The Political Economy of Iran

Abstract

All Middle Eastern countries, with the exception of Israel and Lebanon, profess Islam as their state religion. Islam, whether simply in words or in fact, is woven into the fabric of these societies, affecting everything from the political system, to the social, financial and economic system. Islam is a rules-based system, with the collection of rules constituting its institutions in the quest to establish societies that are just. Allah commands mankind to behave in a fair and just manner to protect the rights of others, to be fair and just with people, to be just in business dealings, to honor agreements and contracts, to help and be fair with the needy and orphans, and to be just even in dealing with enemies. Allah Commands humans to establish just societies, rulers to be just and people to stand up for the oppressed against their oppressors. It is for these reasons that it said that justice is at the heart of Islam. In the same vein, the state (policies) must step in to restore justice whenever and wherever individuals fail to comply with divine rules; government intervention must enhance justice. This series brings together scholarship from around the world focusing on global implications of the intersections between Islam, government, and the economy in Islamic countries.

Outsiders on the storm: Precarity, persecution, and despair in Iranian political‐economic context

“…The unsystematic implementation of some market-oriented strategies -which add fuel to the fire of inequality on a global scale themselves (Bell, 2019;Ostry et al, 2016)-has at best, produced and reproduced the same structure in the guise of a "pseudo-modernism" (Katouzian, 2004). In other words, the system has relied more on the rule of "an army of final arbiters" instead of the rule of law or any sort of social cohesion (Gohardani & Tizro, 2019). Historically rooted confiscation, through which the presence of obscene Father-Enjoyment has been reproduced, manifests itself in the guise of an unsystematic privatization that has formed and consolidated a rent-seeking kleptocratic oligarchic system; the authoritarian kleptocratic Father-Enjoyment, that stubbornly refuses to die.…”

“…There is a chaotic situation of belated inbetweenness, in which the Iranian community has been divided by strife and rivalry among different political and religious ideologies, divisions, and regimes of truth. Short-lived cohesiveness and coalition among voices and regimes of truths (Islamism, Persianism, Modernism) are volatile and unstable and hinder any consensus on the resolution of irreconcilable differences (Gohardani & Tizro, 2019). Arabestani (2019) considers the situation in Iran as a Fatherless society in which there is "dominance without hegemony," and the dominant discourse is not able to integrate various aspects of the life of the subjects.…”

“…There is a chaotic situation of belated inbetweenness, in which the Iranian community has been divided by strife and rivalry among different political and religious ideologies, divisions, and regimes of truth. Short‐lived cohesiveness and coalition among voices and regimes of truths (Islamism, Persianism, Modernism) are volatile and unstable and hinder any consensus on the resolution of irreconcilable differences (Gohardani & Tizro, 2019).…”

“…Compactness (i.e., changing sides at vital moments for a union against a common enemy) and factionalism (i.e., the state of internal division) extremely dominate the Iranian society, and in such a situation, not only is the state divided from the society, but also the society itself is divided as a result of the lack of common grounds for constructing firm coalitions among voices and regimes of truth. In such an unstable and short‐lived embeddedness, hybridity and nomadic behavior result in even more disintegration (Gohardani & Tizro, 2019).…”

“…Alongside being a religious authoritarian country, what distinguishes Iran in terms of its political economy is the fact that privatization in Iran has always been limited to rent distribution. Iran's economy, in general, is addicted to oil export (Gohardani & Tizro, 2019) and has a sort of parasitic economy in which production has been victimized (Raghfar, 2010). Moreover, the so‐called “private sector” of the capitalist economy of Iran is excessively dependent on rent‐seeking, contacts, and connections (Seif, 2018).…”