Governmentality and Crises of Representation, Knowledge, and Power in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Date

2015-01-01

Author

Fozi, Navid

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

142
views

0
downloads

Since the contested presidential (re) election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, crises of representation, power, and knowledge have destabilized the Islamic Republic of Iran's governmentality notwithstanding a strong Weberian state. When many Iranians demanded a recount, the state rejected allegations of vote-rigging, purged Reformists from the state, cracked down on their supporters, elicited forced confessions, and staged show trials. This state-sponsored vigilantism that diminished the Republic's claim of representing the people caused a Reformist retreat from the streets as well as withdrawal from the parliamentary elections of March 2012. Such withdrawal, which threatened the vibrancy of the elections, added to the crises of representation. Moreover, it caused the Principalists to factionalize and radicalize, producing a crisis of power. In addition, divisions within the government and between the government and the populace resulted in the failure of the state to discern friends from foes, causing a crisis of knowledge. The subsequent presidential elections of Hassan Rouhani four years later in 2013, both in terms of the ways in which it unfolded as well as the outcome, was a confirmation and a way out of these challenges.

Subject Keywords

Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/63715

Journal

ASIAN POLITICS & POLICY

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/aspp.12173

Collections

Unclassified, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

The presidential election in Azerbaijan, October 2008 Ergun Özbolat, Ayça (Elsevier BV, 2009-12-01) On 15 October 2008, Azerbaijan held its third presidential election after the declaration of independence (1991). The election resulted in President Ilham Aliyev, son of former President Heydar Aliyev, being elected for a second term. Thus, post-independence, Azerbaijan was dominated by the rule of the Aliyev family.1 Ilham Aliyev had inherited his father's administrative staff and clientelist networks, supported by strong regionalism, and used his first term to consolidate his power. Moreover, oil revenues...
Determinants of political behavior in Istanbul, Turkey Ozcan, YZ (SAGE Publications, 2000-10-01) This paper investigates the factors that determined the party preferences in the 1987 and 1991 general elections and the 1989 local election in Istanbul, Turkey's largest metropolitan city. It argues that parry preference is essentially an aspect of individual political behavior, which should be explained by the characteristics of individuals who are, in turn, affected by various macro factors. Theories developed for industrialized western countries are of limited use in developing countries and in need of ...
Europeanization of foreign policy: the case of Turkish foreign policy towards the Black Sea region Ustun, Cigdem (Informa UK Limited, 2010-01-01) Turkey's efforts to initiate an active foreign policy towards the Black Sea region in the 1990s were scuttled by Russian influence and an international environment inconducive to multilateralism. When security needs changed in the twenty-first century and the enlargement of the EU reached the Black Sea, a multilateral approach was developed for the region by local and international actors, i.e., the EU and Turkey. In this framework, this article aims to show the changes observed in Turkish foreign policy to...
Politics and the Mass Media in Turkey Kaya, Ahmet Raşit; Çakmur, Barış (Informa UK Limited, 2010-01-01) This article sets out to examine the linkages between the media and politics in Turkey. It argues that, rooted in the world of politics from the outset, Turkish media has always been marked by a high degree of political parallelism. As regulator and funder, the state, making up the political majority, exerted strong control over the media. In the 1990s, the shift to a globalized market and the explosive growth of private broadcasting did not decrease the high degree of political parallelism. Instead, it ena...
LEVEL OF ANALYSIS AND UNIT OF ANALYSIS - A CASE FOR DISTINCTION Yurdusev, Ahmet Nuri (SAGE Publications, 1993-03-01) This paper takes the view that the 'level of analysis' problem, first posed by Singer (1961), has not been discussed to the extent that it deserves in the literature of International Relations. The concepts of the 'level of analysis' and the 'unit of analysis' have widely been used interchangeably. The author attempts to make a distinction between the 'level of analysis' and the 'unit of analysis', arguing that the 'level of analysis' is an issue of how to study (methodology and context) and the 'unit of ...

Citation Formats

N. Fozi, “Governmentality and Crises of Representation, Knowledge, and Power in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” ASIAN POLITICS & POLICY, pp. 57–78, 2015, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/63715.