By Aleksandra Kuczyncka
Over four decades after the dramatic overturn of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which transformed the state from a secular, pro-Western monarchy into a non-aligned Islamic Republic, the Iranian regime faces the challenge of transmitting the revolutionary ideology to the new generations while maintaining the state’s strategic preference domestically and regionally. Narges Bajoghli’s book Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic sheds light on the contemporary cultural wars undertaken by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to win over the hearts and minds of the young Iranian generations. With over 10 years of field work in the Islamic Republic, Bajoghli elucidates the media production strategies undertaken by the pro-regime factors, and IRGC in particular, that reconstruct and mobilise history in order to uphold cultural hegemony of the ruling classes. Power is not solely coercive and expository, but is also exercised through manipulating the cultural parameters within which a population navigates. This book ameliorates the shallow, Orientalist portrayals of the Iranian regime as brutish and forceful, and reveals the scrupulous undertakings of consent-building and integration undertaken within the Islamic Republic.
In anticipation of the elections on June 18th 2021, and the potential for renewing the JCPOA Agreement under the Biden Administration, it is worthwhile to engage with the complex dynamics of the Islamic Republic and to better understand the role of the IRGC within these events. The IRGC, a revolutionary army directly under the jurisdiction of the Ayatollah, was founded at the outset of the Islamic Republic in 1979, and immediately plunged into a bloody 8 year war with Iraq. Initially consisting of volunteers inspired by revolutionary and religious fervor, the Revolutionary Guards have transformed over the decades into a permanent, constitutional organisation with an institutionalised bureaucratic structure. Importantly, the IRGC are not simply a military entity in Iran, but rather hold an elevated social status as ‘war heroes’ and protectors of the revolution. As a result, they wield immense institutional and discursive power.
Back in 2019, the Trump administration blacklisted the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organisation under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (1965), marking the first time in history that a military institution of another country has been branded as such. The ‘terrorist’ label is part of a longer history of relentless caricatural portrayals and two dimensional representations of the Islamic Republic in Western political discourse. While certainly there have and continue to occur acts of politically driven violence that are illegitimate according to international law, and could be broadly agreed on as ‘terrorist’, the label is not as self-evident as US political rhetoric may frame it. In his conceptual and historical analysis of terrorism, Fred Halliday points to divergent transformations of what constitutes a ‘terrorist’, and the changing political contexts which position such utilisations. The underlying issue that the author points to in the current theorisations, is the inflation of ‘terrorism’ to enclose various political groups and justify direct political interventionism. Importantly, “the use of the term terrorist today is very often used to denote any liberation movement or nationalist movement of which states or people in the West disapprove” (2000:116). The contemporary international order continues to be demarcated by the color line and Orientalist tropes, which silence and obfuscate the other.
In Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic, Narges Bajoghli opens up unprecedented access to the pro-regime factions’ political and cultural projects and provides complex insight into the deeper social phenomena in which they are embedded. Her ethnographic study of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) collapses the hegemonic superficial binaries of the regime versus the people, hard-liners versus reformists, old generations versus new generation, and sheds light on the complexity and fluidity of what it means to be ‘pro-regime’ as well as the continuous contestations across social classes, political orientations and generational shifts within the Islamic Republic. Since the popular revolution in Iran in 1979 and the subsequent establishment of the Islamic Republic, questions about the new state, the ‘rightful’ heirs to the revolution, and how to uphold revolutionary ideology through the generational and historical changes have been continuously debated. Contrary to the hegemonic rhetoric in the West that largely focuses on Islamic theocratic suppression, Iranian society has undergone complex changes and the Islamic government has proven a resilient and legitimate mediator of these transformations.
