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270 Journal of the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies Núm. 11 / 2018 into an increasingly impoverished middle class that expands downwards in the socio-economic Figure 10: the Grand Bazaar in the Kurdish city of Kermanshah (left) and the Domes in the bazaar of Qom (right) from the Qajar period (1779-1924) http://revista.ieee.es scale74. THE WELFARE STATE AGREEMENT: THE NON-AGGRESSION PACT BETWEEN THE ELITES AND THE SOCIETY The study of the elites does not only comprise the administrative minorities controlling the power resources, but also the nodes in society that consciously allow these groups to administer the hegemony. As we learnt in an earlier section, this function is mainly accomplished by the bazaaries and the bonyads (foundations), even if the support of a public majority is required to guarantee the regime’s stability. In Iran, the state-society relation takes the shape of a non-aggression pact based in coercion and the threat of punishment in accordance to the Shari ‘a. Thereafter, the room for manoeuvre of the individual under the elite’s rule is well demarcated by the ‘transgression’ of the political alienation, and its physical integrity only guaranteed within those limits. But despite the image of lethargy that the Iranian society may portray, this conceded calm must not be mixed up with a complete abnegation of the civil society, as in the Central Asian dictatorships adjoining. This permanent pressure involves multiple undesirable consequences, namely that citizens become passive members of the coercion. In line with Butler’s reflections, inasmuch as rebelling against the structures of power remains impossible, a collaborative 74  BUTEL, Eric. «L’individu postislamiste en Iran: la nouvelle jeunesse», Cemoti - Cahiers d’études sur la Méditerranée orientale et le monde turco-iranien, 26, 1998.

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