how did Iranians even manage to generate the mobilization
that did occur? Foreign observers and media sources assumed the power of new technology
filled this missing gap between organization and collective action. My first-hand experience,
however, suggests this explanation glosses over the facts on the ground.
FACEBOOK-TO-FACE ACTIVISM: INTERNET FACILITATION OR CONFUSION?
Collins argues that the escalation of emotional energy in social movements requires face-toface interaction. Others contend that Internet activism can draw individuals into action, both
online and offline, who would previously have avoided participation due to perceptions of
high costs. Earl et al. (2010: 441) note that online activism can often mobilize the five-minute
participant, which may give the impression of wide support for a particular cause and overcome the free rider dilemma, but the weak ties formed in resultant networks can easily
unravel. Irans Green movement certainly generated new expectations among many commentators concerning the relationship between online media and social movements. Even the U.S.
State Department, believing much of the Green protests were being coordinated and microorganized online, asked the company Twitter to delay a scheduled hour-long maintenance
shutdown on June 16 so that Iranians could access the site during the day.
It is difficult to categorically assess the added effect of Internet networks and communication on the Green protest wave. According to the consulting firm Sysomos (2009), over
8,600 Twitter accounts had been created inside Iran by mid-May 2009, while after the June
election this number jumped to over 19,000. The first number seems accurate, given that the
accounts stated their location as Iran when users first signed up. Yet since many individuals
outside of Iran switched the registered location of their Twitter accounts to Tehran or started
new ones and designated their locations as Tehran, the latter number is likely an overestimate.
Iranians abroad and other Green supporters did this in a coordinated effort to prevent the
Iranian state from locating online activists, but it inevitably generated mass confusion. Several
times during the first two weeks of post-election protests, different locations for rallies were
stated online via Twitter or newly created oppositional Green websites. Even though many
activists endeavored to determine which sites and calls to action were authentically attached
to movement leaders, the cacophonous postings of alternate times and places for rallies
resulted in the fragmentation of protest dynamics. On one day, I had no less than three rallies
to choose from, all of which had been listed online. The one I attended turned out to be the
wrong rally, yet thousands of people showed up alongside me. Only at the rally could
individuals communicate to others the location of the larger rally a few kilometers south.
Conversely, at a rally in the same place a few days before, I marched with a few hundred
thousand individuals westwards and, at the impromptu end of the march, many people handed
out freshly printed postbills or simply whispered among the crowd: Tomorrow. Revolution.
Four. (i.e., the following day at Revolution Square at four oclock in the evening). The
Revolution Square rally on the day afterwards, which I attended, did not have any competitors. Landline phones and mobile cellphones also acted as more effective methods of
communication, though the latter were blocked on particular days. This pattern is not neces-

