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Post-revolutionary Iran points to the development of two patterns of civil-military relation that this thesis will call the auxiliary guardian model and the garrison state model. While the former term casts light on the conventional role of the Sepah as the protector of the IRI’s ideological foundation and the doctrine of clerical rule, the latter denotes its recent proactive and expansive involvement in politics and society (2004-2013). Herewith, I borrow the term ‘garrison state’ from Harold Laswell (1941; 1962) to refer to the growing power of the military in a state which is encountering domestic and international challenges (Laswell, 1941; Laswell, 1962).

This section describes the respective characteristics of the two patterns of civil-military relations in the IRI. It shows that the two patterns defy both praetorian and communist models – wherein the military is (by design or tradition) the ultimate arbiter or a mere partisan guard of the party. Before scrutinising these models, it is useful to highlight the broader features of revolutionary state-building and the socio-political dynamics within which both Iranian civil-military relations and the Sepah developed and evolved.

The current state of Iranian civil-military relations has been shaped by various factors. On one hand, some of these factors stem from the dual nature of the IRI political system and existence of the political Sepah, whose range of responsibilities, including its internal security functions, exceeds those of the Artesh.

On the other hand, other factors emanate from the conflicting choices and initiatives of various political elites and from a range of pressures exerted on the polity by societal demands and continuous elite rivalry. All these variables are reminiscent of the praetorian symptoms common to many developing societies. In this thesis, though, the presence of praetorian conditions has not been followed with the trappings associated with an outright military coup (Hen-Tov, 2011, p. 46).

Nonetheless, new relationships have emerged, between the Sepah and the state apparatus on the one hand and a society that is an indicative of a subtle form of its participation in politics on the other. The Sepah has been transformed from the

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‘auxiliary guardian’ of the revolutionary system and its Islamic purity to a de facto guardian of the authoritarian status quo.

This thesis uses the term ‘auxiliary guardian model’ to define a dimension of the pattern of civil-military relations in the IRI that was prevalent for more than two decades of Iran’s revolutionary life (1979-2005). This model is built on Amos Perlmutter’s study of modern authoritarianism, in which he points to various auxiliary structures that serve as an authoritarian regime’s instruments of mobilisation and control (see Chapter 2 for more details). As Perlmutter points out, auxiliary structures such as a political military and a secret police were important in protecting the communist and Nazi authoritarian political systems (Perlmutter, 1981, 16-21). In the IRI, however, because of the absence of a centralised party and the lack of a tyrannical mode of control, auxiliary structures such as the Sepah have taken on a more prevalent role in the political system. Due to the absence of an organised channel of penetration, the Sepah’s relationship with its clerical-political authority in the auxiliary guardian type is sustained to a great extent by its method of charismatic control based on ideology, personal loyalty and shared values. At the heart of these values is a sense of devotion to Shiite Islamic tenets, to the Islamic Revolution, and most importantly to Velayat-e Faqih (the Mandate of the Jurist), which confers the right to rule upon a high-ranking clergy (see Chapter 2 for more detail). The sum of these civilian values and interests are given a legal mandate which promotes the Sepah’s political action in an array of parameters, while at the same time deterring it from supplanting its civilian Commander-in-Chief and civilian political institutions, which legitimises its authority.

The Sepah’s role is defined primarily as one that provides additional, but vital, support for the maintenance of the system of Velayat-e Faqih. The Sepah’s formal constitutional authority as the ‘guardian of the revolution and its achievements’ designates it as the defender of the system, charged with fighting the enemies of the revolution within and without (Algar 1980, p. 81; Islamic Consultative Assembly, 1983). In spite of this vaguely defined role, the Sepah’s political mission is bounded by its auxiliary status. In this way, the Sepah does not have a supervisory role over the functioning of the political system in the same sense as its Brazilian and Turkish counterparts do. This is not surprising given the duality of the IRI political system, which designates the leader’s ‘extended arms institutions’

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and ‘super-religious’ bodies with supervisory and vetting authority over the popularly elected Majles and the presidency (Schirazi, 1997, pp. 75-77). In this context, the Sepah functions under the auspices of the political-religious figure Supreme Leader (the position held by Khomeini from 1979 to 1989 and occupied by Khamenei since 1989), who, as the ultimate authority and arbiter in the IRI, is supposed to stand above the political fray and intervene directly when the survival of the system is at stake.

