Zoe Holman

What has spurred thousands of ordinary women in Iran and throughout the world to take to the streets under the slogan ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’? How unprecedented is this recent uprising in the history of Iran’s women’s movement? In this week’s ABR podcast, author-journalist Zoe Holman discusses the distinctive features of this protest and argues that its primary drivers are members of Iran’s Generation Z, who are educated, fearless, and angry. 

With protests by members of the Iranian diaspora burgeoning across Europe and the rest of the world, I attend a demonstration in central Athens. A group assembles in front of the Greek Parliament, with two banners outstretched. The first reads ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’, the second, ‘the Iranian people no longer want the Islamic Republic’. The mise en scène seems to capture the genealogy of a movement that began with the death of a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman, Jina (or Mahsa) Amini, on 16 September in Tehran following her arrest by the notorious morality police, and has since grown into what has been deemed the biggest domestic threat yet to the existence of the Islamic regime. 

Facing the ‘global refugee crisis’, politicians in Europe and Australia claim they are protecting their countries from the arrival of untold multitudes. Yet the ‘crisis’ is not global but highly specific. In 2019, seventy-six per cent of refugees came from just three countries (Congo, Myanmar, and Ukraine), while eighty-six per cent of refugees are hosted in a handful of countries in what is known as the Global South (especially Turkey, Jordan, Columbia, and Lebanon). Despite the significant contribution of Germany to hosting refugees, only ten per cent of the global refugee population live in Europe, comprising 0.6 per cent of the continent’s total population. There are 2,600,000 refugees in Europe today, compared with 11,000,000 at the end of World War II. The European Union’s challenges can scarcely be said to be at ‘crisis’ levels.