Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Research Articles

Iran Protests and Patterns of State Repression

Over the past four months, the brutal, extralegal, and violent repression of protestors during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran has taken observers and participants by devastating and sometimes fatal surprise. Although not a drastic departure from past practices, the large scale and seemingly random acts of violence, such as the beating of protestors to death on the streets, the shooting of passersby and nonviolent demonstrators point blank, and the fatal torturing of detained protestors and activists, have marked new levels and scales of violence. In what follows I analyze this brutal repression campaign in relation to the institutional history of the Islamic Republic's armed units, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as the most controversial entity among all. I contend that the IRGC's historic endorsement of firing at will as an accepted practice among its ranks has enabled the decentralized radical instances of violence. I will discuss how, despite the continued reliance on decentralized forces, their firing at will is not unanimously endorsed this time around, due to the different nature of the current movement and the deepening uncertainties and schisms in both the forces on the ground and the ruling elite.

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

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.

Iran's Africa‐Pivot Policy

AbstractAfrica is a pivotal continent for Iran, as the Islamic Republic aims to expand its influence in wider global vistas. Iran experiences frequent setbacks in developing its Africa policy, but the continent continues to offer ample opportunities to support Tehran. This is partly because revolutionary Iran's Africa policy evolves through a wide array of piecemeal political, security, maritime, economic, and cultural activities. A host of Iranian organizations implement Iran's Africa policy, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Quds Force, the naval forces, inter‐parliamentary groups, friendship associations, and local chambers of commerce, as well as charities, religious seminaries, and universities. This article explores Iran's policies and their impact across the African continent. It also shows how Iran's activities evolve as the country seizes opportunities to expand bilateral and regional ties with African countries while retracting its involvement when it is unable to ensure strong bonds. The ebb and flow in Iranian Africa policy challenges but continually offers Tehran a chance to explore its foreign relations across the continent; as a result, Africa will play a vital role in sustaining Iran's international contacts, ability to circumvent sanctions, and capacity to withstand pressures from rival powers. The undeniable spread of Islam across Africa means that Iran will make efforts to win followers and propagate its brand of religion and revolutionary worldview as part of measures to build strategic depth across the continent.

Kurdish insurgency in Rojhelat: from Rasan to the Oslo negotiations

This article sheds light on recent political developments in Rojhelat (Eastern/Iranian Kurdistan), focusing on the activities of Rojhelat’s leading political parties. This study argues that the existing situation in the area is a product mainly of the shift in Rojhelat’s mainstream political organisation, the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran, in its political and military approach to the Kurdish movement in Iran, popularly known as Rasan-i Rojhelat (the revival/sudden rise of Eastern Kurdistan). This has triggered a new, high level of conflict between Kurds and the Islamic Republic of Iran since 2015. Since the announcement of the Rasan, tit-for-tat clashes between Kurdish Peshmerga/guerrilla units and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) have been witnessed across Rojhelat. Analysis of the Kurdish question in Rojhelat reveals this development as multifaceted and complex, involving multiple actors and activities such as insurgency and collective protest from Kurdish civil society. This article focuses on two main developments: the methods and practices deployed by the Kurdish political parties of Rojhelat following the Rasan, and the sudden announcement of negotiations between representatives of the Iranian government and of four of Rojhelat’s political parties from 27-28 July 2019 in Oslo.

The Researcher as a National Security Threat

AbstractBased on ethnographic research in Iran among the country's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its Basij militia, this article explores the process of gaining access to these militarized groups in order to conduct long-term research. Specifically, what does it mean to build rapport and gain trust within a highly securitized space such as this? What happens when the researcher is a potential “national security” threat in both Iran and the United States? How is national security enacted in everyday interactions in the field? Given that anthropologists have tended to have an affinity with the group and community they work with, this article explores the implications of research among a group of men in charge of surveillance, intelligence gathering, and citizen suppression in the country. The article argues that in the midst of national security rhetoric, interrogative surveillance is a strategic tool that makes space for engagement.

The State Department Designates Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a Foreign Terrorist Organization

On April 8, 2019, President Trump announced that his administration would designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). This is the first time the United States has designated an arm of another government, rather than a non-state actor, as an FTO. In his announcement, Trump asserted that the Iranian government has used the IRGC to engage in a campaign of global terrorism. The measure, which officially took effect on April 15, expands on previous terrorism-related sanctions imposed on the IRGC and Iran.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the Iran–Iraq war: an unconventional military’s survival

As Iraqi forces invaded the Iranian border shortly after the Islamic Revolution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) participated in the battle along with the debilitated Iranian Army. The IRGC was a young religious-revolutionary institution that lacked the resources that revolutionary armies and militias conventionally rely on. Nevertheless, it survived the battle pressure and even achieved relative military successes in the second year of the war. By examining personal narratives written by Iranian veterans, this article argues that in the void of conventional resources in the first year of the war, the Guards retrieved elements of their Shia background to recognize a religiously inspired charisma in every combatant who would devotedly step up for martyrdom. This shared understanding of the omnipotent charisma was then acknowledged in action—by commanders’ deployment of it to impose order and through frequently held Shia rituals on the battlefield. It thereby created an alternative source of cohesion and motivation that led to the IRGC’s survival and prepared them for further successful steps by the end of the war’s first year.