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Mobilization

sarily a result of Internet v. face-to-face organization alone. During the Egyptian uprising in
February 2011, around 20-30 Twitter accounts were enough to create a trusted network of
information dissemination. But this information was largely directed at the media world
outside of Egypt, not internally at the millions without daily Internet access.7
One aspect of the Sysomos analysis may be accurate: 93 percent of the Twitter users
registered in Iran by June 19, 2009, were located in Tehran. In fact, as figure 1 shows, the
geographical distribution of protests in Iran was almost entirely centered in the capital.
Protests did take place in Tabriz, Ahvaz, Shiraz, Isfahan, Qazvin, and several other large
provincial cities, but most lasted no longer than one or two days, according to my interviews
and news accounts. These mostly occurred around universities, and students were more
heavily represented in provincial demonstrations. The center-periphery dynamic in Iran
neither diffused from the capital outwards nor generated a relationally linked upsurge between
cities that could outpace the states response. This capital-centric pattern diverges with the
Arab uprisings of 2011, where provincial mobilization performed key roles. In fact, the
capital-centric pattern of the 2009 Green movement occurred even though Internet activists
called for protests in provincial cities, mimicking the tactics of Tehrans protests. This
suggests that while online facilitation of offline mobilization took place, there must be enough
brokers on the ground for face-to-face interactions to generate the trust required to
coordinate and escalate protest incidents at the microlevel.8
There is evidence that opposition leaders inside Iran utilized Internet networks to deliver
communiqus to the population. One study analyzed Persian-language comments and likes
on Mir Hossein Mousavis official Facebook page on a daily basis, finding that on days when
the state had slowed or altogether stopped internet access, there was significantly less activity
on the page (Cross 2010).9 Individuals inside Iran, in the thousands at least, did read and
comment on the oppositions discourse as it developed during the months after the election.
As demobilization set in and the state crafted more effective countermeasures to disperse
rallies, however, Internet activism also generated incentives for people not to attend public
protests. This was not only due to a proliferation of five-minute activists who became more
comfortable in online mode than offline. Demobilization also occurred because numerous
online postings drew attention to, and amplified the severity of, violent acts committed against
protesters. For example, the disturbingly graphic shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan convinced
many that the costs of participation were too high. One middle-class professional who
attended many of the protests told me that he had tried to cajole his entire office staff to visit
the rallies. In his opinion, one could generally escape to safety when segments of the crowds
encountered police attacks. Yet instead, he recounted, his colleagues and staff spent the days
of the protests mostly watching videos of protest violence online, using the offices highspeed Internet connection and becoming increasingly horrified. The mobilizational effect of
moral shocks, at some point, reversed to a demobilizational effect on many individuals as they
went online and witnessed spectacles of repression.10
Internet-based information did supplement many protestors repertoires of action, such as
using cigarettes or lemonade to counter the effects of tear gas on the eyes (I observed both
substances being applied to much comical effect). Yet this information was mostly disseminated in face-to-face situations, even if one person had learned of these measures from Internet
sources. In many cases, prioritizing information from the Internet misled the media outside of
Iran about the extent of protest levels. For example, the New York Times reported on June 26,
two weeks after the election, that a nightly 10:00 P.M. protest call of Allahu Akbar (God is
great)a Green movement reframing of the 1979 revolutionary sloganhad been growing
stronger by the day (Fathi and Slackman 2009). This claim, which implied that the movement was still growing larger, was patently not true. It may have been perceived to be true, if
one was reporting from a few neighborhoods in northern Tehran or receiving limited
information from individuals solely in those neighborhoods. Not only did these areas contain
a large proportion of home Internet users, but the presence of high-rise apartment buildings

The Brokered Exuberance of the Middle Class

445

there also guaranteed that one could engage in this particular word of mouth interaction ritual
with very low cost of participation. I lived in a lower-middle class/working-class neighborhood in eastern Tehran and observed nightly calls of Allahu Akbar during the period that
overlapped with the largest protest days of June 15-20 (see figure 1). I recorded audio of the
calls on several evenings outside my window. Listening closely to these audio recordings, I
could tell that this form of protest was a family affair. During these initial days, I recorded
elderly shouters, women, and even small children taking part in the nightly protest ritual.
Afterwards, however, these waves of shouts never returned to my neighborhood, though I did
occasionally observe them in wealthier areas of northern Tehran in subsequent weeks.
Nevertheless, online activist sites continued to call for rooftop shouts of Allahu Akbar, long
after they had stopped inside the country.
Assuming a correspondence between online activist appeals and offline participation,
therefore, can be deceptive for social scientists. More importantly, it can be demobilizing for
social movements. In February 2010, on the eve of an expected protest to counter official
celebrations on Revolution Day, Internet sites and blogs were predicting a sizeable opposition
turnout by hardcore Green activists. Months later, I was told that a few Iranians in the U.S.
diaspora had literally expected the government to fall on this day, and had been discussing
their subsequent return to the homeland. My information on Revolution Day activities came
from a different source, however, and turned out to be more accurate. I inquired at a local
tourist agency if business was doing poorly, and was assured that flights to Dubai, Turkey,
and Caspian Sea resortscheap travel packages for middle-class Iranianshad been booked
for weeks in advance. On February 11, I walked among tens of thousands of Revolution Day
marchers and their families as they trudged past hundreds of nationalist kiosks, athletic
displays, and government tents near Freedom Square. Their participation was not a heartfelt
defense of the state, but rather the equivalent of a Sunday outing to the park. Few protests had
materialized, and the gap between expectations and outcome for those who attended in
anticipation of a protest further convinced many of the movements disintegration. The tourist
agent turned out to be a better predictor of mobilization than the Internet. Sreberny and
Khiabanys (2010) perspective, from the field of media studies, fits with my own general
experiences as a participant observer:
There is little evidence that Twitter and Facebook or YouTube played a major role in
organizing demonstrations. They did became [sic] channels through which messages could be
sent to international media organisations that had little access and first-hand information about
what was happening in Iran. These sites also attracted messages and actions of international
solidarity as well as mobilising the Iranian diaspora. . . . [P]art of the move to use new technologies in Iran has been because of the profound difficulties of organizing face-to-face
politics and peaceful demonstrations. Facebook and Twitter came into their own as other
platforms and voices were closed down. However, the real action remained on Iranian streets
and rooftops. . . . The green wave has shown, however, how much can be achieved within a repressive context. But it has also shown that technologies in themselves are insufficient substitute
for political strategy, goals and discourse. (Sreberny and Khiabany 2010: 175, 181)

