Page 248

REVISTA IEEE 11

248 Journal of the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies Núm. 11 / 2018 THE IRANIAN ELITES AS PERCEIVED FROM THEIR SOCIETY AND THE MAIN GEOPOLITICAL ACTORS INTRODUCTION In this article we will travel along the different layers of the Islamic administration dominating the state of Iran: from the philosophic foundations to the economic outcome and the power structures shaped by its geopolitical position in the confluence of The Middle East and Central Asia. The Islamic Republic of Iran (from now on, the IRI) has long been absorbed in a struggle to fight the inconsistencies between a social revolution originally meant for the mostazafin1 or déshérités and a rigid cleric structure based on birth privileges. Fueled by an almost platonic vision of the «divine right», these religious-political elite led by the ayatollahs serve as iconic ‘ethical guides for the blind people’ managing, in the meantime, an extraordinarily wealthy territory. Contrary to the official claims that base the survival of this particular sort of alienated state administration on the incumbent’s moral virtue, the more down-to- earth economic factors actually lay behind the unlimited room for maneuver to materialize these philosophic ambitions. Notably, through the creation of politically-biased armed forces and the abnegation of the civil society by repressive means. And what is more, it enables this regional superpower to perpetuate its presence in international conflicts for the purpose of mitigating the historical marginalization suffered by the Shia community and the demarcation from the «false Muslims», illustrated by the Sunni pro-Western governments in the Persian Gulf. THEORETICAL APPROACH TO THE ELITES IN IRAN Any analysis of the political structure of the IRI is likely to fall within the realm of Western biased criticism or the excessively «islamophile» counter-narrative. With this in mind, we reflect upon the field of philosophy of science and extrapolate several ideas from the construction of scientific theories to the political turn of events in an attempt to examine the reality from a more objective perspective. Next, we propose a brief inquiry into the patterns of social psychology that enable or hamper the prevalence of an authoritarian regime. To that purpose the area of critical theory offers a less ethnocentric approach in which the study of the subject’s scale of values obtains a central role through the prism of modern progressive political thought. 1  This name is used in the Koran to describe the poorest layers of society. http://revista.ieee.es

REVISTA IEEE 11
To see the actual publication please follow the link above