Iranians have experienced many a dark day since the 1979 revolution: the bitter political clampdown of early post-revolutionary years, the Iran-Iraq War, which was the longest conventional war of the 20th century, disasters caused by government negligence, severe economic hardship from international sanctions and domestic corruption, egregious gender and ethnic inequality, and many, many rounds of bloody repression whenever they took to the streets to protest any of these injustices. When the latest, and by far the bloodiest, wave of repression struck – the massacre of thousands and thousands of protesters in January 2026 – it felt as though things could not get any darker. A profound sense of despair and the burden of mourning so many lives lost had crippled the nation. Yet glimmers of hope began to emerge. People had reached a point of no return. Students, teachers, workers continued to protest despite the savage crackdown. Families of the fallen transformed mourning rituals into displays of defiance, celebrating collective strength. Just as Iranians were starting to find ways to express this extraordinary amalgam of grief, anger, resilience, and solidarity, bombs began to fall from the sky.

It is useless to deny that many Iranians had come to see foreign intervention as their only way out of the Islamic Republic’s iron grip. Across the world, the Iranian diaspora loudly echoed this belief. Many among them aligned themselves with Trump’s America and Netanyahu’s Israel – even as much of the rest of the world sought to distance itself from both – lobbying for, and then cheering on, the bombing campaign. Inside Iran, too, there were some who felt hopeful that the Israeli-American war on Iran might bring about meaningful change. The assassination of Ali Khamenei, the dictator who both figuratively and literally tortured the population for almost four decades, sparked some hope for a swift collapse of the Islamic Republic. But, following repeated attacks on Iran’s energy and water infrastructure and the regime’s retaliation against the Arab Gulf States, culminating in Trump’s terrifying threat that Iran’s ‘whole civilisation will die tonight’, the idea of the United States ‘liberating’ the Iranian people has lost its appeal even among the minority that believed in it.

Now, following the announcement of a two-week conditional ceasefire, hopes for a swift collapse of the Iranian regime have been further dispelled. Whether Israel and the United States ever genuinely planned for regime change in Iran, it was always an implausible outcome of this war. An end to the conflict risks condemning the Iranian people to a double burden of suffering, precisely what many of us have long warned against: they will have endured the death and destruction of war only to face an emboldened, and even more intolerant, dictatorship that extinguishes any chance of a democratic movement reviving itself.

At the risk of sounding overly optimistic, I would like to challenge the pervasive sense of hopelessness surrounding the regime’s survival, as well as the assumption that the war will inevitably embolden the most extreme factions in power. For all the hardship and tragedy suffered by the Iranian people, it remains possible to imagine a brighter long-term future for the country.

Iran’s war strategy over the past weeks has indicated that hardliners have the upper hand within the country’s oft-fragmented political elite. The appointment of the late supreme leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as his successor signalled a clear continuation of his father’s policy of resistance at any cost. In addition, recognised moderate voices, such as the president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and his foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, have been marginalised, and threats of retaliation and destruction – be it against foreign aggression or domestic dissent – have filled the country’s airwaves. Caught between domestic repression and airstrikes, Iranians have been living in a state of unremitting dread.

Crucially, however, Iran’s leadership will not necessarily continue pursuing a hardline policy whenever the war ends. Indeed, it is conceivable that it will have both strong incentives and a favourable environment to change course. The Islamic Republic’s leaders, especially the hardliners among them, are not famous for making the most rational decisions, even in pursuit of their own interest, let alone that of the people they govern. But they could be more likely to do so in a postwar scenario, for several reasons.

