Four Years After Jina Mahsa Amini: Woman, Life, Freedom Through a Feminist and Social Movement Lens

 Four Years After Jina Mahsa Amini: Woman, Life, Freedom Through a Feminist and Social Movement Lens

Dr. Soraya Fallah scholarly commentary

September 16, 2026 marks four years since the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, a 22 year old Kurdish Iranian woman whose death in the custody of Iran's morality police became the catalyst for one of the most consequential women led mobilizations in contemporary Iranian history. What began with the death of one young Kurdish woman quickly developed into a nationwide movement challenging compulsory veiling, gender discrimination, political repression, ethnic marginalization, and restrictions on individual autonomy.

The movement became known internationally through the Kurdish phrase Jin, Jiyan, Azadî, translated as Woman, Life, Freedom. Yet the history of this phrase did not begin in Iran in September 2022. It has deep roots in Kurdish women's movements and political thought. Its emergence throughout Iran following Amini's death therefore brought together two dimensions that are essential to understanding the movement: the struggle for women's rights and bodily autonomy, and the longstanding experiences of Kurdish and other minoritized communities. Recent scholarship similarly examines Woman, Life, Freedom as a transnational movement rooted in Kurdish feminist political thought while developing into a broader Iranian mobilization. (Taylor & Francis Online)

Four years later, an important question remains: What happened to Woman, Life, Freedom after the extraordinary mobilization of 2022? Did the movement decline, or did it transform?

From a feminist social movement perspective, this question cannot be answered simply by counting demonstrations. A movement is not necessarily defined by the continued existence of mass street protests. Social movements can change organizational forms, develop new repertoires of action, move between periods of visibility and relative quiet, and continue to shape political consciousness even when repression makes public mobilization more difficult.

The events of 2022 demonstrated the political significance of women's bodies and everyday experiences. Feminist theory has long challenged the separation between the personal and the political. The principle that "the personal is political" recognizes that experiences within the family, workplace, community, and private sphere can reflect broader systems of power. In Iran, compulsory veiling transformed women's appearance and bodily autonomy into matters of state regulation. The refusal to accept that regulation consequently became not merely an individual decision about clothing but, for many participants, an act of political agency.

This is one of the central contributions of Woman, Life, Freedom to contemporary feminist politics. Women were not simply demanding that institutions provide them with rights. They were asserting themselves as political subjects capable of defining their own identities, bodies, choices, and participation in society.

An intersectional feminist framework makes this analysis more complete.

Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality demonstrates that systems of power cannot always be understood through a single category such as gender. Gender intersects with ethnicity, race, class, religion, nationality, and other social identities. The circumstances surrounding Amini's death make this framework particularly important. She was a Kurdish woman from Saqqez. Her Kurdish identity was not incidental to the history of the movement. The Kurdish dimension of her identity and the Kurdish origins of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî place questions of gender and ethnicity within the same analytical framework. (UNPO)

This intersectional perspective also reminds us that Iranian women are not a homogeneous social category. Kurdish, Baluchi, Arab, Azeri, Baha'i, Sunni, economically marginalized, and other minoritized women may experience state power and social discrimination in different and overlapping ways. A feminist analysis that treats all women as experiencing oppression in precisely the same manner risks reproducing another form of exclusion.

Woman, Life, Freedom therefore offers an important case for examining how gender and ethnicity interact within social movements. The movement was simultaneously about women's autonomy and about whose identities are recognized within the political community. It brought the experiences of Kurdish women and other minoritized communities into a national and international conversation that had often treated these questions separately.

The United Nations Independent International Fact Finding Mission on Iran provides an important factual foundation for understanding the violence surrounding the movement. In March 2024, the mission concluded that Jina Mahsa Amini's death was unlawful and resulted from physical violence inflicted while she was in state custody. The mission also documented serious human rights violations committed in the context of the protests and found that certain violations amounted to crimes against humanity. (UNOG Newsroom)

These findings are significant because they distinguish documented evidence from political interpretation. The death of Amini was not simply a symbolic event around which people constructed a movement. According to the UN investigation, it involved an unlawful death in state custody, followed by extensive violations during the state's response to the resulting protests.

The state's response also changed the conditions under which collective action could occur.

Social movement theory helps explain this transformation through the concepts of political opportunity structures, resource mobilization, collective identity, and repertoires of contention. Large scale collective action requires networks, communication, organizational resources, leadership, public space, and opportunities for people to participate without facing prohibitive costs. Repression can disrupt each of these resources.