Iran's Basij: Membership in a Militant Islamist Organization

The Basij militia is a central component of Iran's clerical regime and a supporter of hard-line conservative interests. It is a security organization that also engages in social and political activism. This study focuses on the group's rank-and-file members and looks at the organization's mechanisms for recruitment, participation, and training. Based in part on interviews with current and former Basij members, the article concludes with general observations about the organization and its internal practices.The Basij militia is an omnipresent feature of life in many Iranian cities. The orga- nization is one of the regime's largest social enterprises, encompassing somewhere between 1.5 to 15 million members, and has steadily evolved over the last two decades into a pillar of Iran's security establishment.1 There are seventeen separate Basij subor- ganizations (e.g., for university students, factory workers, government workers, engi- neers, etc.) and three types of Basij memberships: regular, active, and special. Regular members comprise the vast majority of the organization and are the lowest ranking, having undergone a minimal amount of training. Active members comprise a middle level and receive complete basic ideological coursework, and some military training. Special members are full-time Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) soldiers who have been assigned to Basij units.2Although the Basij has steadily gained the attention of scholars, relatively little has been written about those who join the organization.3 To that end, this article explores general experiences of Basij members and specifically looks at how the organization's rank-and-file (both regular and active) members are recruited, what sort of incentives drive their participation, and what types of training and instruction they receive. The ar- ticle concludes with observations on three issues - the importance of social networks, the role of ideology in recruitment and retention, and the informality in leadership and structure - that give shape to the Basij, its membership, and its operations.This study is primarily based on interviews with former and current Basij mem- bers, conducted mainly in Tehran between November 2009 and July 2010. Due to the acute political tensions in Iran during that period (and since), the researchers and the subjects they interviewed requested to remain anonymous.4 Also for this reason, the in- terviews consciously avoided sensitive political topics (such as opinions on the regime's legitimacy and the Basij's role in suppressing popular unrest following the contested 2009 presidential election), and focused instead on less controversial aspects of general life in the Basij. Each interviewee was asked around fifty questions that covered non- political topics. These questions were divided into several broad categories that were designed to learn more about why individuals joined the Basij, the process of becoming a member, what sort of training they experienced (or were offered), what aspects of being a part of the organization they enjoyed, the types of activities that they took part in, and their general relationship with commanders. Although these interviews form a small data set, they nonetheless provide valuable glimpses into the internal dynamics of the Basij organization and the experiences of its members.SECURITY FORCES AND REGIME LOYALTYThe tsunami of popular unrest that has swept across the Middle East since 2011 has seriously challenged - and perhaps forever altered - some of the region's authoritarian regimes. While this turmoil has amplified the need for political reform in the region, it has also highlighted the risk of deploying security forces against spirited mass dissent. The extent to which governments deploy their security forces against popular protest often de- pends on a government's assessment of a particular force's loyalty to the regime against its members' sympathies for popular grievances. …

THE RISE OF THE SUBCONTRACTOR STATE: POLITICS OF PSEUDO-PRIVATIZATION IN THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN

AbstractSince 2009, analyses of Iran have stressed the centralizing takeover of the country's economy by a single state institution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. At the same time, however, Iran's factionalized political elite uniformly advocate for rapid privatization of state-owned enterprises. Underneath this puzzling contradiction is a complex shift of economic ownership away from the state toward a variety of parastatal organizations including banks, cooperatives, pension funds, foundations, and military-linked contractors. The result is not a praetorian monolith but a subcontractor state. This article draws on interviews conducted in Iran during 2009 and 2010, primary data from parliamentary and governmental reports, and secondary sources to show how intraelite conflict and nonelite claims have structured the process of privatization. Framed comparatively with privatization outcomes in other middle-income countries, Iran's subcontractor state can be seen as a consequence of the way in which politics and society shaped the form of capitalism that has taken root in the Islamic Republic.

Evaluating the Political and Economic Role of the IRGC

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is Iran's most powerful security and military organisation, responsible for the protection and survival of the regime. Over time, the IRGC has attained a position of dominance vis-à-vis the regular army (Artesh). In due course, the Guards have also been transformed into a leading political and economic actor. The major political role of the IRGC started with the election of the reformist presidency. However, the Guards' involvement in the Iranian economy began during Rafsanjani's presidency. In view of the importance of Iran and its military, especially the IRGC, this article seeks to analyse the political and economic roles of the IRGC. The article argues that the IRGC's political and economic role is likely to increase due to its unique relationship with Iranian political elites and in view of the current power struggle between various political factions within Iran. However, any such expansion of the IRGC's role may not go unchallenged. The unintended consequence of this could be the erosion of the IRGC's credibility and people's trust.

The Role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the Future of Democracy in Iran: Will Oil Income Influence the Process?

Iranians have experienced some democratic movements during the last fifteen years, but they did not succeed in establishing democracy in the country. However, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has increasingly played an undeniable role in different fields of Iran's society, particularly after the war with Iraq in the early 1990s. Additionally, Iran's political economy, based on oil revenue, helped the center of power to support the IRGC and the government. In this article, we discuss about the relationship between the government and IRGC, and moreover we conclude that this condition plays an obstacle role for democracy in Iran.

After Khamenei: Who Will Succeed Iran's Supreme Leader?

Since succeeding the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, Ali Khamenei has striven to make himself indispensible to the fate of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran. However, the measures Khamenei has taken to secure his power have left his succession in doubt, with no consensus heir. The lack of clear successors among the clergy, weakness of the government institutions, and concerns about regime strength could lead to instability and the potential for an Islamic Revolution Guard Corps coup.