Johns Hopkins University

Graduate Student, Sociology

Thesis Title: The Martyrs Welfare State: Politics and Social Policy in the Islamic Republic of Iran

About

My dissertation asks two questions.  First, against nearly the entirety of experts’ predictions, why has the post revolutionary state in Iran endured for decades despite war, social conflict, and economic turmoil?  Second, was the 2009 “Green Movement” in Tehran a negation of the events of 1979 or was it a lineage of the Iranian revolution itself?  The second question arose for an undeniably fortuitous reason.  I landed in Tehran for fieldwork two days after the June 2009 presidential election, whose dubious results spawned the largest social protests in the country since the 1979 revolution.

Drawing on sixteen months of fieldwork from 2007-2011 in several Iranian provinces, and using archival research, interviews with government officials, and participant observation of the Green Movement itself, I argue that the post-revolutionary state in Iran remained resilient because its state-building project was intertwined with a welfare-building project.  Confronted by international isolation and an eight-year war with Iraq, the Islamic Republic channeled the social mobilization it inherited from the 1979 Revolution into a set of institutions that promised welfare provisions and upward social pathways to previously marginalized social groups in exchange for warfare participation and policy legitimation.  This revolutionary welfare regime contained an institutional complex linking warfare legacy and social policy, embedding the state within a wide array of social groups and strengthening its capacity to sustain serious challenges to its survival.

After the Iran-Iraq War, the Islamic Republic implemented a new state-building project focused on economic development.  To do this, it utilized and adapted a pre-existing corporatist welfare regime, left over from the Pahlavi monarchy’s developmental dictatorship, to expand and empower a new middle class of educated, technocratic cadres.  Yet this developmental push, common to many middle-income states, also generated new expectations among the population for upward mobility, changed livelihoods, and an alternative cultural-political order.  Instead of the usual tropes of civil society versus state, widely used in research on Middle East countries as in most of the global South, I combine my own ethnography of the Green Movement with an historical analysis of the post-revolutionary period and argue that this new class transformed into a disloyal opposition.  Their grievances and identities, however, are related to the politics of status inequality, blocked social mobility and a shared “fear of falling,” not to ahistorical logics of universal democratic transition or regional exceptionalisms.  The Green Movement, therefore, was not the consequence of an awakened civil society set against an ossified, backward-looking state.  Instead, I argue it is an outcome of the various and conflicting lineages of state-building efforts by the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the response to those efforts by newly empowered social classes.

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