The idea that cutting-edge forms of technology are liberating is an old one in popular culture.
Yet the dynamics of mobilization in the Green protests were not a harbinger of a new type of
twenty-first century rebellion. This begs the question: who did rebel? The issue is important
not only for what it tells us about contentious politics in Iran, but also what it illustrates about
the Islamic Republic itself.
PINNING DOWN CLASS IN THE GREEN MOVEMENT
When standing in the middle of a social movement, tiny processes of emotional and strategic
micro-interaction can be easy for a sociologist to observe. Yet ethnographic data can also be

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Mobilization

used to examine large social processes. Although the Green protest wave arose for conjunctural reasons, as I argued above, its movement dynamics illustrated broader socialstructural processes of class formation. This is relevant because, as Walder (2009: 400, 406)
pointed out, mobilization studies have tended to neglect the relationship between social
structure, political orientation, and movement participation. We need to look at the social
lives of movement participants and nonparticipants alike in order to analyze the question of
the social structural circumstances that make certain interpretive frames, collective identities,
or emotions salient to potential participants in a movement. Ethnographic observation of
social class at work in movement dynamics captures particular elements of social-structural
change which otherwise might go unnoticed.
In the case of Iran, activists and journalists heatedly debated the issue of class composition of the demonstrations. This was not merely a speculative question. If the Green
protestors were mostly in the middle class, then did they really represent broad social
dissatisfaction with the post-revolutionary state? Were they constitutive of Iranian civil
society, or, even more nebulously, the Iranian nation? Or were protest participants a narrow segment of society that loudly proclaimed its opposition to the election outcome, while a
silent majority had voted in favor of the government? In response to commentators who
dismissed Irans protestors as part of the domestic bourgeoisie, for instance, Hamid Dabashi
irately stated that millions of educated youth who were also unemployed could not be
classified in the middle class (2011: 104-112). The debate itself tended to confuse the issue
further, since Iran is a middle-income country in the world economy and its class structure
differs from wealthy countries in North America and Europe. How class was defined and
framed in such a social movement had broader implications for the representation of political
claims and international appeal of self-identified Green activists. Ones position on the matter
often determined the definition of class that was used, not vice versa. The debate over class
composition in Irans 2009 protests became, in effect, a nondebate that used incommensurate
concepts of class to talk (or shout) at cross-purposes.
Tehrans geography, with northern high-rise apartments at the feet of the Alborz Mountains
and a sloping southward tilt, is often used as a proxy for social class. Before the 1979 revolution, it was widely known that uptown and downtown were shorthand for wealthy and
poor. To some degree, even though the city and its greater environs have nearly trebled in
population over the past three decades, this is still the case in popular terminology as well as
neighborhood layout (though caveats existsee Ehsani 1999). Subsequent to the Green
protests in June 2009, Irans Interior Ministry eventually released a full list of all polling
stations in the country, with the official vote counts at each station tabulated for the four
presidential candidates. For reasons not made clear, the Ministry never provided a corollary
list of the specific locations of these 45,692 stations. In other words, we can see the vote totals
for all the polling stations in Tehran and other provinces, but we cannot identify the neighborhood each polling station was located in, limiting our ability to investigate voting patterns
by income or any other variable. Nevertheless, a few polling station numbers were listed in
newspapers and blogs during the election period. From these, selected stations in Tehran
could be located in districts with different income levels, and are presented in table 1 as a very
rough proxy for voting patterns by income level.
While the data should be treated with caution, given allegations of vote fabrication
proffered by the opposition, the trends in table 1 suggest a link between income level and candidate preference. Lower-income Tehran neighborhoods voted for Ahmadinejad, while
middle- and upper-income neighborhoods voted for Mousavi.11 From this perspective, it seems
that an income-based definition of class neatly resolves the question of who participated in
post-election protests. Indeed, table 1 hides the fact that votes for Ahmadinejad might be even
more skewed towards low-income households, since individuals in Iran are not registered at
particular polling stations and can vote anywhere. Therefore, it is possible that poorer
individuals who work in wealthier districts such as Niavaran could have voted for Ahmadinejad

