The attraction of direct action: the making of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the Iranian Kurdish conflict

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) played a significant role in repressing armed movements that erupted around Iran after the 1979 revolution, but little is known about how this repression campaign shaped the IRGC’s organization and logic of practice. Focusing on the most intensive of these movements, i.e. the Iranian Kurdish conflict at its height in 1979–80, this article argues that the IRGC’s involvement in the conflict ingrained a particular structure and practice within it, in two ways. On the political level, fighting for the state legitimized the IRGC’s existence as an organization independent of the regular army. On an organizational level, learning combat in a low-intensity war allowed the IRGC to adopt a flexible structure based on direct action, which was attractive to both leaders and volunteers as the ‘revolutionary’ method. I argue that post-revolutionary civil conflicts enable alternative paths of institution-building by defying the need for rapid centralization. The article uses novel in-depth interviews with veterans of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and Iranian Army officers, as well as documents collected in Iran, to explore this early phase of the IRGC’s history.