Addressing Injustice with Incivility: Justifying Iranian Acts of Disobedience in 1978

The focal question herein is whether the public disobedience recognized as the start of the 1979 Iranian revolution was justified. To assess the justification of the disobedience, I will consider two conditions: injustice and last resort. To assess the uncivil aspects, I will detail a principle and condition that I will call strategic destabilization. I will conclude that the acts of public disobedience by Iranian citizens in January and February of 1978 were justified because they targeted the resolution of profound injustices that had proven unresolvable by the civic and civil means available.

I. Three Conditions for Justifying Iranian Disobedience

First, we must address a nuance in the question by differentiating between an acute versus a chronic cause. Casual references may cite the earliest acts of public disobedience in 1978 as a response to the printing of an editorial defaming a popular exiled dissident (The Iranian Revolution, 2022). That inciting incident was an acute cause of the disobedience. Weighed against only this acute cause, the destructive actions of the demonstrators were not justified. As Rawls (1969) argues, to be justified, acts of disobedience should be a response to “substantial and clear violations of justice” (p. 183). An editorial does not meet that threshold. However, it would be unrigorous to ignore the chronic causes that had built up behind that inciting incident. The chronic causes of the 1978 Iranian demonstrations can be understood as the more than two decades of unrepresentative, unpopular autocratic rule and a litany of state-enforced injustices, e.g., market extortion, violent repression of political opposition by secret police, and the imprisonment and torture of writers, poets, and academics (Axworthy, 2013, pp. 90-93).  Weighed against those chronic causes, the public disobedience does meet that justificatory threshold. Moreover, the killing of five demonstrators by police on the second day of demonstrations only intensifies the sense of justification under this condition.

In addition to that condition of injustice, the disobedient acts were justified based on a principle of last resort—a notion supported by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963), among others (paras. 9-10). It is reasonable to argue that disobedient acts are not called for if the same ends can be effected through non-disobedient civil procedures. In the case of the 1978 Iranian riots, the rioters lacked recourse to justice through a democratic process, given that the target of their action was an unelected autocratic monarch, as noted above. Without access to such an essential means of righting injustice, many Iranians sought change by speaking out publicly, resulting in the imprisonment and torture of thousands for political speech (Axworthy, 2013, p. 91). This and other historical evidence show that the principle of last resort was met.

Beyond justifying acts of disobedience generally, we must specifically justify the immediate escalation to uncivil acts of disobedience on the second day of demonstrations, characterized by Axworthy (2013) as mostly rock-throwing and window-breaking (p. 104). This is where I part ways from King and, in particular, Rawls (1969), who argued that uncivil acts are wholly unjustifiable because they show a lack of “respect for legal procedures” and the “principles which regulate civil life” (p. 182). To the contrary, I am compelled by Delmas’ (2020) claim that “civic friendship-threatening” acts of incivility can be a virtue (p. 35). If those civic bonds are holding together unjust legal procedures and the unjust regulation of civil life, then destabilizing and rebuilding them appears to be precisely what is called for. Moreover, it could be argued that exacting such means toward democratic ends strengthens a core civic friendship—a unity around the target demands—independent of any particular state or legal system. In the Iranian case, both the legal procedures and regulation of civil life exhibited profound injustices, as already described, justifying this third condition.

Additionally, it seems reasonable to argue that uncivil disobedience is only justified after exhausting civil means, just as civil disobedience is only justified after exhausting procedural means. While it seems that the demonstrations escalated immediately to uncivil on the second day, I would argue that the thousands of political prisoners noted above who were jailed for speaking out against the Shah are evidence that the state was committed to squashing dissent, and there is no rational reason to expect that additional civil acts of disobedience would result in anything different. Therefore, a progression to uncivil acts is justified.

II. Two Objections: Unsavory Consequences and the Democratic Ideal

Claiming that the Iranian rioters’ actions in 1978 were justified in the manner described above may lead to some unsavory consequences. Suppose supporters of Donald Trump, instigated by the printing of a particularly scathing anti-Trump editorial prior to the 2024 election, launch into destructive riots similar to those carried out in Iran in 1978; similar, for that matter, to the riots carried out on January 6th, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol. After another year or so, those dissenters effect regime change, installing Trump undemocratically as their autocratic supreme leader. Suppose further that they cite decades of purported, unpopular, cross-party rule by the so-called “deep state” as the chronic cause and justification of their actions. An objector might allege that by arguing as I have that the Iranian demonstrators’ project was justified, I am opening the door to the 2024 case I have outlined here. Far from a slippery slope argument, this appears to be a valid concern given the similarities between cases.