The Brokered Exuberance of the Middle Class

447

Table 1. Reported 2009 Voting Returns in Selected Tehran Neighborhoods [District Number,
Polling Station Number]
High Income
Mirdamad [3, 249]

Ahmadinejad

Mousavi

Karroubi*

Rezai*

Spoiled*

116 (7.4%)

1359 (87.1%)

35

45

Niavaran [1, 66]

276 (14.4)

1502 (78.4)

83

43

13

Shahrak-e Gharb [2, 112]

352 (13.7)

2072 (80.5)

59

78

13

Middle Income
Kerman St. [4, 317]

538 (29.3)

1204 (65.5)

13

57

25

Khosh St. [10, 116]

733 (35.8)

1197 (58.5)

31

46

39

Mehrabad [9, 1086-7]

921 (41.8)

1172 (53.2)

16

54

41

568 (54.4)

439 (42.0)

11

26

Low Income
Javadieh [16, 2190]
Javadieh [16, 2191]

618 (65.9)

283 (30.2)

14

20

Meydan Fallah [17, 2399]

1350 (77.9)

327 (18.9)

19

31

*Vote returns under five percent for candidates reported only in absolute numbers.
Source: Ballot results from identified polling stations were obtained from Iran Ministry of Interiors website (www.
moi.ir).My thanks go to Ali Reza Eshraghi for identifying locations of specific polling station from newspaper and
online reports.

there. Furthermore, Tehran is a far wealthier city than the rest of Iran, and so a middle-income
neighborhood in the countrys capital likely possesses higher-income households than in other
provincial cities and towns such as Yazd or Abadan, where middle-income neighborhoods
may have voted for Ahmadinejad. Even Tehrans low-income neighborhoods listed in the
table are wealthier than the poor neighborhoods of most cities elsewhere in the country.
Yet this static snapshot of Tehran voting preferences hides the complex roles of class and
geography in movement participation. As Asef Bayat (2010) has noted, this paradox city
has developed multiple sites of cross-class interaction since the 1979 revolution. These
urbanization processes undoubtedly played a part in broadening the protest dynamics of the
Green movement. Let me relate two ethnographic observations to illustrate. The Tehran metro
connects the far-flung neighborhoods of the city along a set of north-south and east-west
subway lines. East and West Tehran contain wealthy and poor neighborhoods alike, most of
which popped up after the 1979 revolution through government housing policies, informal
land grabs, and illegal license procurement. On protest days, I took the metro from distant east
Tehran into the city center along with thousands of other individuals who hopped on at
various stations. These easy access paths were important before the election during the
campaign mobilizations, but became crucial for the post-election demonstrations, since road
traffic would often be blocked or simply jammed to a standstill on days of protest. On the
train we mingled with others who, through tiny and silent symbolic cues, displayed the
appearance of a protestor just under the surface. However, it was difficult, though not always
impossible, to tell where anyone was from or what their background was. The protests drew
not only the politically militant but also the socially curious, misfit teenagers, and large
families with children. I often saw odd sorts jumbled similarly together in Tehrans large
public parks on Thursday evenings.
A few weeks after the election, I attended a welcome home party for a man who had
been caught by police near a protest that he was not even attending and then held in jail for
more than two weeks. He had stayed in a large cell with nearly twenty other detainees. Since
the arrest seemed quite random, I figured this jail cells population might represent a random
sample of the protest crowd who were haphazardly thrown into trucks and police cars. I asked

Mobilization

448

the man if he had befriended any of his cellmates during these two weeks, and if so did he
know where they lived in Tehran. Of course, he replied, we are all friends now, and I am
going to see some of them next week. Four or five of the cellmates were from southern Tehran
and had taken the metro train up to the protests where they were subsequently arrested. Urban
space, in other words, facilitated the cross-class protest surge, situating the events of 2009 in
the century-long tradition of urban-based mobilization in Iran.
The debate over middle-class protest participation cannot be blamed solely on polemics
over the Islamic Republic. Social scientists have not fared much better at constructing a fully
satisfactory definition of the middle class. As Dahrendorf (1959: 52) complained, there is no
word in any modern language to describe this group that is no group, class that is no class,
and stratum that is no stratum. Mann (1993: 547) categorized the debate over these middling
groups into five alternative sociological theories:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Part of the working classthe orthodox Marxian view