First and foremost, it is important to remember that it is the conflict itself that has enabled hardliners to pursue their scorched earth policy as the regime’s only path to survival. Agreeing to a compromising ceasefire deal that offers Tehran no concessions, simply to halt the hostilities, would not necessarily help the regime to survive later down the road. It would leave the Iranian leadership vulnerable both to future Israeli incursions, and, more importantly, to an economically strained, politically frustrated, and resolutely oppositional population. The combination of continued economic hardship – exacerbated by the war – and eroded political legitimacy is a recipe for slow death. Any deal that gives the regime even the minimum conditions required for its survival would instead need to include a guarantee that Israel will not initiate another excursion soon and, even more crucially, meaningful sanctions relief to stop the economic nosedive. Such a deal was conceivable only if Iran pushed the world economy to the brink of American tolerance, even at immense cost to its own people – a price, of course, that hardliners are willing to pay.

However, if the current ceasefire leads to a permanent deal and, as now looks likely, the Islamic Republic emerges from the ruins of war still standing – ending the war on its own terms before externally induced state collapse – its remaining leaders will face an urgent need to modify their stance to let the potential gains from any deal take effect. On the international front, securing a US commitment to restrain Israel will require Iran to adopt a less confrontational stance. More importantly, the regime needs to avert economic collapse and renewed social uprisings – which pose an even greater existential threat to the Islamic Republic’s survival than Israel. Indeed, such an imperative gives pragmatic voices within the IRGC and political elite a chance to reassert themselves. In short, just as the regime’s hardline approach – and strategy of inflicting extreme pressure on its adversaries – may have been necessary to survive the war, moderation will be necessary to survive its aftermath.

A revived, albeit mildly softened, Islamic Republic is still not a hopeful prospect, but bear with me a little longer for a glimmer of hope. Why, you may ask, would the typically reckless hardline leadership of the IRGC, now reinforced by Mojtaba Khamenei, be inclined to act rationally? In truth, they haven’t always been irrational, and they will be less inclined to be so now for two reasons. First, having ‘won’ this war simply by avoiding outright defeat, military and political leaders, converged under the influence of the IRGC, can claim that they have proven Iran’s military might. As such, focusing on the achievements of the war – resistance that led to economic relief – could offer a more welcome narrative than straining themselves to maintain their confrontational posture. In other words, moderation would grant them some much-needed respite, and wouldn’t equate to losing face either.

There is a historical precedent for the reality of war transforming ideologically committed soldiers and commanders into pragmatists. The younger generation of the IRGC who did not experience the Iran-Iraq War are generally regarded as more radical than their war-experienced elders. This very generation has now endured a war of their own, and experienced the gap between ideological postures (‘we will annihilate the Zionist Regime’) and the actual reach of their military capacity. It is not far-fetched to imagine that this generation of commanders might seek a transition to a calmer postwar period, if it concludes with a ceasefire that contains at least limited concessions. The hardliner, hostile policy is simply too costly to sustain indefinitely, and the history of the Islamic Republic is replete with policy fluctuations for exactly this reason. Speculation that an IRGC strongman and parliament speaker, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, is being considered in the US as a conversation partner becomes more intelligible on these grounds. This is not to suggest that war itself has accelerated such a transformation, one that may well have occurred faster and more organically under different circumstances. It is rather an attempt at imagining a best-case scenario given that the disaster of war has already descended upon Iranians.

This brings me back to the promised glimmer of hope. With a more pragmatic IRGC at the helm of the country’s economy, security and politics in the immediate postwar era, protest is likely to take a back seat. The Iranian people, shocked and exhausted by the January massacre and wounded by the war, will be less inclined to take to the streets and mobilise. Potential improvements in the country’s economic conditions enabled by sanctions relief, and in its social life allowed by a more moderate leadership, would also act as a pressure valve to let some of the steam off and postpone popular protest.

Yet the spark for protest, for real change, will not die. I have relied on several hypotheticals, but I am as certain as a social scientist can be about one thing: the Islamic Republic will not regain popular legitimacy. Instead, the potential economic and social relief that may emerge from this war could enable a repressed civil society to slowly – perhaps very slowly – rebuild itself and initiate democratic change in the only way possible: from the bottom up and through the people.