By Meg Foley Yoder
In the wake of last month's protests and with looming threats of a U.S. military strike in Iran, the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights and the Institute of Politics convened a recent panel to examine whether the Islamic Republic is approaching a breaking point or entrenching itself more deeply in repression.
Introduced by Mathias Risse, director of the Carr-Ryan Center, the event brought together individuals whose authority on the subject is both professional and personal. Jared Genser, an international human rights lawyer known for securing the release of political prisoners moderated the discussion. He previously served as pro bono counsel to one of the panelists, Siamak Namazi, during his imprisonment in Iran.
The panelists included Hadi Ghaemi, founder and executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, which has documented abuses in the country for nearly two decades; Neda Bolourchi, executive director of the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans and a historian whose work focuses on state formation and legitimacy; Namazi, who was held hostage in Iran from 2015 to 2023; and Morad Tahbaz, co-founder of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, who also spent years imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison.
Genser framed the evening around four central questions: What is truly happening inside Iran? Has the regime become more vulnerable or more dangerous? What might follow the eventual death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei? And can nuclear diplomacy proceed without abandoning human rights?
The answers, while varied in emphasis, converged on a stark conclusion: the Islamic Republic is now governing primarily through coercion.
Bolourchi argued that the most consequential shift is structural. “For the first time since 1979, the Islamic Republic no longer governs through a mix of ideology and coercion,” she said. “It governs almost exclusively through coercion.” The regime’s claim to legitimacy, she contended, has eroded so thoroughly that citizenship itself has become conditional. Rather than treating Iranians as rights-bearing citizens, the state increasingly classifies them into hierarchies of loyalty: “loyalists” and “martyrs” on one side, “rioters” and “foreign agents” on the other. Once citizenship becomes conditional, she warned, rights become revocable.
“For the first time since 1979, the Islamic Republic no longer governs through a mix of ideology and coercion. It governs almost exclusively through coercion.”
–Neda Bolourchi
Yet she cautioned against equating moral collapse with political collapse. The security apparatus remains unified, elites are materially invested in the system, and the coercive machinery is intact.
Ghaemi, whose organization has meticulously documented repression in Iran, described the January crackdown as a historic rupture. Over two nights, he said, between 20,000 and 30,000 civilians were killed in what he called a premeditated massacre designed to prevent protesters from reaching larger gatherings.
“These were families, children, entire families walking out of their homes,” he said. “They were massacred on their doorsteps.”
The shock of that violence has altered how many Iranians perceive their government. Ghaemi said the regime is now widely viewed not simply as authoritarian but as an occupying force detached from the population it claims to represent. “The view of the ruling class is now one of an occupying power,” he said, adding that the government’s ideological slogans increasingly ring hollow against the devastation at home.
“These were families, children, entire families walking out of their homes. They were massacred on their doorsteps.”
–Hadi Ghaemi
If repression defines the political landscape, economic decay deepens the crisis. Namazi, drawing on eight years in Evin Prison and decades in business, described systemic corruption that has hollowed out the country’s institutions. Iran’s banking sector, he said bluntly, “is insolvent, period.” He recounted a pattern of inflated collateral, bribery and circular lending that resembles a closed loop of toxic assets. Across sectors, he argued, loyalty has supplanted competence.
“Violence can replace governance,” Namazi said, “but only to a point.”
For years, he noted, some policymakers in Washington resisted military action partly out of concern that bombing Iran would rally a largely pro-American population around the regime. Today, he suggested, that silent deterrent has weakened. The population is divided between those who oppose foreign intervention and those so desperate for change that they welcome it. Still, he cautioned that neither military strikes nor diplomatic deals will address the regime’s violence against its own citizens. “Neither of those moves will undo the carnage that already took place,” he said.
Tahbaz approached the question of state durability through the lens of hostage-taking, which he described as a deliberate instrument of policy dating back to the 1979 embassy seizure. Foreign nationals, particularly dual citizens, are arrested after carefully constructed media narratives create the appearance of guilt. “By the time this person is arrested, they’ve created enough media presence about the arrest that everybody thinks you’ve done something,” he said.
The practice persists, he argued, because there are few meaningful consequences. “There has to be a way of punishing the regime for taking hostages,” Tabhaz said. Without it, the tactic remains a proven, if “despicable,” method of statecraft.
“There has to be a way of punishing the regime for taking hostages.”
–Morad Tahbaz
When Genser turned to the question of succession, Bolourchi emphasized that while society may have moved beyond the regime psychologically, succession will hinge on elite cohesion rather than popular will. The Islamic Republic, she said, is institutionalized around a fusion of clerical authority and security enforcement. A successor is likely to remain a cleric, operating within parameters increasingly shaped by the Revolutionary Guards. Economic contraction and shrinking resources could strain elite bargaining, but the system has thus far endured by preserving internal alignment around survival and patronage.
The panelists agreed that meaningful transition would require defections within the security apparatus and unity among opposition forces. “If we want to defeat this regime,” Namazi said, “we have to use our brain.” Calls for vengeance, he warned, may deter the very defections that would make change possible, “If we want people to defect, we have to be inclusive.”
“If we want people to defect, we have to be inclusive.”
–Siamak Namazi
Ghaemi described efforts to convene a broad diaspora coalition and stressed the importance of transitional justice rather than retribution. “These are historical times,” he said. “There is a responsibility on all our shoulders, inside and outside the country.”
Throughout the evening, a persistent tension emerged between geopolitics and human rights. As Washington and Tehran weigh nuclear negotiations amid military posturing, Ghaemi expressed deep frustration that accountability for mass violence remains absent from diplomatic agendas. “These negotiations have never included anyone who represented the Iranian people,” he said.
The panel offered no easy predictions about Iran’s future. But taken together, their testimony sketched a country governed increasingly by force, economically hollowed out, and morally disconnected from its rulers. Whether that fracture leads to transformation or deeper repression, they suggested, will depend less on regional power calculations than on internal cohesion, defections within the security apparatus, and whether the international community is willing to treat human rights not as a secondary concern, but as central to Iran’s unfolding crisis.
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