An Iran resistance strategy faces a stark imbalance: millions of Iranians may reject the system governing them, but the Islamic Republic still controls the organized force used to keep that system in place. January exposed what that difference means. Mass opposition can shake a state without breaking it if the forces tasked with repression continue to obey.
Since January, however, the equation has become more complicated. Iran’s security apparatus is now operating amid war, economic deterioration, renewed fear of domestic unrest, attacks on security personnel and installations, Kurdish armed pressure, intensified repression, and growing demands for force protection.
None of these pressures alone proves that the Islamic Republic is close to collapse. Together, however, they create something more consequential: a contest over how much coercive capacity the state can still deploy reliably.
Why Did Iran’s January Uprising Fail to Break the Regime?
Because mass opposition did not produce a corresponding collapse in the forces willing and able to repress it.
The January uprising demonstrated why any Iran resistance strategy must account for more than the size of a protest movement. Demonstrations spread widely and posed one of the most serious challenges to the Islamic Republic in years, but the state retained the essential instrument it needed to survive: a security apparatus that continued to carry out repression.
The UK House of Commons Library later noted that Iran’s security forces remained loyal during the protests, with no reported defections. Reuters reached a similar conclusion while the uprising was still unfolding, identifying the absence of significant defections among the Revolutionary Guards, Basij and wider security establishment as a central reason the system continued to hold.
That distinction is crucial. Popular opposition can challenge a regime’s legitimacy. It becomes an existential threat when the regime can no longer reliably enforce its authority.
Sources:
UK House of Commons Library: Iran protests 2026: UK and international response
Reuters: Why Iran’s clerical establishment still holds as protests rage
What Has Changed Since January?
Iran now faces several forms of pressure simultaneously, forcing the state to defend itself externally, suppress opposition internally, and absorb growing economic damage at the same time.
The significance lies less in any single development than in their convergence. Economic strain, an ongoing war, domestic discontent, armed activity, and an intensified state response are now competing for attention and resources at the same time. That does not mean the Islamic Republic is approaching collapse. It does mean the environment in which it must maintain control has become considerably more demanding.
How Much Economic Pressure Is Iran Under?
The pressure is severe and increasingly difficult to separate from political stability. Iran’s annual inflation reached 66 percent in July, while food prices were 128 percent higher than a year earlier. War damage has disrupted factories, transport and trade, while businesses have closed or cut jobs and the naval blockade has made imports more difficult and expensive.
Iranian officials and political insiders told Reuters that the greater danger may be what this hardship produces next: renewed nationwide unrest. Economic deterioration therefore matters here not simply as a measure of poverty, but because it creates another source of pressure the state must contain.
Sources:
Reuters: Battered by war, Iran’s rulers wary of more economic pain and unrest if US tightens pressure
How Is the War Stretching State Resources?
The war has expanded far beyond exchanges between conventional military targets. Strikes have damaged roads, bridges, transport links and other infrastructure, while facilities connected to Iran’s navy and Revolutionary Guards have also been hit. At the same time, the struggle over the Strait of Hormuz has become a prolonged military and economic confrontation of its own.
For any Iran resistance strategy, that matters because the state must divide attention and resources across several fronts at once. It does not prove that resources diverted to the war would otherwise have been used for domestic repression. But the operational implication is difficult to avoid: protecting infrastructure, repairing damage, defending military sites and sustaining a regional confrontation all place additional demands on a state already responsible for maintaining internal control.
Sources:
Reuters: US and Iran target infrastructure as strait shipping comes under renewed pressure
Reuters: Strait of Hormuz transits drop as US and Iran escalate attacks across Gulf
Is Internal Resistance Still Active?
Yes, although its different forms should not be treated as one coordinated movement. Armed activity continues in Kurdish areas, including operations involving IRGC personnel, while broader claims of clandestine attacks elsewhere remain harder to verify independently. Labor unrest has also continued, with workers protesting unpaid wages, dismissals and deteriorating employment conditions in several parts of the country.
These developments do not establish a unified national resistance structure. For any Iran resistance strategy, their importance is narrower: domestic pressure has not disappeared simply because the January uprising was suppressed.
For a closer examination of the armed groups and competing claims, see our earlier analysis of Iran’s underground resistance.
Sources:
Reuters: Iran’s Revolutionary Guards say they killed Kurdish militants in northwest Iran
Hengaw: IRGC member Omar Dehqan killed in armed attack in Mahabad
IranWire: Iranian Workers Enter Day 40 of Strike After Firings, Unpaid Wages
How Is Tehran Responding?
Tehran is not responding like a state that believes the danger has passed. Hossein Taeb, a veteran intelligence official associated with earlier protest crackdowns, was appointed to command the Basij in August. Separately, the UN human rights chief has warned of a sharp rise in executions and death sentences since March, including cases connected to the January protests, while rights organisations continue to document arrests, prosecutions and lengthy sentences targeting dissent.
