The Logic of Regime Change and the Allure of Revolution

30 January 2026

From the mid-2010s onward, a new term entered Iran’s political vocabulary under the name barandāzi (براندازی), best rendered not as “toppling” but as a sudden act of regime change, a project aimed at bringing down a political order from above rather than transforming it from within. From the outset, this concept defined itself in opposition to reformism, while at the same time keeping a deliberate distance from its conceptual sibling, revolution. This distancing had at least two dimensions.

The first was political. The advocates of toppling/regime change were animated by a deep aversion to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, an aversion that manifested itself as an allergy to the very word “revolution.” The second dimension was geographical. The promoters of regime change were based mainly outside Iran and, by definition, could not credibly present themselves as heralds of a revolution unfolding within the country.

This geographical index, however, signified more than mere distance. The popularization of the barandāzi / regime-change discourse coincided with the launch of the “maximum pressure” campaign against the Islamic Republic during Donald Trump’s first presidency. In reality, the principal actors in the regime-change project were not domestic forces within Iran, but its external enemies, actors prepared to test a wide range of methods for disrupting Iran’s political order, from economic sanctions to outright military attack.

Seen in this light, barandāzi/ regime change was primarily an external project, coordinated, almost by definition, with Western adversaries of the Islamic Republic and with segments of the exiled opposition. The role assigned to the Iranian people was largely passive, limited to accompaniment or post-facto endorsement. The model was reminiscent of what occurred in Iraq, where the population’s imagined role was reduced to staging welcome celebrations for invading coalition forces.

With the end of Trump’s first term, the regime-change project itself appeared to reach a dead end. Not only was the military option removed from the table, but the crippling sanctions regime gave way to behind-the-scenes bargaining and tacit deals. This, however, was not the end of the story. During the Jina uprising, the regime-change current sought to rebrand itself within the framework of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” revolution, reviving its earlier agenda in a more insurgent guise. What emerged was a dual strategy: on the one hand, continued reliance on Western economic and military intervention, and on the other, an attempt to appropriate a popular uprising in its own name.

This dual program was promoted without any serious effort to reconcile its two divergent vectors. The popular uprising was, at its core, an endogenous process, made possible through the broad participation of Iran’s civil and social institutions, from student circles and professional associations to labor collectives and feminist networks. Within this framework, it remained entirely unclear how the externally oriented will that looks toward foreign intervention, and properly belongs to the logic of regime change, could be reconciled with the internally generated will that flows through the capillaries of Iranian civil society and deserves no name other than revolution.

After the fires of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests subsided in 2022, this contradiction largely faded from view. Yet amid the protests of 2026, the conceptual rupture has returned with greater force. It becomes unmistakable when the language of regime change is openly replaced by that of a so-called “national revolution,” and Reza Pahlavi presents himself as the national leader of this revolution.

The fundamental question raised by this transformation is simple: what, exactly, has changed in the mentality and material conditions of regime-change advocates that would suddenly render the title of “revolution” appropriate to them? In my view, the answer lies in a broader issue, one that brings us back to the very logic of revolution itself. Let us clarify this by returning to the example of 1979.

The dominant narrative of the 1979 Revolution has long identified its decisive advantage as the strong connective bond between revolutionary leadership and the masses. What this narrative understates, however, is the concrete mechanism that made this bond possible, what may properly be called the revolutionary organization. The fact that Ayatollah Khomeini’s statements, issued from Iraq or Paris, could reach the most remote cities of Iran in less than twenty-four hours, in an era before digital communication, was not incidental; it was decisive. Khomeini’s leadership rested less on personal charisma than on the performance of revolutionary organizations that transformed Ayatollah Khomeini into “Imam Khomeini.” These organizations poured their accumulated cultural capital at his feet and elevated popular trust in him to the level of faith.

The most important of these organizations, as is well known, were religious institutions embedded in the fabric of Iranian society, from mosques and hosseiniyehs to tekyehs and bazaar guild associations. It was this expansive revolutionary infrastructure that mediated between leadership and enraged masses, making the crucial task of coordination possible and allowing the revolution to advance along its turbulent path.