Part of the ruling bourgeoisie/capitalist classthe pessimistic Marxian view
In an ambiguous, contradictory class locationas theorized by Wright (1985)
Decomposed into upper and lower segments of different classes (e.g., Dahrendorf 1959)
A separate middle class whose power lies in market closure conferred by educational
credentials/technical skills (e.g., Giddens 1973)

These differing theories, however, were mostly formulated for interpreting social change in
wealthy European and North American countries. During the 1960s-70s, scholars focused on
the role of the intermediate classes in peripheral societies in supporting political change,
whether in left-wing revolutions or right-wing military coups (Ahmad 1985). Yet no matter
their political orientation and outsized impact, middle classes in poorer countries seemed to
share one common quality: they were a small minority of the population. Indeed, formal
industrial workers in Third World countries would often be grouped in with professionaltechnical workers as a labor aristocracy that allegedly allied with postcolonial governments
at the expense of the larger informal urban and rural labor force.
As with any middle-income country, therefore, Irans occupational structure looks different than it would in a wealthy country. Yet change in Irans occupational structure through
time can provide valuable information for analyzing collective identities and grievances
observed during the Green protests. In table 2, I condense and adapt occupational classification data from Iranian censuses collected by Behdad and Nomani (2009).
Table 2 shows changes in the relative size of occupational classes in Iran during the postrevolutionary period. Several notable trends stand out in the data. First, formal wageworkers
shrunk as a percentage of the labor force after the 1979 revolution, and their relative size has
not recovered to pre-revolutionary levels. This was partly produced by capital flight from the
import-substitution sections of the Pahlavi monarchys industrial base. The Islamic Republic
did return to industrial planning during its five-year development plans beginning in the late
1980s, but the process of formal wage labor proletarianization, at least in the form understood
by classical political economy, stagnated. Second, as the inverse of this process, the informal
sector, consisting mostly of self-employed workers or workshop owners, has persisted over
the past four decades as a substantial segment of the labor force. This phenomenon is not
limited to post-revolutionary Iran. Similar countries throughout the global South, including
much of Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, have exhibited
persistence and even a relative expansion of the informal labor force (e.g., Portes and Hoffman
2003; Davis 2006).12
Table 2 helps us draw some conclusions about social structure and movement participation. Surely individuals in the informal self-employed, formal wage labor, and professionaltechnical sectors are all still workers and could be classified as one large working class. Yet
the differing lived experiences of social class, occurring at the level of both workplace and

The Brokered Exuberance of the Middle Class

449

neighborhood, condition how individuals are disposed towards collective action (Katznelson
and Zolberg 1986). Individuals in these first two occupational classesformal wage labor and
informal laborhave engaged in protest over the past several years in Iran in a manner that
resembled collective action over shared economic grievances. These groups did not do so,
however, in the context of the Green movement. Industrial laborers have been striking with
increasing numbers in the steel, auto, and transportation sectors and other durable goodsproducing factories over the past decade (Harris 2011). This unrest usually occurs over economic grievances, such as the nonpayment of wages, the use of temporary contracts, and the
poor delivery of welfare benefits. Such protests resemble what Beverly Silver calls Polanyitype labor unrest, where workers resist the changes in production and dismantling of
manufacturing sectors brought about by global economic transformations and the abandoning from above of established social compacts (2003: 20).
Informal sector workers, who are often associated horizontally to the social nexus of
market bazaars, engaged in collective action along with larger shop owners against proposed
tax increases by the state on retail activities. These widespread shop closings, first in October
2008 and again in 2010 and 2011, point to antagonisms between a state attempting to build
governing capacity and an economic sector whose members struggle to avoid these regulatory
practices (Keshavarzian 2007). Yet it does not follow from these sporadic episodes of protest
that these occupational classes, on the whole, are linked to the political orientation of the
Green movement.
Table 2. Occupational Structure of the Iranian Labor Force, 1976-2006 (% of total labor force) a
1976
1986
1996
2006
Capitalists b

