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MADRID - In West Asia, and Iran in particular, episodes of social protest rarely remain confined to strictly domestic concerns. Not only because the region is traversed by ongoing conflicts and enduring strategic rivalries, but also because its political space has historically been treated as a legitimate arena for external intervention, reinterpretation, and narrative contestation. In this context, social mobilizations circulate not merely as local political events, but as discursive objects quickly incorporated into explanatory frameworks generated outside the country. The recent protests in Iran provide a particularly illustrative example of this dynamic.
The mobilizations arose in an environment marked by prolonged economic pressures, persistent inflation, and profound regional transformations. These factors generated tangible unrest, recognized even by voices within Iran’s own political system, which acknowledge the need for adjustments and greater institutional capacity. What has particularly surprised the authorities, however, is the level of violence observed in certain episodes, surpassing the intensity typical of previous protests. This escalation has reinforced the perception that some sectors may be receiving external support or inspiration, consolidating the interpretation that the disturbances are not purely domestic phenomena but occur within a broader framework of geopolitical influence. As a result, much of the international attention has shifted away from structural causes—economic and social—toward readings centered on confrontation and strategic exploitation by external actors, interpreting the events as signals of potential political outcomes guided from outside the country.
The tendency to interpret Iranian events through a lens of collapse or existential confrontation is not new. For decades, Iran has been portrayed across broad sectors of Western political and media discourse as an anomaly within the international order, an actor whose political legitimacy is continually questioned. Within this framework, any episode of social contestation is quickly incorporated into a narrative that privileges expectations of rupture over analysis of continuity, adaptation, or national sovereignty.
The result is a deliberate simplification of a complex social reality. Iranian society is diverse, plural, and traversed by multiple political positions that do not conform to binary schemas. Within it coexist critiques of specific public policies, urgent economic and social demands, and, simultaneously, firm commitments to foreign policy principles enjoying broad social consensus, including support for the Palestinian cause. Presenting these dimensions as mutually exclusive does not reflect the everyday political experience of broad sectors of the population; rather, it responds to a discursive operation that reduces social complexity to a strategic instrument.
This process cannot be understood in isolation from the role of the United States. Since the 1979 Revolution, the Washington-Tehran relationship has been marked by a sustained policy of pressure, gradually shifting from the military to the economic and financial sphere. Sanctions have become the principal instrument of this strategy. Beyond their technical formulation, they constitute mechanisms of power producing profound material and symbolic effects, reshaping both the Iranian economy and the framework through which its internal dynamics are interpreted.
In official U.S. discourse, economic pressure is often presented as a tool aimed at modifying state behavior or promoting fundamental rights. Yet this rhetoric tends to obscure the cumulative social impact of decades of sanctions, as well as the structural asymmetries of the international economic system. In this context, internal protests are often read retrospectively as confirmation of the efficacy of coercion, rather than as expressions of social tensions generated in part by the same external pressures.
Against this external narrative, which tends to interpret every protest as an opportunity for intervention or strategic advantage, Israel has made evident its intention to exploit the situation in Iran for political fragmentation. Tel Aviv’s apparent objective is to weaken internal cohesion and foster divisions, following a pattern suggestive of a form of Balkanization of the country. In this context, Israel’s Channel 14 stated that “foreign elements are arming protesters in Iran with live weapons, and this is the reason for the hundreds of deaths among the people of the state.” Beyond the veracity of the claim, which has not been independently confirmed, the statement illustrates the external narrative framework that seeks to portray domestic violence as the result of foreign intervention, thereby justifying strategies of pressure and destabilization.
Such representations tend to erase the political agency of Iranian society, reducing a multifaceted phenomenon to an instrumental episode within a broader strategic contest. In doing so, they attempt, from within a particular discourse, to create the conditions necessary for that discourse to perpetuate itself. It is, therefore, more a prescriptive vision than a descriptive one.
Sanctions form the essential material backdrop for understanding this dynamic. Few economies have been subjected to a coercive regime as prolonged and systematic as Iran’s. Their effects extend beyond macroeconomic indicators, reshaping everyday living conditions and affecting social sectors unevenly. The rising cost of basic goods, difficulties in accessing certain medications, and precarious employment are part of a structural context that seldom occupies a central place in external analyses.
Within the country, the situation is more ambivalent than many international narratives suggest. This ambivalence cuts across multiple levels of the political system and cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between continuity and rupture. At the same time, the constant external pressure, coupled with the perception of externally backed violence, reinforces the priority of maintaining stability and national cohesion as strategic assets.
Sanctions and international pressure do not act in isolation. They intertwine with narrative frameworks that amplify destabilizing effects and weaken national sovereignty. The paradox is evident. External strategies that purport to support Iranian society tend, in practice, to reduce the country’s autonomy and reinforce perceptions of vulnerability in the face of foreign agendas. By linking internal tensions to projects promoted from abroad, they delegitimize endogenous narratives and reinforce a defensive logic. Far from weakening the state, such pressure often consolidates structures of power nourished precisely by the perception of constant threat and by the limited autonomy imposed by prolonged sanctions.
Regionally, this instrumentalization contributes to growing fragmentation in political discourse. Conflicts are presented as competitive arenas for attention and legitimacy, rather than being approached as interrelated processes sharing common structural causes, such as persistent militarization, economic inequality, and the absence of inclusive security frameworks. Europe observes these dynamics with a mixture of concern and structural limitation. While there is explicit recognition of the negative impact of sanctions, European capacity for autonomous action remains constrained by the centrality of the U.S. financial system. This dependency reinforces, from Tehran’s perspective, the perception of a hierarchical international order, where norms are applied selectively and economic sovereignty is conditioned by third-party policy.
Ultimately, the debate surrounding protests in Iran speaks as much about the frameworks from which the country is observed as it does about Iranian society itself. The insistence on simplifying narratives reflects a persistent difficulty in accepting that non-Western societies can maintain complex and autonomous political positions, not reducible to binary categories. Iran is no exception. It is a country traversed by real tensions, but also by a strong historical awareness of sovereignty and a cumulative experience of prolonged external pressure.
Acknowledging this complexity does not imply denying internal challenges. It requires resisting readings that transform any expression of social tension into a geopolitical instrument. It entails recognizing that internal critique and the defense of autonomy in the face of external pressure are not incompatible positions. As long as this distinction continues to be erased, internal events in Iran will continue to be interpreted externally less as situated social processes and more as strategic opportunities within a broader regional confrontation.
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