There is a moment in revolutions – a precise and historically recognizable sweet spot – when an old, brutal, and hardened regime, like the Islamic Republic of Iran, still deploys its forces, yet something breaks in its resolve. You can sense it, and then the public senses it: fear has shifted sides, and the revolutionaries are winning.
How do we know that, as Nadav Eyal put it, “fear has shifted sides” in Iran?