Yet the traditional religious revolutionary organization was not the only intermediary. The Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK), through its confrontational operational networks, played a significant role in mobilizing forces during the revolution. Likewise, leftist organizations, despite their relative distance from Khomeini’s movement, mobilized their own revolutionary structures in service of the 1979 Revolution and, at times, helped smooth the path for mass alignment with Khomeini’s leadership. One could add further examples, but the key point remains: alignment between revolutionary leadership and revolutionary masses was impossible without the mediating role of these organizations. It is precisely for this reason that revolution is understood as an endogenous process, one that requires temporal and spatial proximity among its constitutive elements.

The regime-change current of yesterday, now styling itself as the champion of a so-called “national revolution,” stands in absolute contradiction to this logic. Not only does it lack any concrete revolutionary organization inside the country, but it is openly hostile to domestic civil and political institutions that possess the potential to become such organizations, from parties, groups, and political prisoners to labor unions, professional associations, and student and intellectual networks, precisely those nuclei that have sustained themselves through the harshest years of repression. From this perspective, the organizational hostility and anti-civic posture of the Pahlavi current can only be understood as a movement against the very logic of revolution.

If the logic of revolution demands the activation of internal revolutionary organizations, then hostility toward potential revolutionary organizations is nothing other than the logic of counter-revolution. It is precisely this logic that propels this current toward militaristic fantasies, fantasies that either obscure the political space under banners such as the so-called “Imperial Eternal Guard” (گارد جاویدان), thereby paving the way for harsh sentences against domestic activists, or cling to the prospect of foreign military intervention and gamble recklessly with the very existence of the country.

© Copyright IranDraft

Annotations

1. Barandāzi (براندازی)

Literally “to cast down,” the term gained prominence in Iranian political discourse in the 2010s to denote externally supported regime change, distinct from both gradual reform and mass revolution.

2. Reformism vs. Revolution in Iran

“Reformism” refers to efforts to change the Islamic Republic from within its constitutional framework, especially prominent in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “Revolution” implies mass, structural transformation from below.

3. The 1979 Islamic Revolution

Scholars widely understood the overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy and establishment of the Islamic Republic as a mass, internally driven revolution with extensive organizational infrastructure.

4. “Maximum Pressure” Campaign

A U.S. policy under President Donald Trump (2018–2020) involving sweeping economic sanctions against Iran, aimed at forcing political capitulation or collapse.

5. Jina Uprising / “Woman, Life, Freedom”

Protests sparked in 2022 after the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini in morality police custody. The slogan became the movement’s defining chant, emphasizing gender, bodily autonomy, and civil freedom.

6. Reza Pahlavi

Son of Iran’s last monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. In exile, he has positioned himself as a symbolic opposition figure but lacks organizational structures within Iran.

7. Revolutionary Organizations (1979)

Includes religious institutions, leftist parties, and militant groups that enabled communication, mobilization, and coordination between leadership and masses.

8. MEK (Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization)

An Iranian Islamist opposition group that participated in the 1979 Revolution but later fell out with the Islamic Republic. Today, it is widely seen inside Iran as externally aligned and socially isolated.

9. Endogenous vs. Exogenous Change

A key analytical distinction in social-movement theory. “Endogenous” refers to change emerging from within a society’s own institutions and networks, “exogenous” to change imposed or driven from outside.

10. “Imperial Eternal Guard” (گارد جاویدان حافظ سلطنت)

A reference to the Guard-e-Javidaan, the deposed Shah’s private royal army, and today, monarchist or militarized exile fantasies that echo pre-1979 royalist symbolism and imply armed intervention rather than civil mobilization.

Mohammad Mahdi Hatef , born in 1984 in Tehran. He holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology, an MA in Western Philosophy from Allameh Tabataba’i University, and a PhD in Philosophy from the Institute for Research in Philosophy of Iran.

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