That the Sepah has not become a sort of outright intervener in political affairs by its own right should not imply its non-participation or non-interference in politics.

Indeed, the increasing reliance of clerical civilians on the Sepah to manage mounting domestic security problems has led to its ascent into the political fray. In his study of Brazilian and Peruvian militaries, Stepan (1973, p. 47-65) notes that the

‘professional socialisation’ of the military in the internal security matters contributed to the blurring of the line between the military and the political elite leading to military politicisation and its role expansion into civilian social life.

Post-revolutionary Iran shows a similar pattern of military politicisation as outlined by Stepan, as clerical civilians have awarded the Sepah with a broad range of internal and external functions beneficial for its vitality as a security organisation.

Nonetheless, unlike the secular, pragmatic ideology of developmentalism espoused by the Brazilian military, the pattern of the Sepah’s involvement in internal security and its politicisation has been prompted by its outwardly religious and revolutionary outlook. Grounded in the thesis of Velayat-e Faqih and the exclusively Iranian branch of Shiite precepts of Islam, the Sepah and its affiliated institutions have gained access to tremendous political, economic and ideological incentives, as well as extensive involvement in Iranian social life. The confluence of these norms and incentives, together with factionalised internal politics, has encouraged the Sepah to support its political allies indirectly, as well as display antagonism towards those governments and politicians it perceives as existential challenges to the basis of the political regime – and, in effect, its own privileged position within that regime. In this sense, the Sepah played a partisan role for the pro-Khomeini forces (1979-1989) and, later on, for the conservative branch of the Khomeinist faction during the moment of crisis whereby domestic uprising and mounting fissures amongst Iran’s leadership and political factions came to the surface.

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An evaluation of the Sepah’s domestic role is not comprehensive without paying attention to its unprecedented rise in post-revolutionary politics and society.

Over the years the Sepah has evolved into a socio-political force, participating in internal politics while augmenting its political/security status against what it considers to be the IRI’s opponents. Ironically, these opponents are often from the ranks of the regime’s insiders. Taking note of this development, many outside observers have pointed to the ‘militarisation’ of post-revolutionary Iran and its coming out of a ‘military-led system’ or ‘military dictatorship’ (Alamdari, 2005;

Vali Nasr, 2005 Ehteshami and Zweiri, 2007; Hen-Tov, 2011; Alfoneh, 2013).

Nonetheless, the use of such terms in the case of Iran is a mistake, as it implies an utter dominance over the state by the military which has not yet taken place in Iran.

There is, however, another description used by the reformists that refers to a more nuanced type of civil-military relations between the Sepah and IRI’s clerical elite, which falls short of military dictatorship but is attentive to the informal power of the Sepah in Iran’s power politics. Many reformists use the term ‘garrison party’

to account for the Sepah’s rise to power in the parliamentary elections of 2004. The term originated from Harrold Laswell’s concept of a ‘garrison state’, and entered Iran’s political lexicon following the 2002 article Police State Garrison State by Said Hajarian, the former reformist aide to President Khatami(Hajarian, 2002).

Drawing on Laswell’s concept, Hajarian brought into the discussion the increasing roles of specialists of violence, in particular the military and paramilitary forces, in an autocratic political system which faces various internal and external threats (see Hajarian, 2002, pp. 4-5). While not mentioning Iran explicitly, the article was written at a time when the reformists’ drive for political liberalisation and the expansion of a civil society appeared to be dwindling. Thus, it was considered by many observers as the author’s attempt to forecast the possibility of similar political trends in Iran – trends which would be characterised by the rise of the military and security forces in managing manifold political tumults while penetrating the state.

