ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 examines the two outstanding cases of social mobilization and political contestation in Iran at the turn of the millennium: the 1999 student movement and the 2006 Women’s One Million Signature Campaign. Both are viewed as precursors to the Green Movement, because women, students and youth comprised the great majority of their actors, just as they would in 2009. This will serve to elucidate, among other things, how in a semi-authoritarian context social mobilization and sociopolitical contestation at the grassroots level develop and are sustained and how new subjectivities are constructed. In addition, I demonstrate how tactics and techniques of resistance come to be developed and solidarities forged among oppositional elements in political settings that are ill-disposed to mobilization and protestation.
