A demontrator holds a portrait of a 20-year-old man dead during clashes with police in Tataouine, south of Tunisia, as he attends a gathering held on Habib Bourguiba avenue in Tunis, on Monday May 22, 2017. Chedly Ben Ibrahim/Press Association. All rights reserved.Recent social explosions in Iran and Tunisia make us wonder whether ‘social justice’ demands and ‘class’ politics have made a comeback. The importance of both Iran and Tunisia derive from the representative and vanguard roles they played in triggering the emergence of the global social movements, which exploded in 2009 and spread to the rest of the world.
These occupation movements all around the world between 2011 and 2013 began in 2009 with the Green Movement in Iran, reappearing in a stronger form in Tunisia one year later. The ripple effects of those upheavals impacted in remote parts of the world including the US. All those movements raised new questions for us, creating a new vocabulary and new perspectives – questions such as, ‘how the fusion of plutocracy and the political caste could be prevented from imposing excessive power on us?’ and ‘how we can form an alternative to the current social, political and economic system’.
Analyzing the political and economic features of these recent events remains important for the future of social movements still struggling to establish a better political strategy against the fusion of dynamics of capitalism and political caste in their geographies. In this article, events in Iran and Tunisia are considered from the point of view of social justice. Is social justice back on the agenda? And if social justice is back, is it possible to talk about the return of social ‘class’ as a player? If both are back, how should we assess these upheavals in terrains torn apart by ravaging identity conflicts – radical religious groups, nationalist and authoritarian leaders, rising populism – for many a long year.
