The Islamic Shia theocracy is preparing for the next uprising—and next crackdown

Iran's ruling establishment is increasingly using rhetoric that suggests it is preparing for another major domestic uprising, according to a JNS analysis. Senior officials, including police commanders and clerics, are interpreting economic hardships like unemployment and gasoline prices, as well as cultural dissatisfaction, as potential triggers for rebellion rather than governance failures. This shift in language indicates the regime is constructing a justification for future repression, viewing internal grievances through a national security lens. The Islamic Republic, having come to power through revolutionary disintegration, fears a scenario where mass mobilization, institutional fracture, and a collapse of coercive cohesion occur simultaneously, similar to the 1979 revolution. The regime's security doctrine is built around preventing protests from escalating into a revolutionary sequence, fearing "the moment when fear ceases to flow downward from the state to society and begins flowing upward from society toward the state." This preemptive narrative allows the state to portray future demonstrators as participants in an externally engineered destabilization campaign, justifying extraordinary violence as national defense.