As Bajoghli reveals, after the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq war the IRGC’s “focus has shifted significantly from military warfare to a different kind of front: the culture wars carried out primarily in the arena of media production” (10). The Revolutionary Guards have been responsible for producing collective revolutionary war narratives to preserve the Islamic identity of the state and uphold its legitimacy. These media production projects have been subject to debate internally, as the regime's media producers do not always agree on the ‘right’ way of going forward. A turning point for IRGC-directed media production came in 2009. Following the questionable presidential victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, widespread protests erupted mobilising the largest crowds since the revolution. Also known as the Green Movement, these events revealed a crisis of legitimacy as the protest slogans quickly transformed from ‘Where is my vote’ to ‘Down with the dictator’. Admitting that the religious revolutionary stories of the war generation no longer resonated with the wide public and young people, the IRGC sought a new way of framing state narratives and keeping the system ‘alive’. While the Iranian people are still religious and want to honour their history and cultural heritage, the repressive character of the state, and its imposition of a narrow uniform narrative which silenced variation have pushed the citizens away from what it propagates, particularly the younger Iranians born after the revolution.
The solutions that IRGC media producers have put forward include: erasing “the origins of regime discourse through strategies of dissimulation”, creating “new distribution strategies”, and appealing to “notions of nationalism as a unifying force beyond political ideology” (100). Thus, the Revolutionary Guards’ deployment of soft power through new media production have recast the ontological representations of the state narrative under the banner of nationalism, and created new possibilities for rallying collective belonging among wider sectors of the society. The public campaigns have further sought to “lionise the Islamic Republic’s warriors” (109) as national heroes and protectors. In particular, they have sought to elevate Qassem Soleimani, an IRGC general and Iraq war veteran, as the symbol of the Guards’ heroic endeavours. The nationalist framing of the IRGC was evident in the 2015 public funeral organised for fallen soldiers during the war with Iraq, where millions congregated to honor the 175 Iranian divers killed. This event stood as a juxtaposition to the religious funerals for martyrs during the conflict with Iraq. It was a mass congregation of people across the political spectrum, commemorating the fallen heroes who defended the nation. One of the participants at the event who positioned himself as ‘opposed to the regime’ stated: “Look at how chaotic the entire region we live in is. … Iran is the only stable, safe country in our region, and we have Qassem Soleimani and the Revolutionary Guard to thank for that” (111).
The assasination of Qassem Soleimani in January 2020 and the ensuing mass demonstrations to honour his death across Iran, reveal the social and political legitimacy that the Revolutionary Guards are bestowed with. Contrary to Western discourse which portrays them as irrational, evil bearded men, acting in unison to bring terror upon innocent people, the Revolutionary Guards are rooted in organic societal developments from the bottom up. As Fred Halliday notes, one of the fundamental preconceptions among terrorists (as well reflected in counter-terrorist pursuits) is that “you can shortcut social and political change…you do not have to mobilise popular forces, you do not have to create a rebel army, you can just break through the oppression of the state…by killing a few people or carrying out a certain dramatic act” (145). The IRGC cannot be rendered ‘terrorist’ precisely because they have not circumvented social and political processes in their becoming, but rather have been born out of voluntary revolutionary mobilisation, and since then have been institutionalised legally and politically, as well as consolidated in the socio-cultural spheres of the public.
Nonetheless, US counter-terrorist practice and rhetoric continue to be dominated by a simplistic and narrow vision. So much was reflected in the organised assasination of Qassem Soleimani. The operation was based on a conviction that by killing the perceived ‘terrorist’, this would weaken the whole organisation and curtail the threat that the IRGC poses to US interests in Iraq and Syria. Hallidays’ reflections on conceptualising terrorism ring true when he said, “there is refusal to see that you have to mobilize support, that you have to gain consent. There is also a refusal to see how strong your opponents are. It is a politics of desperation”. Trump’s ordered assasination indicates the US policy’s inadequacy in understanding the social and political legitimacy of the IRGC. In rebuilding relations with the Islamic Republic, the Biden Administration must not repeat the ignorant mistakes of their predecessors, and widen the space for common understanding and dialogue.
Narges Bajoghli’s book is a noble pursuit in that direction. The ethnography does a remarkable job in lifting the veil off the ‘other’ and bringing greater understanding of the complex actors that are the Revolutionary Guards.
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