This book is about the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its ascent to become one of the most formidable entities in Iran and the Middle East. It follows the organization from its birth in the midst of the 1979 revolution through the succeeding decades of the Islamic Republic’s maturation. The IRGC is a multifaceted military organization with a distinct raison d’être: the defense of Iran’s theocratic system. Pursuing that mission has allowed the IRGC to expand beyond the military sphere and become influential in the political, economic, strategic, sociocultural, and regional arenas ... More

This book is about the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its ascent to become one of the most formidable entities in Iran and the Middle East. It follows the organization from its birth in the midst of the 1979 revolution through the succeeding decades of the Islamic Republic’s maturation. The IRGC is a multifaceted military organization with a distinct raison d’être: the defense of Iran’s theocratic system. Pursuing that mission has allowed the IRGC to expand beyond the military sphere and become influential in the political, economic, strategic, sociocultural, and regional arenas. This book conceptualizes the IRGC as the product of three intersecting impulses and experiences: pro-clerical activism in Shiite Islam; devotion to the supreme leader; and the impact of conflict on organizational development and state formation. These concepts underpin this study, and are threaded through discussions on the IRGC’s religious and ideological foundations; its development during the Iran-Iraq war; its role in exporting the revolution; the place of religion in the IRGC’s politics and self-conception; the IRGC’s suppression of pro-democracy reformism in the 1990s; the impact of post-9/11 American foreign policy on the IRGC’s domestic and foreign influence; the organization’s retaliatory use of terrorism outside of Iran; and the religious and strategic motivations for its interventions in Syria and Iraq following the Arab Spring. By exploring this subject matter, this book is at once a comprehensive history of the IRGC, a thematic history of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and an entryway into the complex world of war, politics, and identity in the Middle East.