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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   225 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 15, 2026

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Been monitoring it. My current read is.

  • In number of protestors, Ayatollah's Iran has seen larger protests before. IRGC has quelled protests of larger scale.
  • In terms of violence, these are the most violent protests Iran has seen since the revolution. This is in terms of property damage, outright protestor violence and retaliatory shooting.
  • Protests were getting more intense until mid last week. Conflicting reports on scale of protests this week.

Protests are materially new in a few ways:

  • Khamenei is old (this time for real) and has no true heir lined up
  • Tehran water crisis is real. Civilians are stressed.
  • Legitimacy of regime materially affected after
  • For the first(?) time, protestors are chanting in support of regime change

Note, the Bangladeshi protests that led to regime change went on for 2 months, until Hasina was eventually pushed out. It took ~4 months in SriLanka. Iran is not an Arab nation, I think recent regime change in developing/middle income stable nations is a better proxy for what a revolutionary protest might look like, compared to Arab spring. In Nepal, banning internet forced more people into the streets, not fewer. So, hard to assign a positive or negative signal based on just the internet blackout. The main difference is that the IRGC is totally loyal to the Ayatollah, so an early military coup to limit causalities is unlikely.

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