This project culls comprehensive, longitudinal and rarely-found data on socio-political protests and civil society activities in Iran from 2005 to 2019.

The recent wave of protests in Iran draws considerable global attentions to internal political dynamics of Iran. Yet, it once again showed the lack of any comprehensive attempts to understand the rise and demise of protests in unfamiliar contexts through Western perspectives. Scholars fail to explain the roots, organizers, demands and participants of the recent protests mainly due to the lack of protest event data (PED) in Iran. PED informs us when, where, what form [of protest] and who organizes/participates in it (Rucht & Ohlemacher, 1992), which provides a broader and historical view of these protests.

With this growing interest in the field of social movement studies, Ali Honari at Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam) and Peyman Jafari, a former researcher at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center, initiated this project with the development of a semi-automated system to document, map, and analyze protest event data in Iran from three Iranian news agencies, using machine-learning tools to collect, process and code it.