For any Iran resistance strategy, this response matters because pressure on the regime can generate new demands on the very institutions responsible for maintaining control. The pattern is therefore not simply pressure on the regime, but pressure → greater repression and protection → greater demands on the institutions responsible for maintaining control.
Sources:
Reuters: Iran, US make competing claims over control of Strait of Hormuz
UN Human Rights Office: Iran: Türk says executions used to instil fear, suppress dissent
Center for Human Rights in Iran: Iran’s New Weapon: Group Prosecutions of Protesters Send Dozens Toward the Gallows
Why Do These Pressures Matter More Together Than Apart?
Because each pressure forces the state to spend resources, personnel and political attention that are also needed elsewhere.
An authoritarian state can withstand considerable opposition as long as it retains the capacity to respond where and when it chooses. The problem becomes more difficult when threats overlap. Money committed to economic stabilization cannot be spent twice. Personnel protecting infrastructure or responding to armed threats are not simultaneously available for every domestic security task. Intelligence services monitoring clandestine activity also face demands from war, border security and internal dissent.
For any Iran resistance strategy, the more important question is not whether the state is simply running out of resources, but whether it can continue converting the resources it still possesses into effective control across all of these fronts.
Political research on authoritarian resilience helps explain why that distinction matters. State capacity—including the ability to implement decisions and exercise coercion—is an important part of how authoritarian systems survive challenges. Coercive institutions themselves also depend on organization, information and personnel to translate political orders into repression.
This is not simply a contest between protesters and police, or rebels and the IRGC. It is increasingly a contest over state capacity.
And that makes the behavior of the people inside the security apparatus the next critical variable.
Sources:
Jonathan K. Hanson: State Capacity and the Resilience of Electoral Authoritarianism: Conceptualizing and Measuring the Institutional Underpinnings of Autocratic Power
Cambridge University Press: The Bureaucratic Politics of Authoritarian Repression: Intra-agency Reform and Surveillance Capacity in Communist Poland
What Changes When the Repressors Become Targets?
Can Pressure Weaken the Basij Without Defeating It Militarily?
When Does Pressure Become a Political Tipping Point?
When pressure begins changing what security personnel do—not merely how many of them are killed.
The first signs of such a shift may be easy to miss. Security personnel do not have to announce that they have joined the opposition. They can delay orders, avoid deployments, remain in barracks, call in sick, quietly reduce their effort or find other ways not to participate fully in repression. More visible forms can follow: desertion, withdrawal of support or, in more extreme cases, openly siding with those challenging the state.
Recent research on security-force disloyalty shows why these distinctions matter. Different forms of resistance can produce different responses inside the coercive apparatus. Nonviolent campaigns are more closely associated with shirking, criticism of the regime and withdrawal of support, while violent campaigns are more likely to produce desertion and side-switching.
There is therefore no guaranteed linear progression from refusal to regime collapse. But analytically, the warning signs can be understood as an escalation:
refusal → absence → desertion → withdrawal → loss of local control
For an Iran resistance strategy, the decisive point is reached when isolated acts begin affecting the state’s ability to enforce decisions across a wider area. A regime can tolerate individual defections. It has a much greater problem when units stop appearing, commanders cannot rely on orders being followed, or security forces begin withdrawing rather than confronting opposition.
Killing one Guard is a tactical event. If it causes a hundred other security personnel to change how they operate, it has acquired strategic significance.
That is the tipping point worth watching: not the number of casualties, but the spread of changed behavior.
Sources:
Marianne Dahl et al.: Dissent Campaign Strategies and Security Force Disloyalty
Holger Albrecht & Dorothy Ohl: Exit, Resistance, Loyalty: Military Behavior during Unrest in Authoritarian Regimes
What Would Show That Iran’s Security Apparatus Is Actually Beginning to Break?
The clearest sign would be a repeated inability—or unwillingness—of security forces to maintain ordinary state control where Tehran expects them to.
Pressure, casualties and even individual defections are not the same as institutional breakdown. For an Iran resistance strategy, the more meaningful question is whether those problems begin spreading across units and locations, making it harder for the state to turn orders from the center into action on the ground.
Which Warning Signs Would Matter Most?
The strongest indicators would show that disruption is becoming persistent rather than isolated.
That could include repeated order refusals or desertions, units failing to deploy, fewer routine patrols, checkpoints being abandoned, or forces having to be transferred from other provinces because local units are unavailable or unreliable.
Other signals may appear before outright defection. Emergency pay or retention incentives could indicate difficulty keeping personnel in place. Repeated relocation of security personnel or their families would suggest that force protection has become a continuing burden. A growing delay between protests beginning and security forces responding would matter if it appeared across different locations.
The most serious signs would come later: local commanders failing to follow central orders, or districts and cities where normal state enforcement temporarily disappears.
