What Makes a Movement Work? A Comparative Analysis of Grassroots Uprisings from Latin America to Iran (2025–2026)
Written by: Reza Ashouri
Abstract This paper examines why some grassroots movements succeed while others fail, comparing documented cases across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Five factors — organizational infrastructure, coalition breadth, economic disruption, strategic sequencing, and elite defection — consistently distinguish durable successes from suppressed uprisings. The framework is applied to Iran's seven protest cycles (1979–2026). Keywords: civil resistance, social movements, organizational capacity, elite defection Why This Question Matters When ordinary people pour into the streets, the world asks one question: will it work? Sometimes the answer is yes. Apartheid fell in South Africa. The Berlin Wall came down. Marcos fled the Philippines. Sometimes the answer is no, or not yet. Hong Kong’s pro-democracy wave was crushed. Egypt’s Tahrir Square moment produced a harsher autocracy. People in Iran have organized at least seven major protest cycles since 1979 — including the largest and deadliest uprising in the country’s modern history, ongoing since late 2025 — and the Islamic Republic remains in place. Understanding why some movements succeed and others do not is not merely academic. This paper draws on peer-reviewed scholarship and verified reporting to examine well-documented cases across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe, then applies the resulting analytical framework to Iran’s protest history. The word “successful” is used in the sense political scientists use it: a movement is treated as successful when it forced a major political shift — removing a ruler, replacing an institution, or producing a durable change in law or social norms (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011). This paper consistently distinguishes between the people of Iran and the Islamic Republic’s governing apparatus. Any reference to the regime describes the state, not ordinary Iranians, who are the central subject. Global Cases: What the Evidence Shows Latin America offers the clearest evidence that organizational depth, not crowd size, drives outcomes. Brazil’s Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) is the largest social movement in the region (Britannica, 2014; Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, 2024). Founded in 1984, it has organized more than 2,500 land occupations and secured legal land titles for approximately 370,000 families through a hybrid structure: a national coordinating body combined with deeply local encampments, democratic assemblies, and cooperatives. Bolivia’s Water War of 2000 shows the same logic: indigenous communities, labor unions, farmers, and urban poor united around the reversal of water privatization and won within weeks (Olivera & Dwinell, 2014). Chile’s 2019 estallido social drew over one million people into Santiago on a single day and forced a constitutional rewrite, yet the proposed new constitution was rejected by 62 percent of voters in 2022 because the movement built protest momentum without building durable political coaliti…
Civil resistance · elite defection · organizational capacity · social movements
