Mostafa Sarlak has posted Conflict Accumulation and Legitimacy Erosion in Iran: A Structural Analysis of the Socio-Political Crisis and an Institutional Architecture for the Intergenerational Exercise of Self-Determination on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Contemporary Iran is confronted with an accumulation of unresolved conflicts and a gradual erosion of institutional legitimacy. Under these conditions, the widening gap between the legal continuity of the existing order and the society’s actual demographic, value-based, and generational composition causes even limited political, economic, or security shocks to escalate rapidly into social crises and, subsequently, crises of governance. This article argues that the present predicament is less a by-product of administrative inefficiency or economic pressure than a manifestation of a deeper constitutional and institutional deficit: the absence of durable mechanisms for the legal management of foundational conflicts and for the intergenerational renewal of public consent. Accordingly, the central problem is not sectoral policy failure but one of public law and institutional design for the practicable exercise of the right to self determination. Adopting a normative-institutional approach grounded in the logic of institutional design, the article first conceptualizes Iran’s socio-political crisis as a multilayered, overlapping, and self reinforcing phenomenon. It then locates its structural sources in legitimacy gaps, the problem of contemporaneous consent, and the lack of institutionalized intergenerational justice. Finally, it proposes an institutional architecture-capable of legal entrenchment-for direct, rulebound, predictable, and binding recourse to the people’s vote. The article’s principal innovation is the design of the People’s Decision System as a complementary instrument to representative institutions. By separating affirmative (constitutive and policy-forming) votes from supervisory (accountability and control) votes, embedding thresholds and stability safeguards, and establishing an independent constitutional guardian and enforcement authority, the model elevates citizen participation from symbolic expression to legally consequential agency.
Through a set of legal and institutional protections—including safeguards against populism, agenda manipulation, suspension of fundamental rights, and data abuse—this architecture seeks simultaneously to prevent political instability and avert majoritarian domination. The resulting framework aims to redirect foundational conflicts away from accumulation and eruption and toward transparent, predictable, and peaceful public adjudication, thereby meaningfully reducing the costs of conflict resolution and political transition.