The suppression of the 2022 protests therefore affected not only individual protesters but also the organizational environment in which collective action could continue. Arrests, prosecutions, surveillance, intimidation, executions, restrictions on civil society, and institutional pressure created significant barriers to sustained public mobilization. The United Nations and international human rights organizations have documented extensive repression connected to the movement. (OHCHR)

But repression does not necessarily eliminate the political consciousness that generated a movement.

It can change the form that resistance takes.

This distinction is essential when examining Woman, Life, Freedom four years later.

The large demonstrations of 2022 are no longer occurring at the same scale. That is an important empirical fact. However, recent developments indicate that the movement's central claims have not simply disappeared. In September 2026, labor and civil society organizations inside Iran issued a joint statement reaffirming demands concerning freedom, equality, economic security, and opposition to repression and executions. (Center for Human Rights in Iran)

Current reporting also documents continuing resistance surrounding compulsory veiling and renewed acts of collective action associated with the fourth anniversary. Kurdish political prisoners have announced hunger strikes, while Kurdish political organizations have called for a strike on September 16. IranWire has reported heightened security measures in Saqqez, Amini's hometown and burial place, ahead of the anniversary. (IranWire)

These developments should not be interpreted as evidence that the 2022 movement continues unchanged. Rather, they demonstrate that its political language, collective memory, and forms of resistance have continued to evolve under conditions of repression.

This is where feminist theory offers an important contribution to conventional social movement analysis.

Traditional measures of political mobilization often emphasize visible collective events: demonstrations, organizations, membership, leadership, and institutional outcomes. Feminist theory encourages researchers to examine less visible forms of political agency as well. Everyday resistance, bodily autonomy, refusal, cultural expression, collective memory, and the transformation of social norms can all be relevant to understanding political change.

Women's continued refusal to accept restrictions on their bodies and public participation is therefore analytically significant even when it does not take the form of a mass demonstration.

The body itself became a site of political contestation.

For women living under systems of compulsory dress regulation, deciding how to appear in public can become a political act. The significance of such acts does not depend exclusively on whether they immediately produce legislative or institutional change. They can also challenge the normalization of state authority over women's bodies and expand the boundaries of what is socially imaginable.

This is closely connected to feminist theories of agency.

Women living under authoritarian or patriarchal systems are sometimes represented primarily through the language of victimhood. Such representations can unintentionally obscure their political agency. Woman, Life, Freedom complicated that narrative. Iranian women were not simply recipients of state policy. They became visible political actors who challenged restrictions through collective and individual action.

My own observations during the early months of the movement reflected this dimension of agency.

In 2022, while speaking publicly about the unfolding movement, I emphasized the importance of people recognizing their own power. At the time, my observation was that something deeper than a moment of protest was occurring: people were beginning to understand themselves as agents capable of influencing their political and social environment.

Four years later, I find that observation particularly relevant.

The significance of a social movement cannot always be measured by whether the original demonstration continues at the same scale. Collective action can produce changes in consciousness that are difficult to measure immediately. People may acquire new political identities, develop new networks, challenge previously accepted norms, and reconsider their relationship with authority.

In this sense, political agency can become one of the movement's most enduring legacies.

The Kurdish dimension of the movement is equally important to my understanding of this history.

Jin, Jiyan, Azadî emerged from Kurdish women's political movements long before September 2022. Its appearance throughout Iran represented an important expansion of a Kurdish feminist political concept into a broader national movement. The death of a Kurdish woman consequently became the point around which gender, ethnicity, political repression, and questions of national belonging became interconnected.

For Kurdish women, this history cannot be separated from longstanding experiences of linguistic, cultural, political, and social marginalization. Amini's Kurdish identity and the Kurdish origins of the movement's central slogan should therefore remain visible in scholarly accounts of Woman, Life, Freedom. (Taylor & Francis Online)

At the same time, acknowledging the Kurdish origins of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî does not diminish the participation of women and communities across Iran. Instead, it allows for a more historically accurate understanding of how a political concept originating within a particular movement traveled across social and geographic boundaries and acquired new meanings.

This is one reason why Woman, Life, Freedom is particularly important for feminist scholarship. It demonstrates that feminist movements do not always emerge from a single social category or a single political demand. They can develop at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, generation, class, geography, and political experience.

The movement also became transnational.

Following Amini's death, Iranian diaspora communities organized demonstrations, educational programs, artistic events, advocacy campaigns, and commemorations throughout North America, Europe, and other regions. The movement consequently became both a domestic struggle and a transnational field of political engagement.

