ABSTRACT
This book examined the increasing power of the Sepah (the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps) as a political and economic actor in light of the following questions: What is the nature of the relationship between the Sepah and its political masters? What is the place of the armed forces, in particular the Sepah, in the Iranian state? What is the nature of the Sepah’s involvement in politics and how does it engage in the political contestations among the regime’s factions? How does the Sepah’s involvement in the dynamics of power and its responses to external security threat conditions affect its role in the economy and the foreign policy of the IRI? To lay the conceptual foundation, Part I of this book synthesised theoretical and empirical work on civil–military relations, including institutional and new institutional studies, with a specific study of power relations, namely political factionalism, in the IRI. The first chapter provided a theoretical model for this book by analysing the Sepah’s relationship with its civilian authority, composed of the clerical and lay power elite, as well as its role in politics and the economy, from a theoretical perspective.