2.1

3.1

3.6

7.5

Modern

12.8

6.5

14.1

17.3

87.2

93.5

85.9

82.7

5.4

7.0

10.2

12.3

21.3

8.3

14.6

30.3

78.7

91.7

85.4

69.7

43.5

44.3

41.2

39.3

Unpaid Family Workers

26.7

9.9

13.3

8.4

40.2

24.6

30.7

30.4

84

67

69.5

76

16

33

30.5

24

8.3

16.8

11.1

8.7

8,799

11,002

14,572

20,476

Traditional
c

Professional-Technical
Private Sector
Public Sector

Informal and Self-Employed

Formal Wage Workers

Private Sector
Public Sector
Political Functionaries

Total Labor Force (thousands)

Column percentages do not add up to 100% as unspecified workers are not included. Italicized percentages refer
to percentages of the occupational category, not total labor force.
b
Capitalists are owners of physical and financial means of production; modern refers to managerial-administrative
or professional-technical occupations; traditional refers to clerical, sales, agricultural, or service occupations.
c
Professional-Technical refers to employees in managerial-administrative and professional-technical occupations
in both public and private sectors.
d
Informal and Self-Employed workers do not hire any paid workers but may rely on the work of unpaid family labor.
e
Formal Wage Workers are employees of the public and private sectors who do not own the means of production
or enjoy the authority and autonomy of those in professional-technical occupations.
f
Political Functionaries are those employed in the political apparatus of the state, including rank and file workers
as well as military, intelligence, and paramilitary forces.
a

Source: Behdad and Nomani (2009: 89)

450

Mobilization

Ethnographic observation illustrates how differences in class disposition and lived

experience can condition collective action. During one demonstration in the period of peak
protests from June 15 to 19, 2009, I stood on the sidewalk as a group of hundreds of thousands of Iranians marched past me. The street was located slightly north of the Tehran central
bazaar, lined with small shops that employed the informal workers who performed the difficult and menial tasks involved in retail and wholesale commerce. On the sidewalk with me
were thousands of these workers and shop owners milling around and gawking at the march.
This particular demonstration occurred before protest participation became more dangerous as
a result of intensified crowd-control tactics by the police. One could cross the street and join
without any apparent cost, just as I had seen hundreds of others spontaneously join in previous marches. Therefore it was as close as one could get to a natural laboratory for
observing how social class influences mobilization while it is taking place. Although only a
small metal barricade separated the onlookers from the marchers, no one crossed the street to
join in. The micro-interactional emotional energy generated by the marching protestors did
not transfer over a class boundary that was deeply felt by those standing beside me. Brokered
exuberance is never universally compelling, nor does it resonate equally among all. During
that same week, several different opposition groups issued calls for a general strike. Even as a
huge number of demonstrators poured out onto the streets, these calls for a strike were barely
heeded, including in the capital Tehran. As Polanyi (1957: 160) remarked, cross-class support
occurs at the everyday level more often than one would expect from a rationalist or structuralist account of economic interests. Yet class dispositions, embedded in observable sociocultural cues or struggles over symbolic classifications (Bourdieu 1996), present boundaries
that can structure both the facilitation of protest and the demarcation of participation frontiers.13
Nevertheless, even with such observations we should be cautious about describing Green
movement protestors as belonging to a narrow segment of the population. As table 2 shows,
professional-technical workers have unquestionably been growing as a segment of the Iranian
labor force over the lifetime of the Islamic Republic. Certainly many of the protestors, as
observed by myself and reported in the international media, belonged to this stratum of the
labor force. Given that many of these workers are located in the public sector, possessing
educational credentials and technical skills that allow them to garner higher incomes and
living standards, we can classify these individuals in the new middle class. Relying solely
on occupational classifications, however, hides several key social-structural changes that also
have been taking place in post-revolutionary Iran. Women, for instance, are undercounted in
the labor market. While census surveys put female labor force participation at only around
15.5 percent (2006), women who are classified as homemakers often engage in incomegenerating activities. Although this would classify them as informal workers, such activities
extend to high-income households and can utilize technical skills and educational credentials
(Bahramitash and Esfahani 2011). From my own observations, female participation in the 2009
demonstrations was almost always equal to male participation.
Also important is the expansion of secondary and tertiary education over the past two
decades in Iran. In 1999, 18 percent of university-age Iranians were enrolled in tertiary education. By 2009, this level had doubled to 36 percent, with more women than men (UNESCO
2011). Many of the educated young Iranians who formed the militant cadres of the Green
movement, therefore, were first-generation college and high school students whose parents
worked in the formal unskilled or informal sector. I encountered numerous individuals who
went to protests but hid their participation from families and relatives. This was not
necessarily because of differences in political orientation between generations, but more out
of the threat of social sanction by neighbors if participation was publicly known. While the
parents may have belonged to the working class, the children exhibited the social desires of
the upwardly mobile. In fact, the grievances of the Green movementenforcement of
political rights, fewer restrictions on social behavior, replacing the ruling elite with bettertrained technocrats, separation of the private from the public sphereare common throughout

