Leiden University Student Repository

Burg, Niencke van (2024)

Agency Amidst Adversity: The Historical and Contemporary Dynamics of the Iranian Women’s Movement

Bachelor thesis | International Studies (BA)

This thesis aims to investigate how agency of Iranian women can be explained through the political landscape during both the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911) and the Mahsa Amini protests (2022). This study builds on the theoretical framework of agency, defining agency as the “communal capacity to act,” and identifying a gap within agency, situated between the capacity to act and the capacity to impact. This study poses that this gap can be explained through the political landscape and hypothesizes that the political landscape during both the Constitutional Revolution and the Mahsa Amini protests has functioned as a barrier to the agency of the Iranian women’s movement. Lastly, this thesis proposes that during the Constitutional Revolution, the Iranian women’s movement capacity to impact was primarily restricted; and that during the Mahsa Amini protests, the Iranian women’s movement’s capacity to act was primarily restricted.

Iran

Women's movements

Constitutional Revolution

Agency

Mahsa Amini.

Author

Burg, Niencke van

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Middle East

Supervisors

Pourbagheri, H.

ECTS Credits

15

Language

en