Presentation short abstract

How do participants in Iran’s water protests represent their grievances? Analysing slogans, chants, and signs, this project shows how they reappropriate state-sanctioned narratives, resisting environmentally destructive projects while largely remaining within prescribed discursive boundaries.

Presentation long abstract

In Iran, environmental protests, especially those centred on water, have increased significantly in recent years. While these crises are ultimately rooted in global warming, they are exacerbated by exploitative economic practices that benefit the country's ruling class, leaving the general population — particularly marginalised communities, often ethnic minorities — to bear the greatest burdens. Even as these ecological distribution conflicts prompt mobilisation, elites maintain dominance through repression and by promoting mainstream understandings of environmental issues that deflect responsibility and exclude anti-government narratives. To explore how subaltern actors navigate this dynamic, this paper asks: How do participants in Iran’s water protests represent ecological and social grievances?

While several publications have addressed environmental movements in Iran, most focus either on urban, middle-class activism, thereby neglecting struggles in peripheral areas, or consider mobilisation in these areas solely through the lens of NGO activities. This project complements this body of literature by analysing protest materials, such as slogans, signs and chants, from major water-related protests in Iran between 2016 and 2025. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, I contextualise these expressions within the material realities of ecological distribution conflicts and examine how they interact with narratives promoted by elites. Ultimately, I argue that the framing promoted during these protests exploit contradictions in elite environmental discourse to resist exploitative practices; at the same time, however, these framings largely remain within sanctioned boundaries and reproduce mainstream narratives, falling short of articulating alternative visions of ecological inequality.