In states such as Iran, political transitions systematically prioritise regime stability, central authority, and territorial unity. Consequently, demands for power-sharing or recognition from ethno-national and religious communities are treated as existential threats to national integrity, reproducing the hierarchies they claim to overcome.
Keywords: Iran, Middle East, conflict transformations, minorities, political transitions, exclusion
Political transitions are often presented as moments of renewal. They promise a break with authoritarian rule and the possibility of building more inclusive political orders. Political transitions in the Middle East frequently fall short of promises to construct inclusive political orders. While uprisings and reforms alter superficial political landscapes, they rarely dismantle the underlying power structures that perpetuate exclusion. This failure is particularly acute for minoritised groups. In states such as Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, transitional processes systematically prioritise regime stability, central authority, and territorial unity. Consequently, demands for power-sharing or recognition from ethno-national and religious communities are securitised and treated as existential threats to national integrity.
This article argues that transitions without structural inclusion reproduce the very hierarchies they claim to overcome. Political change remains limited when it is framed primarily as a question of stability and control, rather than as an opportunity to renegotiate authority, sovereignty, and belonging. This article first examines the limits of conventional transition frameworks, then explores how these dynamics unfold in Iran as a concentrated case of transition imagined through recentralisation. It concludes by arguing that transitions without inclusion reauthorise existing hierarchies under the language of renewal.
What is a political transition?
Political transition is often understood as a period of uncertainty that must be carefully managed to prevent instability. In this view, the immediate priority is to maintain order, avoid institutional collapse, and ensure continuity in governance. While these concerns are real, particularly in conflict-affected contexts, this ‘stability-first’ approach carries important limitations. It frames political change as a problem of management not as a question of how power should be reorganised.
Earlier scholarship often explained regime change through structural factors such as economic development or inequality. However, comparative research shows that these variables do not consistently predict when transitions occur or how they unfold. Instead, outcomes depend more on political dynamics: elite bargaining, institutional constraints, and the capacity for collective action. Transitions may arise through negotiated agreements or mass mobilisation, but neither path guarantees inclusive outcomes. In most cases, authority is reshaped without altering how power is distributed.
This emphasis on stability also shapes who participates in transition processes. When minimising disruption becomes the primary objective, decision-making tends to remain concentrated among a limited set of actors; political elites, military institutions, or externally supported figures. Transition becomes a managed process rather than an open political negotiation. The result is a familiar gap: visible change at the level of leadership, but continuity in the underlying structure of power.
Who is it for?
The position of minoritised groups reveals this dynamic most clearly. These groups are not simply numerical minorities; they are communities historically marginalised through centralised state-building and power hierarchy. Their claims—whether related to language, territory, or religion—raise fundamental questions about how authority is organised within the state. They challenge not only policies, but the structure of political order itself.
Yet in many transition frameworks, these claims are deferred or reframed. They are treated as issues to be addressed once stability is secured, or as threats to national unity when articulated politically. By prioritising short-term order over structural renegotiation, transition narrows the scope of political possibility. Instead of enabling new forms of power-sharing, it often preserves the arrangements that produced the exclusion.
Claims that prioritise short-term political stabilisation over deep structural inclusion fundamentally ignore some of the key drivers of internal conflict, which are exclusionary politics and group-level inequalities. Empirically, conventional state-level measures often fail to capture the reality of political violence because conflict is explicitly motivated by targeted political discrimination and wealth differentials along ethnic lines. When a political transformation focuses merely on restoring order while leaving exclusive governance intact, it ignores the grievances that drive identity groups to take up arms. This systematic exclusion deeply polarises society, creating a trap where the state is incentivised to use ethno-national and religious framing to suppress dissent, while opposition groups are pushed away from non-ethnic agendas because the highly exclusive nature of the regime makes cross-ethnic collaboration nearly impossible to sustain. Consequently, trying to enforce stability without dismantling exclusionary structures ensures that the core structural causes of civil war remain completely unaddressed.
