Persian phrase for nationwide protests, used by organizers, journalists, and activists to describe coordinated protest activity across multiple Iranian provinces.
The phrase makes a political claim of scale, naming the protest as national rather than local. State media counters by reframing events as scattered, foreign-inspired, or limited to specific cities. The contest over saraseri is itself a front of the protest.
Eteraz-saraseri is the word that beats the regime's preferred framing. The state likes to talk about a few troublemakers in one neighborhood. Saraseri puts the whole country in the sentence.
Learners reading Iranian news need the word to track whether what is happening is one campus or thirty cities.
اعتراضات سراسری (eteraz-saraseri) is the standard organizing phrase for nationwide protests in Iran. اعتراضات is the plural of اعتراض (eteraz), protest, and سراسری means covering the whole country. The phrase entered everyday political vocabulary during the 2017 to 2018 economic protests, then deepened across the 2019 fuel protests, and became almost a daily fixture in 2022 to 2023. Calling something eteraz-saraseri is a claim of scale, a way of saying Sanandaj, Mashhad, Zahedan, Tabriz, Ahvaz, and Tehran are all moving on the same day for the same reason. The regime works to deny that frame; organizers work to enforce it.
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