When Mojtaba Khamenei’s elevation as Iran’s new supreme chief was introduced, many observers handled it mainly as a affirmation of a brand new hardliner order in Tehran. Subsequent rumours about his harm and even demise, sparked by his disappearance from public view, have fuelled speculations of what that will imply for the Iranian regime.
What many analyses fail to register is that the ability consolidation below approach in Iran is structural slightly than private. What the battle has bolstered is a broader regime of securitised rule whose logic exceeds anyone successor. This course of will proceed with or with out Mojtaba Khamenei on the helm.
Financial restructuring
To understand the continuing transformation in Iran, one has to maneuver past succession intrigue and return to political financial system. After the top of the battle with Iraq in 1989, Iran went by way of a protracted part of “market-oriented restructuring”. Underneath the banners of privatisation and financial improvement, the state didn’t merely retreat; it was reorganised.
Public property had been transferred into the arms of quasi-state conglomerates, parastatal foundations, and politically related establishments. What emerged was not much less statism, however a distinct configuration of state energy: much less accountable and extra deeply entangled with mechanisms of upward redistribution.
It was on this terrain that what I name the military-bonyad complex took form. Following the modification of Article 44 of the 1979 Structure, which authorised “public and non-governmental entities” to amass as much as 80 p.c of shares in main state industries, the years after 2006 noticed a large-scale switch of property from authorities ministries to companies affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the religious-revolutionary foundations (bonyads), together with the Mostazafan Basis, Setad, the Astan Quds Razavi Basis, and the Martyrs’ Basis.
Safety-linked conglomerates had been thus among the many chief beneficiaries of market-oriented restructuring. By the top of the 2000s, this course of had produced a dense bloc linking coercive establishments to parastatal capital: a nexus that got here to dominate main sectors of the financial system whereas extending its attain throughout the unelected core of the state.
Sanctions and consolidation of energy
After 4 rounds of United Nations Safety Council sanctions from 2006 to 2010, the USA shifted its technique to impose sweeping unilateral and extraterritorial measures focusing on Iran’s oil exports, monetary system, and entry to worldwide banking. Sanctions expanded once more after US President Donald Trump’s administration withdrew from the nuclear take care of Iran in 2018.
These sanctions didn’t reverse the transformation within the state; they deepened it. Opposite to the widespread view of sanctions as devices for weakening authoritarian states from the surface, their results in Iran have been much more uneven and perverse.
They inflicted immense injury on the broader financial system, whereas selectively empowering the very actors greatest positioned to function by way of opacity, coercion, and sanctions evasion. As entry to formal commerce and finance narrowed, shadow networks, protected channels, and security-linked conglomerates and intermediaries acquired larger strategic and financial worth.
The outcome was not merely a weaker state, however a extra securitised one. The prices of this order had been socialised downward, borne by strange Iranians by way of inflation, unemployment, precarious labour, subsidy retrenchment, rising inequality, and deepening political exclusion.
That is the broader setting during which the uprisings of the previous decade have to be located, from the protests of 2017 and 2019 to the Girls, Life, Freedom revolt and the January 2026 unrest that preceded the current battle.
These mobilisations didn’t emerge out of nothing, nor can they be lowered to a easy wrestle over financial and social freedoms. They had been rooted in a compound disaster of livelihood, legitimacy, and illustration. They expressed anger not solely at repression, however at a political order whose exclusions had turn into more and more materials in addition to juridical: an order that fused neoliberal dispossession and sanctions administration with intensifying authoritarian closure.
Battle and a narrowing political horizon
The rebellion that Washington and Tel Aviv referred to as for initially of the battle has not materialised. As an alternative, Iran’s nationwide police chief, Ahmad-Reza Radan, has declared that the state now views “all our points” by way of the prism of battle, warning that those that take to the streets will likely be handled not as protesters however as enemies.
When he added that the safety forces had “their fingers on the triggers”, the that means was unmistakable: this was a direct warning that any home dissent could be met with armed pressure below wartime situations.
This doesn’t indicate that the Islamic Republic was, earlier than the battle, in some way extra restrained in its remedy of dissent. Quite the opposite, the regime had lengthy met standard revolt with extraordinary violence. Over the previous decade, protests had turn into extra geographically intensive, extra socially heterogeneous, and extra explicitly anti-systemic. The state’s response had escalated accordingly.
What the battle has modified is just not the very fact of repression, however its political logic and legitimating language. Exterior battle has given the regime a brand new framework by way of which home dissent could be criminalised, militarised, and pre-emptively crushed. The excellence between international enemy and home opponent is being intentionally collapsed.
What’s at stake, then, is greater than a quantitative enhance in coercion. The battle has accelerated a shift within the political grammar of rule: in the direction of a martial logic during which society seems primarily as an object of surveillance, self-discipline, and menace administration. Battle, on this sense, doesn’t merely harden international coverage. It restructures the home subject, increasing the authority of these establishments most invested in governing by way of emergency, securitisation, and pressure.
Iran with or with out Mojtaba Khamenei
For this reason the importance of Mojtaba Khamenei’s election as supreme chief lies not in novelty however within the continuation of already established developments. If the rumours of his demise show true, that trajectory is unlikely to alter in any elementary approach.
Over the course of his father Ali Khamenei’s rule, the Workplace of the Supreme Chief was reworked from a comparatively modest clerical secretariat into the regime’s central institutional command put up, with attain throughout safety, finance, communications, the seminaries, and the broader unelected state.
This was not merely an administrative enlargement. It was a political response to an authority deficit. In comparison with Iran’s first supreme chief, Ruhollah Khomeini, Ali Khamenei lacked the identical degree of charisma and clerical standing. He compensated not by way of private authority alone, however by build up the workplace round him.
The result’s that the workplace now issues greater than the person who occupies it. If Mojtaba is gone, his alternative will more than likely come from the identical clerical-security constellation and stay carefully aligned with the military-bonyad advanced that now dominates the Islamic Republic’s coercive and financial core.
Even when a brand new successor initially lacks Mojtaba’s political positioning or Ali Khamenei’s collected authority, the construction of the workplace itself is designed to consolidate energy over time. The non secular dimension of the system would stay essential, however more and more as a supply of legitimacy for an order whose actual centre of gravity lies within the safety equipment and the establishments clustered across the supreme chief’s workplace.
What a post-war Iran is prone to produce, then, is just not a system shifting past supreme management, however a extra tightly securitised Islamic Republic. In follow, which means a political order that’s more durable, narrower, and extra militarised than earlier than. Reasonably than opening the way in which to transformation, battle is extra prone to deepen the developments already below approach: a shrinking political subject, larger reliance on coercion, and an much more opaque system of rule.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