Ignoring inclusion in favor of superficial stabilisation is clearly illustrated by post-authoritarian transitions in the Middle East. Political transitions can indeed produce civil war when state institutions collapse and no credible framework exists for managing competing political claims. This risk, however, strengthens the case for negotiated and inclusive transition rather than for preserving exclusionary forms of rule. The collapse of autocratic leaders in countries such as Egypt, Libya, and Yemen did not automatically pave a smooth path to stability; instead, these attempts at regime change yielded intense civil chaos, sectarian violence, and military crackdowns. This persistent instability stems from the fact that old regimes historically relied on predatory divide-and-rule tactics that frayed social harmony, leaving deep societal divisions that surfaced violently once the central authority crumbled. Because these underlying dynamics behave much like historical civil wars, ignoring the need for effective, inclusive power-sharing and instead settling for a fragile status quo only allows grievances to fester. Ultimately, as raging conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen demonstrated, true regional stability cannot be achieved through artificial containment; it requires a commitment to responsive, inclusive governance that resolves the ethno-national and religious inequalities sparking political violence in the first place. These dynamics are clearly visible in contemporary debates about political change in Iran and across the wider Middle East.
Political transitions in the Middle East: Iran as a primary case
Political transitions in the Middle East consistently prioritise restoring order, maintaining territorial unity, and rebuilding centralised authority rather than fundamentally redistributing power. This focus on stabilisation is rooted in a deep historical legacy of centralised governance. As a result, the demands of minoritised ethnonational, linguistic, or religious groups, such as autonomy, federal arrangements, or legal protections, are treated as secondary issues and deferred. While diversity may be tolerated on a cultural level, requests for institutional recognition or local self-governance are ultimately reframed as threats to unity and rejected as a basis for actual political authority.
In Iran, political transition has long been framed as stabilisation rather than transformation. The 1979 revolution, which ended monarchical rule, was widely understood as a moment of radical change. Yet while it replaced one form of authority with another, it did not fundamentally alter the centralised structure of the state. Demands for autonomy, particularly from Kurdish and other non-Persian regions, were quickly reframed as threats to national unity and met with coercion. At the same time, religious minoritised groups faced new forms of marginalisation within an ideological system that privileged a specific interpretation of Shiʿi authority. The transition produced a new regime but preserved an established logic of centralised control.
Recent debates about political change in Iran reflect a similar pattern. Proposals circulated by monarchist actors present themselves as pragmatic roadmaps for managing a post–Islamic Republic transition. Their language emphasises urgency, coordination, and the need to preserve order. Political change is reduced to the question of who governs, rather than how power is structured or shared.
This is evident in the organisation of authority. Executive power is concentrated in a central figure responsible for directing the transition and overseeing key institutions. Although presented as temporary, mechanisms to limit or distribute this authority remain unclear. Institutional arrangements appear less as sites of negotiation than as extensions of centralised control.
Despite references to cultural diversity, these proposals do not substantively engage with the political claims of non-Persian ethno-national groups. Discussion related to questions of power-sharing, or even mother tongue education, are largely absent, or even criminalised. The structure of the state is treated as fixed, and the scope of political change is confined to leadership.
Religious marginalisation follows a similar pattern. Communities, particularly in regions such as Kurdistan and Baluchistan, remain structurally excluded from key positions within a predominantly Shiʿi political system. Yet their marginalisation is rarely addressed as a political issue within transition frameworks. Instead, religious difference is subsumed under broader narratives of unity and territorial integrity. Where difference is acknowledged more directly, it is often framed in terms of security. References to ‘separatism or threats to ‘territorial integrity’ recast political claims as risks. This framing limits participation by positioning minoritised groups as problems to be managed.
Political change in Iran becomes a reorganisation of authority rather than a transformation of it. This securitised treatment of difference, where the claims of minoritised groups are cast as threats, closely mirrors the governing logic through which the Islamic Republic of Iran has long managed and suppressed diversity.
Syria’s post-Assad transition sharpens this concern for Iran
Following the collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024 and the emergence of a transitional government, political change has been shaped by a strong emphasis on restoring centralised authority. Rather than opening space for renegotiating the structure of the state, the transition has largely prioritised territorial control and institutional consolidation. This orientation has had direct consequences for minoritised groups. Communities such as Alawites, Druze, and Kurds have encountered increasing pressure as demands for local autonomy or meaningful participation are reframed as threats to national unity. While limited measures, such as symbolic recognition of linguistic or civic rights, have been promised, they do not extend to institutional forms of power-sharing or decentralised governance.
Iraq illustrates a different but related case
The post-2003 transition formally restructured the political order by integrating previously marginalised groups into a new power-sharing system. While this arrangement brought core constituencies, particularly Shiite political groups, into the center of the state, it redefined political inclusion along narrow institutional lines.
