Any good volume on Iranian politics incorporates a fair dose of first-hand experiences and anecdotes. The twelve contributors to Power and Change in Iran, many of whom have had direct involvement in the country's politics or have done on-the-ground field research, offer exactly that. Mehrangiz Kar, a prominent lawyer and human rights activist, is a perfect example. She vividly describes how she was one day summoned to the Islamic Revolutionary Court. The court's original purpose was to convict the pre-revolutionary Pahlavi elite. The political momentum to abolish it never materialized, and the Revolutionary Court now functions as a prime prosecutor of individuals deemed “plotters against the regime.” While its existence is formally unconstitutional, its judges endow the Revolutionary Court with a flair of pseudo-legality by asking all the accused to appeal to a higher court. The success of this Kafkaesque scheme depends fully on the accused's signature. Thus, when Kar refused to appeal, the judge in command had to beg her, arguing that reformists from higher up the bureaucratic ladder could get him sacked for violating this delicate balance between the unconstitutional and the legal.
Editors Daniel Brumberg and Farideh Farhi bring together a range of case studies on the dimensions and dynamics of what they call Iran's “diffused semi-autocracy”—a fairly common political system in which a competitive elite allows limited democratic mechanisms to the extent that it does not threaten their hold on power. In their clear introduction, the editors explain that in diffused semi-autocracies, the legal system is a source of discursive power and reference, but its substance presents no more than a template, with a multitude of struggles taking place over the precise definition of its terms. Indeed, anyone acquainted with Iran sees these struggles playing out both within and across institutions and social groups. It is a common political structure, and in the Middle East Lebanon and Yemen have often been placed in this category.
The contributors show how the last years of Khomeini (1988‒89) were crucial in fracturing Iran's political arena into multiple warring factions. These key years presented a political U-turn, with Khomeini demanding major constitutional revisions, which enhanced the executive power of the Supreme Leader and the electoral vetting powers of the Guardian Council. Khomeini also informally designated Ali Khamenei as his successor, replacing Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri. While sly politically, Khamenei lacked Khomeini's charisma, religious learnedness and his ability to bridge divides. These shortcomings ensured that his “supreme” powers as leader (rahbar) would be challenged from the start. Since the death of Khomeini, Iran's political elites have been vying among themselves for maximum social support and maximum economic rent, without having yet experienced either a decisive centralization of power or a transition to democracy.
Filling in important gaps in the study of Iran, the book traces the balance between democratization and further authoritarian centralization of power. It offers a diverse collection of case studies into the dynamics of political competition in the economic, political, cultural and legal realms of social life—too many to discuss fully here. Instead, I will attempt to review some of the main arguments that these contributors put forward.
On the economic front, Payam Mohseni shows how the redistribution of state-owned assets to the private sector has played a crucial role in fueling intra-elite conflict. Mohseni insightfully describes how privatization initially faced large hurdles until the powerful alliance between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's political bloc and the Supreme Leader caused it to speed up in the mid-2000s. Ahmadinejad's clique eventually proved too keen to hoard assets among themselves at the expense of the wider conservative bloc, leading to clashes with senior allies and criminal cases against some of his closest lieutenants. Mohseni discerningly rejects the argument frequently made by Washington-based think tanks that the asset hoarding by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps foreshadows a total military takeover of the state. Instead, he stresses that rivalry over economic assets is a spillover of political competition, rather than a danger to it. Yet Mohseni struggles to put forward a coherent political spectrum of elite conflict in Iran. The two axes he uses to describe political networks since the 1979 Revolution—“left” vs. “right” and “theocratic” vs “republican”—are themselves rife with internal contradictions and shifts. Iran's political elite has almost never shown a full commitment to any of these ideals. For the 1980s at least, I have found Evaleila Pesaran's distinction between “statist” and “mercantilist” more apt, as the main elite struggles during that decade were about the role and size of the state, rather than over republican or leftist values.
Contributions by Mehrangiz Kar, Azadeh Pourzand, Shadi Mokhtari and Fatemeh Haghighatjoo provide further evidence of the extent to which intra-elite conflict has at times bordered on criminalization, suppression and even annihilation by pointing to episodes of exceptionally fierce factional conflict —moments when reformists either claimed majority power in the state’s republican institutions (particularly during Khatami's presidency)—or when massive bottom-up pressure forced major rethinking and shifts at the top (the 2009 Green Movement). The arrest and trial of the former reformist mayor of Tehran, Gholam Hossein Karbaschi, in mid-1998; the assassination attempt on one of Khatami's close advisors, Said Hajjarian, in March 2000; the February 2011 house arrest without trial of the reformist leaders of the Green Movement, Mehdi Karrubi and Mir-Hossein Mussavi—these are some of the key spillovers of intra-elite clashes. Moreover, in her sharp observations on the Green Movement, Haghighatjoo stresses that US pressure on Iran provided a green light for further domestic repression—an important lesson for the West.
On the other hand, the book illustrates how political competition has co-opted social groups, endowing them with rights, resources and a voice. Kevan Harris provides interesting insights into the interaction between welfare policies on the one hand and state formation and socio-economic progress on the other. He convincingly describes how the state's push for the conscription of troops to fight in the Iran‒Iraq war was made politically possible by expanding welfare organizations and reallocating resources to war veterans and their families. In response to alarming reports that high fertility rates would lead to a national crisis, the war also created the conditions for the introduction of a wide-ranging and inclusive family planning scheme, condoned politically and religiously by Khomeini. In particular, the expansion of rural healthcare houses proved an extremely effective measure to bring down the fertility rate.
In another original contribution, Shervin Malekzadeh argues that the weakening of the labor market and the politicization of universities in Iran has neutralized any “natural” tendencies for students to lean towards activism. Ever since the central role played by students in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, student activism has been politicized, functioning as an arm of factional politics. The factional nature of student politics has led to consecutive rounds of—often violent—political exclusion in which an increasingly narrow range of students could participate. After helping to bring Khatami to power in 1997, heavy politicization, heated internal disagreements and external meddling has gradually caused these reformist student organizations to splinter.
Finally, Mehrzad Boroujerdi and Koroush Rahimkhani provide a useful addition to a literature often too focused on the Islamic Republic's electoral politics, while ignoring its less transparent, but no-less powerful, undemocratic institutions. In their detailed institutional analysis of the office of the Supreme Leader, they show how Ali Khamenei has managed to expand his constitutional and extra-constitutional powers by amassing a significant business empire, forging new links with the Revolutionary Guards, and seeing to their conditional rise to power. It should be noted though that the Office of the Supreme Leader has not been the only institution chasing economic rent and extra-constitutional alliances. Indeed, this has been a common trait among political parties and state institution in the Islamic Republic. The capacity of these economic-cum-political relations to shun, cross or overlap with factional divisions of power contribute to the solidification of the Iranian state: it ties the elite together, while fanning internal competition.
Power and Change in Iran is an ambitious work that aims to provide new, holistic perspectives on semi-authoritarian politics in Iran, setting the stage for future research along these lines. Political change is looked at from institutional, social, ideological, economic, and legal angles. While the book does not provide any new data sets, it still scores very high on tracing and explaining the dynamics of contention. Power and Change in Iran should be recommended literature for any student of contemporary Iran.