For an Iran resistance strategy, these are the indicators that matter most. Research on the collapse of authoritarian security systems suggests that the crucial danger is not simply losing individual officers, but losing cohesion and the ability of the coercive apparatus to operate across the territory it is supposed to control.
Sources:
Merouan Mekouar: Police Collapse in Authoritarian Regimes: Lessons from Tunisia
Is Iran’s Security Apparatus Breaking Yet?
No. Iran is showing signs of strain, but there is not yet strong evidence of a broad breakdown in coercive control.
That distinction is important. Earlier in the war, Reuters found signs that the Basij was struggling for manpower, even as checkpoints targeted by Israeli strikes remained operational. The state was still able to deploy security personnel and supporters extensively in major cities.
Nor has military pressure removed the IRGC from the center of power. By late April, Reuters found almost the opposite: wartime decision-making had become increasingly concentrated around the Guards and other security institutions. Despite severe external pressure, Reuters reported no fundamental fracture within the ruling system at that stage.
The leadership has also continued investing in internal control. The August appointment of veteran intelligence figure Hossein Taeb to command the Basij was interpreted by Iranian military-linked media as part of an effort to strengthen neighborhood-level monitoring and the regime’s ability to respond to internal threats.
Iran is therefore under pressure, but pressure is not yet breakdown.
The threshold to watch is more specific: the point at which Tehran can issue an order but can no longer be confident that enough security personnel will arrive, obey it and restore control.
Sources:
Reuters: Fearing economic collapse after war, Iran cracks down on dissent
Reuters: Iran’s Guards seize wartime power, weakening Supreme Leader’s role
Critical Threats Project: Iran Update Evening Special Report: August 13, 2026
Could External Pressure Also Strengthen the Regime?
Yes. Foreign attacks can weaken state capacity while simultaneously increasing nationalism, civilian suffering and hostility toward the attackers.
That creates an important contradiction. Military pressure may damage infrastructure, consume security resources and weaken parts of the state, yet the same attacks can make ordinary Iranians feel that their immediate threat comes from outside the country rather than from Tehran.
Reuters found evidence of exactly this dynamic in southern Iran. The region has a long history of dissatisfaction with the Islamic Republic, but residents interviewed after U.S. strikes blamed Washington for worsening power cuts, water shortages, economic hardship and insecurity. Some remained openly critical of Iran’s rulers while also expressing nationalist anger at the attacks. The additional hardship had not translated into the renewed anti-government mobilization some in Washington had expected.
For any Iran resistance strategy, that is a critical risk. Research across authoritarian regimes has found that foreign pressure can increase pro-government mobilization by allowing rulers to appeal to nationalism and portray external pressure as an attack on the country itself.
This means external pressure cannot be judged only by how much damage it inflicts on the state.
Pressure only becomes politically useful to a resistance movement when it weakens the state faster than it weakens, frightens or alienates the population.
Sources:
Reuters: US attacks deepen hardship, not dissent, in Iran’s restive south
Sebastian Hellmeier: How Foreign Pressure Affects Mass Mobilization in Favor of Authoritarian Regimes
What Does This Iran Resistance Strategy Mean for the Iranian People?
Resistance does not require every civilian to become a soldier.
That matters because political power depends on far more than the people carrying weapons. It also depends on those who obey orders, provide information, report neighbors, keep institutions functioning, enforce restrictions, go to work, join demonstrations, refuse cooperation—or eventually decide that they will no longer help sustain the system around them.
For an Iran resistance strategy, this wider participation matters because nonviolent resistance lowers many of the barriers that prevent ordinary people from taking part in political struggle. Strikes, boycotts, noncooperation and other forms of civilian action can involve people who would never participate in armed conflict, while successful movements can also create loyalty shifts among officials and security personnel.
This is where Shadows of Tehran connects to the present argument. The novel’s struggle with loyalty, conscience, and survival shows power at the human level: political systems ultimately depend on individual decisions about what people will do when authority demands their participation.
The implication for Iran is not that every citizen must confront the security forces. The struggle is also over who continues to obey, who refuses, who participates, who withdraws cooperation—and who eventually stops helping the system function.
Sources:
Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan: Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict
Who Really Has to Lose the Will to Fight?
The decisive question may not be whether millions of Iranians can acquire weapons. It may be whether a much smaller number of armed men can continue believing that repression is safe, sustainable and worth the cost.
January showed that mass opposition alone is not enough while the state can still rely on those ordered to suppress it. What matters now is whether the pressures surrounding Iran begin to change that reliability.
That threshold has not been reached. But if security personnel increasingly refuse, withdraw, fail to appear or become too overstretched to enforce authority consistently, the balance can shift without the population ever matching the regime weapon for weapon.
A regime does not lose effective control of force only when its opponents acquire more weapons. It can also lose it when the people holding the state’s weapons cease to use them reliably on its behalf.
