The Green's Non‐Violent Ethos: The Roots of Non‐Violence in the Iranian Democratic Movement

Shabani, Omid Payrow

doi:10.1111/cons.12040

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…In Iran, repeated peaceful and civil protests have been met by bloody oppression, showing an asymmetry of evolutionary and developmental learning processes between most of the regime's opposition and its base. The mark of this learning process is moving away from dogmatic religious thinking and toward a more tolerant mode of democratic ethos of citizenship (Shabani, 2013). That is to say, people demanding democratic change have evolved to reject violence as a legitimate means of achieving political goals while the regime's forces use violence as a legitimate means to obtain any political ends.…”

Section: In the Absence Of Democratic Prospectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On resistance: As evinced in Iranian political affairs

Shabani¹

2023

Digest Mid East Studies

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Along with fundamental rights such as liberty and property, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 also envisions a right to resist oppression. Irrespective of one's place on the political spectrum, resistance has been employed as an alternative both to submission and to revolt. After briefly sketching a historical and theoretical account of resistance I propose two parallel sets of criteria to further characterize good resistance. I submit that the first set is normative (I call it emancipatory) and the second set is critical (meaning it can be empirically assessed). I further break this typology down as follows: (1) Resistance is emancipatory when it is (a) nonviolent, (b) progressive, and (c) civil; and (2) it is critical when it seeks to (a) change policies and practices that are unjust, and (b) empower citizens to enjoy their full rights. I show the usefulness of this scheme by applying it to the political situation in Iran and by evincing these criteria in three instances of resistance there. Thus, in this context, I argue, resistance is a preferable alternative to both revolution and reform.

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Section: In the Absence Of Democratic Prospectsmentioning

confidence: 99%