The Brokered Exuberance of the Middle Class

451

middle-income countries whenever upwardly mobile middle classes perceive themselves

blocked by the state from the pathways to social power. They are educated and cognizant of
cosmopolitan habits, but lack the political and cultural capital that would allow them to fully
enjoy the middle-class lifestyle they aspire to, free of the bureaucratic authoritarian characteristics of the Islamic Republic. Partly as a result of this mobility, households and neighborhoods in Tehran often contain an overlap of occupational and educational levels among
individuals. Divisions along class lines are not as clearly delineated as some commentators
assume, and I found that many nonparticipants around the country shared the grievances
expressed by Green protesters. Male students with working-class backgrounds were frustrated
as they became underemployed, over-credentialed members of the labor force. Women who
had just exited secondary and tertiary education and entered the professional labor market
often worked in clerical and service positions at occupational status levels below what their
educational credentials might lead them to expect. If the Green movement can best be described
as protest by the middle class, then this class was not a small elite but an increasingly large
and powerful class that was broadly embedded within social transformations that occurred
under the Islamic Republic.
Indeed, the growing middle class was the product of the Iranian states post-revolutionary
efforts, which poured resources into its own vision of modernization, no matter how it was
ideologically branded and framed. The middle classes grew in tandem. Yet this developmental push, common to many middle-income states, also generated new expectations among
the public for upward mobility, changed livelihoods, and an alternative cultural-political
order. Iranand the Arab countries that experienced uprisings in 2011were not catching
up to ahistorical laws of universal democratic transition, as some observers claimed. Rather,
the gestation of grievances among Green protestors is related to the politics of status inequality, blocked social mobility, and a shared fear of falling, stemming from the rise of new
middle classes within Iranian post-revolutionary society, just as Third Wave democracy
movements in Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe emerged from the enlargement
and bolstering of particular social classes by authoritarian states during the 1960s-70s (Arrighi
1990). The Green movement was shaped, in part, by the modernizing efforts of the postrevolutionary state itself. Similarly, those demonstrators surveyed in the Orange protests in
Ukraine turned out to be slightly better off economically than the population, even while
they also identified hope for improved living standards as one of their grievances (Beissinger
2011: 36). In a middle-income country, where people generally compare themselves to living
standards in wealthy countries, this is not a contradictory position to hold (Korzeniewicz and
Moran 2009).
The involvement of many people from this new class impacted the dynamics of the postelection protests. The early phase of surging mobilization created movement slogans, symbols, and emotional energy that drew in individuals from a variety of classes. Yet in the demobilizational phase, the lack of organizational networks linking individuals with differing
class dispositions exacerbated social cleavages and limited the movements expansion. The
Green movement did not remake Iranian society anew, but it did refashion millions of individuals political orientations. This is why so many Iranians told me that the country had
changed forever during the events of 2009, no matter the outcome.
CONCLUSION
The Green protests may have failed to overturn the 2009 election, but they did widen schisms
within the Islamic Republics elite. Whether this matters in the future depends on numerous
factors, including an external threat of war that allows Irans leadership to maintain a modicum of elite cohesion, and whether a new upsurge of unrest could broaden the oppositions
appeal and institutionalize its successes. The protestors also codified a set of symbols that still

