Iranian regime change, if it happens, will be home-made

If political change comes to Iran, it is unlikely to be led by familiar exile figures or pre-packaged opposition coalitions.

Even supporters of exiled crown prince and opposition figure Reza Pahlavi acknowledge, sometimes openly, that he cannot return without US backing—and with US strategic attention shifting elsewhere, that backing is uncertain. Exile legitimacy depends on external sponsorship; internal legitimacy does not. Change would almost certainly emerge from within the country, in forms that are difficult to anticipate from abroad.

In Iran, political legitimacy is earned internally through shared exposure to repression, visible personal risk and continuity with lived experience under the Islamic Republic. Leadership that resides permanently outside the country, regardless of ideology, faces a structural credibility deficit that organisational reach, media access or international recognition cannot easily offset. This is why Iranian politics repeatedly confounds external successor shopping.

This constraint helps explain a feature of Iranian political mobilisation that outside observers often misread: leader-light and decentralised. Such movements are adaptive. The security apparatus has decades of experience in identifying organisers, applying pressure through workplaces and families and preventing visible leadership from converting social energy into durable organisation. Under such conditions, tidy hierarchies are liabilities. The distributed networks we see in Iran survive longer precisely because they are harder to decapitate.

But if visible leadership is not the variable to watch, then what is? It’s whether compliance with the regime still makes sense to the people practising it.

For years, the Islamic Republic has relied on a bargain with key constituencies, including parts of the state-dependent economy and sections of the conservative and security-aligned base: accept restrictions on individual freedoms and tolerate economic stagnation, and the regime will provide order and strategic security against external threats. This bargain does not need to be universally believed; it only needs to be credible enough to keep supporters invested and fence-sitters cautious.

The events of 2025 exposed how hollow that promise can become. The 12-day war between Iran and Israel in June revealed profound intelligence and air-defence failures and demonstrated that Iran’s deterrence can be punctured quickly and visibly. It came at a time when Iran’s axis of resistance—its network of partners and regional proxies—was already severely damaged. The regime’s domestic claim to competence collapsed. Failure abroad eroded legitimacy at home.

The economic shock that followed sharpened this effect. Currency depreciation and inflationary pressure produced unrest that began not in Tehran or among students but in the poorest regions—small cities whose names many Iranians would not recognise—and among bazaar traders and shopkeepers. These are constituencies that have historically tolerated political constraint in exchange for economic stability. When they moved first, before their unrest spread to students and larger cities, they signalled something important: the people with most to lose from disorder had concluded they had more to lose from continuity.

None of this requires a government-in-waiting to be consequential. Many breakdowns and transitions begin when the existing system can no longer sustain daily life at an acceptable level or coordinate its response to crises. Programs and leaders often consolidate after rupture, once a vacuum opens and following becomes safer than waiting.

Three things bear watching: state capacity, and whether the system can still provide basics such as utilities, wages and administrative predictability; elite coherence, specifically whether factions across clerical, security and economic institutions remain aligned on the balance between repression, accommodation and resource allocation; and the stability bargain itself—do key constituencies still believe the regime can deliver protection and order?

If change comes, it is more likely to resemble a rupture followed by contested consolidation rather than a neat handover to recognisable figures abroad. Institutional actors inside Iran, including security services, may manage instability—but coercive capacity is distinct from legitimacy. The ability to impose order does not confer the ability to rebuild consent among a population increasingly sceptical of imposed identities, morality and saviours.

External observers should resist the temptation to look for tidy alternatives on Western timelines. The absence of a visible successor can indicate that authority is weakening before legitimacy is ready to re-form. If Iran changes, it will be made at home, shaped under constraint and legible to outsiders only after the fact.

*AI contributed no ideas to this article—Mitra Safavi-Naeini.

*Mitra Safavi-Naeini is an Australian-based researcher with interests in science and public policy. She writes here in a personal capacity. The views expressed are her own.

Source: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/iranian-regime-change-if-it-happens-will-be-home-made/