Social Justice and Democracy in Iran: In Search of the Missing Link

Abstract

Taking the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911 as the marker of Iran’s entry into political modernity, we can observe that social democracy has also been an inseparable component of Iran’s political modernity. The struggles for democratic participation have been concomitant with the struggles for social justice. The Green Movement of 2009 was a return to the democratic spirit of the Constitutional Revolution, but despite staggering social and economic inequalities in the country, demands for social justice have had little opportunity for discursive articulation due to the absence of the Left. This chapter discusses the intellectual conditions of the renewal of a Left that would articulate the nexus between social justice and civil and human rights.