Another Iranian political analyst, Behrouz Khaliq, used the concept of the

‘garrison state’ to describe the gradual rise of the Sepah in Iran’s post-revolutionary experience. Following Hajarian’s observations on the emergence of a garrison state in the autocratic context, Khaliq explains the growth of the Sepah in terms of its interactions with various historical conjunctures: namely, revolution, engagement in

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prolonged war and military threat. According to Khaliq, the interplay of these historical events, together with the authoritarian structure of power in Iran and the weakness of civil society, has contributed to the Sepah’s increasing involvement in Iran’s internal politics and participation in the foreign policy of the IRI (Khaliq, 2006).

Herewith, this thesis expands on Hajarian’s and Khaliq’s useful, but unelaborated, insights into the garrison state to offer an adequate understanding of the Sepah’s evolution. Nonetheless, the author of this thesis engages in a discussion of the garrison state in ways that are more attentive to the socio-political reality of contemporary Iran. As discussed, Hajarian does not mention Iran in his analysis of the garrison state. In the same vein, while Khaliq applies the concept to post-revolutionary Iran, he does not bring to the discussion a sufficient understanding of uniqueness of the Iranian case. Evidently, the various historical moments and crises that he mentions are not exceptional to revolutionary Iran, as many revolutionary states – such as communist China – as well as praetorian states have gone through similar experiences in their developments. Khaliq points to the rise of the Sepah in the IRI in terms of the authoritarian regime’s increasing reliance on military force to suppress its rivals and protest movements. According to Khaliq, in Iran, this process opened the way for the entry of the Sepah into political power by paving the way for the development of the garrison state, with military and paramilitary forces occupying key political and administrative position in the state.

Yet all authoritarian regimes resort to military forces to keep themselves in power. While in some of these regimes the reliance on specialists of violence may give rise to the growing involvement of the military in politics, in others the military is strictly kept in control by the civilian apparatus. What is unclear, from Khaliq’s description, is the particular quality which makes the case of Iran unique from other authoritarian regimes, and which makes the garrison state hypothesis applicable to IRI civil-military relations. Khaliq does not elaborate on this point, other than briefly mentioning that the garrison state in Iran has not reached the level of the more militaristic garrison state subtypes in Turkey and Pakistan. He also points out that this development is still unfolding in Iran. Of equal importance to the IRI’s case, which Khaliq mentions but does not give enough attention to, is Iran’s authoritarian structure and its power relations. The authoritarian Iranian regime is peculiar in that

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it has competing centres of power and multiple structures alongside various political factions. Still, the political regime of the IRI is different in its origin when compared with the regimes in Pakistan and Turkey, where the military has been historically a dominant power. Moreover, as Morris Janowitz points out, the garrison state is not a direct domination of politics by the military per se, but rather the outcome of its increasing power through historical processes under conditions of prolonged international tension (see Janowitz, 1977, p. 80). Thereby it is only in the context of the gradual evolution and ascendency of the Sepah that the garrison state model is more readily applicable to the case of the IRI’s civil-military relations.

Nonetheless, the applicability of the concept of the garrison state in its entirety to the IRI is not without its problems. This is because the concept was originally proposed as a construct to account for the future trend towards the growth of a specialist in violence, namely, the military, in industrialised societies (the Soviet Union, the US, Germany and Japan during World War II). This is not to dismiss the usefulness of the concept for non-industrialised countries, especially those that imported many elements into their political systems from industrialised countries. In the case of post-revolutionary Iran, the intellectual challenge is to revisit and modify the concept of the garrison state in the context of the IRI’s hybrid political system and its peculiar form of power politics. In view of this challenge, the model of a garrison state presented here will look at the trajectory of the Sepah in the wider context of political contestation in the Iranian authoritarian regime on the one hand, and the regime’s responses to internal crisis and external threat conditions on the other; this is the process that abetted the Sepah’s penetration of the Iranian state as its specialist in violence and management of conflict, and thereby trumpeted its political and administrative power.

Moreover, the overt focus of the garrison state hypothesis on the industrialised world, to the exclusion of developing countries, needs to be revisited.