For members of the Iranian diaspora, participation could involve remembrance, advocacy, human rights work, documentation, political education, and efforts to amplify voices from inside Iran. This created another important dimension of feminist agency: women and communities outside Iran could participate in shaping how the movement was represented internationally.

The transnational circulation of Woman, Life, Freedom also demonstrates how social movements can acquire meanings beyond their original geographic context. The slogan became recognizable internationally, while its Kurdish origins generated important conversations about the relationship between feminism, ethnicity, and political representation.

Four years after Amini's death, therefore, the question of whether Woman, Life, Freedom is "alive" or has "fallen" requires greater analytical precision.

If by "alive" we mean that Iran is experiencing the same level of sustained mass demonstrations witnessed in the months following Amini's death, the evidence does not support describing the present moment as equivalent to 2022.

If, however, we are asking whether the grievances, political identities, feminist claims, practices of resistance, collective memories, and social networks associated with the movement have disappeared, the evidence points to a more complicated picture. Current reports document continued forms of resistance, civil society activity, labor mobilization, political prisoner action, and opposition to compulsory veiling and state repression. (IranWire)

The distinction matters.

A movement can lose the organizational capacity for continuous mass mobilization while retaining political and cultural influence. It can become less visible while remaining significant. It can fragment into different organizations and forms of action while maintaining a shared political vocabulary. It can also influence subsequent generations who did not themselves participate in the original protests.

Current reporting on young Iranians who came of age after 2022 illustrates this generational dimension. Four years after Amini's death, a generation that witnessed the uprising has grown up under continued repression but with social boundaries that have, in important respects, been challenged by the experience of Woman, Life, Freedom. (Iran International | Iran International)

For researchers, this makes longitudinal study particularly important.

The historical significance of Woman, Life, Freedom should not be determined solely by the number of protesters in the streets at a particular moment. Researchers should also examine changes in collective identity, political consciousness, gender norms, bodily autonomy, organizational networks, cultural production, diaspora mobilization, and the relationship between gender and ethnic identity.

The movement also provides an important opportunity to reconsider how feminist movements are evaluated under authoritarian conditions.

A movement does not necessarily become insignificant because it does not immediately transform formal institutions. Conversely, changes in everyday behavior should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of complete structural transformation. Institutional change and social change operate at different levels and at different speeds.

The scholarly task is therefore to examine both.

Four years after Jina Mahsa Amini's death, the most productive question is not simply whether Woman, Life, Freedom won or lost. Such binary categories are inadequate for understanding a movement whose organizational structure, political environment, and forms of resistance have changed substantially.

The more important questions are these: What forms of agency emerged? Which political identities were strengthened? Which structures of power remained intact? Which forms of resistance survived repression? How did feminist consciousness develop? How did Kurdish identity shape the movement? How did the movement influence subsequent generations? And how have its ideas traveled across borders?

These questions move the discussion from the immediate visibility of protest toward the longer history of social transformation.

Jina Mahsa Amini was a young Kurdish woman whose death became a turning point in Iranian history. Four years later, remembering her requires more than remembering the demonstrations of 2022. It requires examining the structures of power that produced the conditions surrounding her death, the women and communities who transformed grief into collective action, and the continuing struggles over gender, dignity, autonomy, equality, and freedom.

My own observation in 2022 that people were beginning to recognize their own power remains, for me, one of the most important ways to understand the movement. Political change is not only produced through institutions. It can also begin when individuals and communities recognize themselves as political subjects capable of questioning authority and imagining alternatives.

That recognition does not guarantee institutional transformation. It does not eliminate repression. It does not resolve the complex political and social differences within a movement.

But it matters.

Four years after Jina Mahsa Amini's death, Woman, Life, Freedom can therefore be understood neither as a completed historical episode nor simply as a continuation of the 2022 uprising in its original form. It is better understood as an evolving social process shaped by feminist agency, intersectionality, repression, collective memory, and changing forms of resistance.

Its history remains unfinished.

And for scholars of gender, social movements, human rights, and minoritized communities, that unfinished history remains an important field of inquiry.

References

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United Nations Human Rights Office. (2024, September 13). Iran intensifying efforts to repress women and girls on second anniversary of “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (OHCHR)

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Iran Human Rights. (2026, September 9). Ten civil society groups inside Iran vow to continue the struggle for freedom ahead of fourth anniversary of Mahsa Amini's killing. (Center for Human Rights in Iran)

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