A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran

Studying the varieties of welfare can offer surprising insights in the workings and tensions of Islamist social movements in such major countries as Iran, Egypt, and Turkey. Based on extensive fieldwork and (for Iran) the batteries of socio-economic data, the recent monographs of sociologists Kevan Harris and Cihan Tugal offer a high-resolution yet panoramic overview. Harris re-positions the Iranian historical 'improvisation called Islamic Republic' as the 'warfare/welfare state' forged in the sacrificial defense against Saddam Hussein's onslaught in the 1980s. The Iranian 'welfare for martyrs' model itself built on the institutional remnants inherited from the earlier developmentalism of the shahs. The surprising resilience of ayatollahs' regime is then better explained by its accidental affinity to the communist guerrilla states in the world-system's semiperiphery like Cuba and Vietnam. By contrast, Tugal sees the power of Islamist mobilizing in Egypt and Turkey in the historical failure of secular state modernizers, respectively Nasser and Ataturk, to meet the social and spiritual expectations of rural masses moving into the sprawling cities like Cairo and Istanbul. Following Gramsci and Bourdieu, Tugal identifies a pregnant tension between the two Islamist models of welfare: neoliberal and religious egalitarian. This tension, not unlike the Christian social movements of interwar Europe, now amidst the post-2008 economic dislocations tends to strengthen the non-capitalist and egalitarian vector in the current global transformation.