In his formulation of the garrison state hypothesis, Laswell applies the concept exclusively to industrialised countries and particularly to democratic political systems on the grounds of these countries’ access to modern technology. This access is not readily available to developing states as they are on the margins of the creative centres of western civilisation and hence are not as integrated with modern technology (Laswell, 1948, pp. 457-458). According to Laswell, the availability of

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modern technology in industrialised countries (in periods of war) has blurred the boundaries between non-traditional military tasks and traditional military tasks, and thereby the specialists of violence have assumed many functions that were previously understood to be ‘a part of modern civilian management’ (Laswell, 1948, p. 458). Since Laswell wrote this, decades ago, industrialised countries no longer have a monopoly on modern technologies of violence; as a result developing countries like the IRI have gone to great lengths to modernise their defence capability. Still, access to the technology of violence is not the only necessary variable in facilitating a garrison state system and expanding the domain of specialists of violence. As Laswell’s thesis is about ‘the need to study [the]

management of the instrument of violence, a much more broader and generic type’

can hold true in many developing countries, in which there exist various security agencies, pressure and paramilitary groups that are tasked with non-traditional security functions (see Janowitz, 1977, p. 16). This is prevalent particularly in the case of the IRI, which has at its disposal various security forces, such as the Sepah and the Basij, among other pressure groups.

According to Laswell, the main components of a garrison state system are as follows:

(1) The powerful elites value power enough to resort to large-scale coercion when they regard such coercive strategies as useful to the maintenance of their ascendency.

(2) ‘The elites accept the expectation that the retention of power during at least the immediate and middle-range future depends upon [the] capability and willingness to coerce external and internal challengers’ (Laswell, 1962, p. 53).

(3) The increasing domination of the state by the political elite, composed of specialists of violence equipped with modern technology for warfare (Laswell, 1948, pp. 457-458).

(4) The presence of a perpetual crisis in the form of general or limited wars (Laswell, 1962, p. 58).

Fitch (1985) reiterates Laswell’s concept of the garrison state, but he discusses the case of the US after the Vietnam war. Fitch confirms Laswell’s argument, stating that, unlike its totalitarian industrial counterparts in the USSR and the Nazi Germany, ‘in the US and Europe, the garrison state need not… be

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characterised by overt abolition of democratic institutions. The external form of democracy might continue to exist, but effective power would be concentrated in the hands of a loosely knit elite of civilianised military and militarised civilians, with increasing integration of corollary skilled elites – the police, party and interest group leaders, scientists and educators – into a growing military-industrial complex’ (Fitch, 1985, p. 32). Fitch, however, maintains that a modern-day garrison state relies on decentralised violence instead of systematic repression to keep itself in power.

Revising Laswell’s garrison state hypothesis in the view of US foreign policy in the post-Vietnam era, Fitch argues ‘that high expectation of violence and a clear enemy are necessary, though not sufficient conditions for [the] emergence of a garrison state’ (Fitch, 1985, p. 32). In addition to such conditions, Fitch stresses the importance of public emphasis on specific external or internal enemies. According to Fitch, the US participated in the new Cold War period because it was marked by the strong sense of threat; growing references to aggression, conflict, and violence; and a heavy emphasis on Soviet Union as the enemy. The absence of an overarching consensus on the place of the US within world foreign policy, however, led to an urgent US reliance on propaganda. If propaganda failed and it was not possible to cope with the Soviet threat democratically, there would have been increasing pressure from the government, especially from American military officers and their political counterparts, to resort to non-democratic means and create a new form of the garrison state (Fitch, 1985, p. 43).

Morris Janowitz (1977) offers a definition of the garrison state that is very similar to Laswell’s but puts the concept in a clear civil-military model. According to Janowitz (1977, pp. 80-81):

The garrison state is a model for describing the weakening civilian supremacy, especially in the democratic state because of a ‘permanent’

threat of mass warfare. While the end result of the garrison state approximates some aspect of the totalitarian state, the garrison state has a different natural history. It is, however, not the direct domination of politics by the military. Since modern industrial nations cannot be ruled

threat of mass warfare. While the end result of the garrison state approximates some aspect of the totalitarian state, the garrison state has a different natural history. It is, however, not the direct domination of politics by the military. Since modern industrial nations cannot be ruled