Neoliberal Reform, Social Fragilization, and the Strategic Misreading of Iran

This essay examines the entanglement of market-oriented reform, social fragilization, and external coercion in Iran. It argues that exchange-rate liberalization, subsidy restructuring, privatization, and price-based reforms do not mechanically produce protest. Rather they can generate social fragilization when they transfer economic risk onto households, erode compensatory credibility, and weaken predictable expectations of governance. Under conditions of sanctions, inflation, currency depreciation, and geopolitical hostility, such fragilization may lower protest thresholds and reshape the perceived opportunity structure available to external actors. The essay shows how domestic economic grievances can be misread by hostile powers as signs of regime fragility and political availability to foreign coercion. Iran’s experience demonstrates both the plausibility and limits of this logic: social fragility may create volatility, but it does not necessarily produce institutional collapse or societal alignment with external intervention. The essay therefore bridges political economy and security studies by showing that domestic reform and external coercion must be analyzed within a single strategic field.