For smaller minoritised communities, this restructuring did not lead to meaningful participation. Groups such as Assyrians, Yazidis, and Mandaeans were formally recognised, yet their political presence remained limited. In practice, representation has frequently been absorbed into dominant party structures, reducing the autonomy of minoritised voices and reinforcing existing hierarchies.
This pattern stems from how political order is maintained. While power-sharing arrangements consolidate elite relations, they restrict independent political agency and sideline minoritised claims to preserve institutional balance among dominant actors. This dynamic is evident in Iraq, where Kurdish actors entered the post-2003 order as key partners but now face growing federal encroachment over authority, resources, and autonomy. Through economic and administrative pressures, the expansion of federal power has steadily constrained regional self-governance, reflecting a broader trend toward recentralisation even within a formally federal framework.
Egypt shows how a brief political opening can be reversed in the name of stability. After 2011, the reassertion of military-led central authority narrowed political participation and preserved the foundations of the existing order. Although groups such as Coptic Christians and Nubians received formal or symbolic recognition, they continued to face insecurity, weak institutional protection, and the subordination of their claims to state development and security priorities. The transition therefore reinforced established hierarchies under a renewed centralised framework.
Both overt centralism and superficial pluralism work to preserve the hegemony of the political center in Iran
Non-Persian alliances, such as the Congress of Nationalities for a Federal Iran (CNFI), remain deeply marginalised; tellingly, in the more than a decade since its establishment, not a single Persian political group has joined it. The CNFI directly exposes the structural flaws of mainstream transition narratives by arguing that merely replacing the current regime is insufficient if it perpetuates a history of Persian dominance, hyper-centralisation, and the systemic denial of collective rights. But its demands for decentralised, shared sovereignty are routinely delegitimised. Mainstream, Persian-centered opposition use the concept of territorial integrity to securitise and dismiss these fundamental democratic questions about the distribution of power.
Furthermore, even seemingly progressive initiatives like the Iran Freedom Congress (IFC) mask an inherently exclusionary framework beneath an inclusive vocabulary of pluralism. By refusing to explicitly recognise Iran as a multinational state or endorse genuine federalism, such platforms merely absorb non-Persian communities into a predefined, Persian-normative national structure. This strategic use of inclusive language allows centralist groups to invite tokenistic participation without transforming the underlying distribution of power. Ultimately, this superficial inclusivity reproduces systemic inequality in a more subtle, insidious form, keeping centralist power hierarchies intact while rendering collective rights strictly secondary.
The Iranian case shows that exclusion is not just a failure of transition planning, but a constitutive feature of how transition is imagined by dominant opposition currents. When political change is framed around preserving territorial integrity, restoring order, and replacing leadership while leaving the centralised state intact, the demands of non-Persian and religiously minoritised communities are depoliticised or treated as security threats. This means that even inclusive language can reproduce exclusion when it avoids the deeper question of how authority should be redistributed. A genuinely transformative transition would therefore require more than regime change; it would require a fundamental renegotiation of sovereignty, recognition, and institutional power. Without such a shift, transition risks becoming another moment in which the political centre renews itself while the structures of domination remain largely unchanged.
Across these cases, the central challenge lies in converting social diversity into durable forms of political authority. In practice, political change has tended to consolidate centralised power while leaving existing hierarchies largely intact. This produces forms of inclusion that are uneven, conditional, and persistently contested. Exclusion, in this sense, follows from the way transition is structured and carried out.
Transitions without inclusion
Transitions without inclusion are not incomplete transitions; they are mechanisms through which existing hierarchies are reauthorised under the language of renewal. When stability, unity, and territorial integrity become the dominant terms of political change, they narrow the field of democratic possibility and convert demands for collective rights into problems of security or disorder.
The central question, therefore, is not whether transitions can manage diversity, but whether they are willing to unsettle the structures that made diversity politically unequal in the first place. Without a redistribution of authority, inclusion remains a decorative vocabulary attached to an unchanged state form. Such transitions do not overcome authoritarian legacies; they reproduce them through new institutions, new elites, and new claims to ‘national’ legitimacy.
Authors: Davoud Osmanzadeh & Dr Fateh Saeidi.
Image: A protest in Vancouver, Canada, advocating for human rights in Iran. Credit: Sima Ghaffarzadeh/Pexels.
