In late December of 2025, Iran plunged into an economic collapse facilitated by international sanctions like embargoes on oil exports. This caused inflation and the cost of living to skyrocket, all the while the Iranian currency hit a record-low. This triggered unrest across the country, starting with the closing down of the Grand Bazaar in Tehran, Iran’s capital city, with hundreds of demonstrations recorded by the Human Rights Activists in Iran.
Long-standing discontent over political corruption fueled the eruption of these protests, with public anger mounting from energy shortages and civil rights abuses. This wave of protests is the largest since 2022, following Mahsa Amini‘s arrest by the morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. Her subsequent death triggered the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, calling for the end of mandated hijab laws and other oppressive laws the regime had upheld against women.
The protesters have been calling for the end of the Islamic Republic System, the authoritarian Iranian regime that was established in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution, and the recent protests are nearly on the same scale as those 1979 uprisings. The unrest has been met with violent crackdowns from the government, with the official total death toll varying from 3,000 to over 30,000.
As a response to the uprisings, the Iranian government imposed a national internet blackout, cutting all access to international web services, mainly between January 8 and 28 of 2026. Iran has historically used blackouts to suppress protests, with a full six-day blackout in 2019, the banning of WhatsApp, Google Play, Instagram, and internet access during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement in 2022, and cut-off telecommunications during the Twelve-Day War between Iran and Israel in June 2025. The 2026 blackout, however, was the longest in Iran’s history because of the scale of the anti-regime sentiment across the protests, pushing the government to suppress dissent and the spread of information.
The repression, however, has not caused people to back down; students at major universities across Iran boycotted classes and staged protests commemorating those killed in the protests.
Human rights organizations, such as the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), have described the situation as one of the most violent crackdowns in decades. Authorities are arresting thousands of people, sometimes arbitrarily, with any type of relation to the protests, alongside mass killings happening between January 8 and 9. In Iran’s prison system, mass executions, seemingly unrelated to the protests, have escalated the human rights crisis. Iran also ranks among the top jailers of journalists globally, intensifying with the waves of arrests surging from early 2026 to now. Detainees face assault by security forces and heavy sentencing, mainly under articles of the Islamic Penal Code that facilitate the abuse and jailing of many Iranian journalists.
The most immediate flashpoint as of February 2026 is the ongoing nuclear negotiation between Washington and Tehran, with the most recent round of talks taking place in Geneva on February 26. The talks are part of a long-running effort to prevent the development of nuclear weapons in the region, leading back to the original nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), aimed at restricting Iran’s nuclear program. The United States, under the Trump Administration, has engaged in diplomacy, but military options remain on the table, including a limited strike if a deal cannot be reached with the Iranian government and President Masoud Pezeshkian and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Tehran’s red line is clear, with a statement from Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, that any U.S. attack would be treated as acts of aggression and met with self-defense. Tehran also appears to be rebuilding aggressively after the Twelve-Day War, where the joint United States-Israeli strikes destroyed or degraded a large fraction of Iran’s military and weapons arsenal and caused severe damage to their nuclear infrastructure.
Thursday’s Geneva talk concluded with Badr al-Busaidi, the mediator and foreign minister of Oman, claiming progress, though no details are public. Technical discussions are scheduled to take place in Vienna, and if they proceed and yield progress, military confrontation could be turned away from, but if talks fall through, the United States could move toward a military strike against the country. The Islamic Republic faces an insurgent population, an economic crisis, and a nuclear standoff that defines the future of Iran, and potentially the stability of the entire Middle East.