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452

resonate today among many Iranians. Unlike the multiple and chained mobilizations of the
Arab Spring in 2011, Irans protestors had no diffused model to follow and adapt. It was
largely a spontaneous, improvisatory effort, where face-to-face interaction rituals that had
transformed and charged the emotional energy of participants temporarily assuaged
uncertainty and risk. The Tehran protests, at their peak, formed a cross-class coalition of
millions, but the strongest ties to the movement were in the countrys rising middle class,
which had expanded over the past two decades due to social transformations partly promoted
by the states developmental efforts.
In this article, I used ethnographic fieldwork to move from a microscopic to a wide-angle
view in attempting to explain the dynamics of the 2009 post-election Green movement. There
is much else I could have discussed further, including the dynamics of police repression and
protestor response, or the nationalist frames used by opposition leaders and government
supporters alike. Yet I chose to focus on large and tiny social processes that, as a participant
observer, I felt were most fundamental to understanding this significant moment in Iranian
history. The Green movement placed 2009 on the canonical list of years that all Iranians
recollect and retell in storied reflections of their own countrys trajectory, along with 1906,
1953, and 1979. The years events in Iran were also useful, however, for social scientists who
savor the chance to use the laboratory of history to test and refine their own theoretical
toolkits.
NOTES
1
For timelines and spot analyses of the 2009 protests as well as reflections by Iranian academics and activists on their
significance, see Hashemi and Postel (2011) and Dabashi (2011). A smoking gun to prove the fraudulence of the
election results has never been produced, but statistical anomalies and circumstantial evidence indicate it was not a
wholly transparent election. With a reported victory of 64 percent of votes cast, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might have
won a true majority even without electoral malfeasance, but we cannot know for certain (Mebane 2010).
2
For a sustained critique of the use and abuse of concepts of social capital and civil society on countries in the global
South, see Cumings (2007).
3
Polling in Iran is haphazard, with wide variation in methods. Generally, face-to-face polls tend to be more accurate
than phone polling. Curiously, the same poll question in the United States resulted in a lower percentage (46%) of
positive responses towards elections, asked in 2006-07 before the Obama campaign.
4
Pro-Mousavi posters were common, but anti-Ahmadinejad posters were also spread via the Internet and printed
widely in Tehran. Several inventive posters recreated the famous 1979 front pages of Keyhan and Ettelaat newspapers that announced the fleeing of the Shah. But in place of Shah raft (the Shah has gone), these facsimiles
announced Ahmadinejad raft. As with many of the other symbols used to signify political orientation, these posters
were fashioned outside of campaign organizations.
5
Once the rallies became more heavily policed, one of the main post-election protest chants was Dont Be Afraid,
We Are All in This Together! I saw this slogan used several times to keep crowds calm in the face of police assault.
6
See Osa and Schock (2007) for a helpful meditation on the limitations of solely focusing on repression in
understanding contentious politics in authoritarian settings.
7
BBC Persian television was watched via satellite by numerous households I visited during the protest period, and
may have been a more important communication tool between opposition voices and individuals who were considering participation in demonstrations.
8
Needless to say, while satellite TV is present in most villages for at least a few households, there were no recorded
instances of Green protests in rural Iran, although Mousavi was known to have some electoral support in rural
areas. Rural areas, it should be noted, were not sites of unrest during much of the 1979 revolution either, although
they did function as sending sites of young laborers into the cities.
9
Facebook, as well as other sites such as BBC Persian and Twitter, were blocked by Internet Service Providers in
Iran. Nevertheless, a vibrant exchange of antifiltering software has been ongoing in the Islamic Republic since well
before the 2009 election. In my experience, the largest impediment to Internet usage in Iran is not the outright
censorship or filtering of particular sites, which can usually be sidestepped, but the speed of access. In 2009, almost
all home Internet users used dial-up service cards at an access speed of 56K. If this dial-up speed was slowed further
by the state on particular days, it was nearly impossible to connect with any sites even using antifiltering software.
10
As I was in the majority of Iranian Internet users who relied on dial-up access, I did not see the Neda video until
August, well after much of the world had seen it. On the original day of her death, however, I was less than one
kilometer from where the shooting took place. The manner in which most Iranians saw this particular video was via
satellite TV, not the Internet.

The Brokered Exuberance of the Middle Class

453

11
The low vote counts for the other two candidates could have been signs of strategic voting, but many (including
Karroubi himself) were skeptical of the results.
12
The decreasing share of unpaid family labor in Iran within the informal sector, especially in declining economic
activities such as carpet weaving, is partly due to increased female education levels, lower family size, and a nuclearization
of kinship structure (Bahramitash and Esfahani 2011). See Hooglund (2011) for an account of changing female
attitudes towards work, family, and education over two generations of Iranians living in rural areas.
13
A young carpet seller in the Tehran bazaar I interviewed a few weeks after the election maintained that about half
of bazaar workers and shopowners supported Mousavi for president, a claim corroborated by another scholar who
was present before the election. This makes the lack of post-election solidarity between bazaar workers and Green
protestors even more conspicuous. Mohammad Maljoo (2010) argued that reformist politicians in Iran rarely engaged
in institution-building and policy proposals aimed at the working class, which in turn made many skeptical of the
universalism of Green movement grievances.

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