I acknowledge that additional, potentially unsavory cases may follow from my argument. I agree with Rawls’ (1969) principle of reciprocity here, that accepting the validity of similar exercises is not only a consequence of public disobedience but a condition that must be met before the initial case of disobedience is even justified (p. 184). If a state is committing sufficiently unjust acts while operating independently of and unresponsive to any procedural input from the citizenry (assuming such opportunities for input exist), then civil and perhaps uncivil disobedience may be justified. Dialecticians from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Rawls and Pasternak agree that this principle of last resort, as we might call it, is among the justifications for disobedience (King, 1963, paras. 6-7; Rawls, 1969, p. 183; Pasternak, 2018, p. 402). If Trump supporters in the illustration above could accurately establish that these conditions were met, their actions would likely be justified. I say that without concern because, even without wading too far into the political science weeds, it appears far from the case that such conditions obtain. More broadly, should such conditions obtain for any group, even those I oppose politically, I would maintain that their actions are justified, whether unsavory to me or otherwise.

A second objection to the notion that the riots were justified, one that I have heard voiced, might rely on Pasternak (2018), who asserted that “justified political rioters should remain fundamentally committed to the realization of the democratic ideal” (p. 395). I have heard these objectors argue that the Iranian demonstrators did not satisfy that condition because, although they unseated an autocratic monarch, the supreme religious leader and clerical government they installed in his place supported and effected the rolling back of many rights that we consider fundamental to the democratic ideal. There are two issues with this objection, one historical and one philosophical. To briefly dispense with the historical issue, Cronin (2004) notes of the revolution that “clerical rule was not part of its original agenda” and that the “more likely outcome seemed to be a bourgeois liberal republic” (p. 47). This is largely because the “largest social base of opposition” was university students, whom Cronin notes were “particularly influenced” by “the secular Left” (p. 46).

The philosophical answer, then, is that we are addressing the notion of “justification” in two different ways that deserve two different answers. I am addressing whether the early riots between January and February of 1978 were justifiable at the time they were instigated—in other words, whether the rioters had met the threshold required for such action prior to acting. On the other hand, the objection seems to be referring to an ex post facto ruling of justification. To effectively repeal justification for the January and February riots after the fact is more or less to make the statement, “had they known how it would turn out, the actions would not have been justified,” which is counterfactual. According to Cronin, as noted above, they did not know, so it is not necessarily the case that they were not justified. At best, I am sympathetic to a more precise form of the objection that the actions grew less justified over time as the demonstrators’ commitments to democratic ideals declined. Still, this third form of the objection only affects acts later in the campaign that were commensurate with or came after the slipping of those ideals—not the actions that came before.

I have argued that the acts of disobedience by Iranian citizens in January and February of 1978 were (1) targeting profound injustices exerted by the state, (2) taken as a last resort, and (3) strategically destabilizing those unjust systems. I acknowledged and accepted that if the Iranians’ acts of disobedience are justified, then the door is open for other potentially unsavory groups to justify their own acts of disobedience. I further acknowledged that the Iranian demonstrators’ actions might have been justified at the start but lost that justification as they began turning away from democratic ideals. Ultimately, I found that the Iranian demonstrators’ acts of public civil and uncivil disobedience were justified.

Axworthy, M. (2013). Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic. Oxford University Press.

Cronin, S. (2004). Reformers and revolutionaries in modern Iran: New Perspectives on the Iranian Left. Routledge.

Delmas, C. (2020). 1. Uncivil disobedience. In New York University Press eBooks (pp. 9–44). https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479810512.003.0002

King Jr., M. L. (1963). Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.]. N.p, n.d Web.

Pasternak, A. (2018). Political rioting: a moral assessment. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 46(4), 384–418. https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12132

Rawls, J. (2001). Collected papers. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1cbn3j4

The Iranian revolution. (2022, March 9). Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-iranian-revolution-a-timeline-of-events/