NGOTC: CSB in Iran

Publication date: Wednesday 28 September 2005

What are the particular preconditions in your country that enable or obstruct civil society building strategies of your organisation?

Based on your experiences, how do initiatives and strategies of your organisation contribute to improving the responsiveness and performance of the state?

Written by Mahboubeh Abbasgolizadeh: The civil society in Iran currently involves a large spectrum of lively and active social, political and culture movements. At the same time, the Iranian political environment and power structure are moving ahead towards multi-polarity and the two radicalized sides of the existing struggles and challenges include republicanism and extremist Islamism. The Republicans demand a pure, democratic rule of the people over the people, while the extremist Islamists emphasize on religious fundamentalism. The reformists are in the middle of these two contending poles and try for a rational
combination between republicanism and Islamic system. Since the trend of government during the pre-reform period was in favor of Islamism, the reformists laid emphasis on the consolidation of the republican aspects. The emergence of the reformists during the recent years and their plans for consolidation of democracy challenged the radical Islamists and created a number of crises which led to the polarization of the ruling system.

Prima facie the civil society may be regarded a logical product of the movements which were categorized between the two points of the spectrum, that is, republicans and the reformists. If this approach is correct, the civil society of Iran is a product of the suitable political atmosphere of the recent decade and hence one may conclude that the institutions of civil society enjoy democratic, republican values and criteria which are in contradiction with the forces on the other side of the spectrum (that is
between the reformists and Islamists). Hence, the civil society of Iran is an outcome of the organized forces which are prone to challenge the forces on the other side and can play a role in the interests of democracy. The radical right (Islamists) and foreign observers (of international civil and political society) agree upon this viewpoint. They foresee that in the near future Iran may undergo a velvet revolution like what happened in Georgia…

Because of this probability, they argue, the radical right exerts pressure on the press and media as well as the Non-government Organizations and create an insecure atmosphere for the activists. On the other hand, most of the foreign analysts maintain that the civil society in Iran is somehow an alternative for the democratic changes like other countries.

But my experience as a feminist and activist with more than two decades (since 1985) of activities in the Non-Government Organizations, and a witness to many social and political developments, depicts another picture. In my opinion the history of civil society is longer than two decades. But the reform period helped the civil society to find its paradigm and discourse and helped its transformation into a self-conscious and goal-oriented process. On practical level too it had found its specific place in the social hierarchy and determined its interaction with the government. But this identification is not tantamount to the maturity of civil society rather it means a self-conscious birth. Hence, it is difficult to claim that the main feature of civil society in Iran is secularism and republicanism without paying attention to Islamism. Since the essence of civil society is based on democratic changes and pluralistic participation, even the right factions in the civil society inevitably accept the democratic values and actions.