Captive Society

The Basij Militia and Social Control in Iran

Saeid Golkar

• Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780231801355
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Iran's Organization for the Mobilization of the Oppressed (Sazeman-e Basij-e Mostazafan), commonly known as the Basij, is a paramilitary organization used by the regime to suppress dissidents, vote as a bloc, and indoctrinate Iranian citizens. Captive Society surveys the Basij's history, structure, and sociology, as well as its influence on Iranian society, its economy, and its educational system. Saied Golkar's account draws not only on published materials—including Basij and Revolutionary Guard publications, allied websites, and blogs—but also on his own informal communications with Basij members while studying and teaching in Iranian universities as recently as 2014. In addition, he incorporates findings from surveys and interviews he conducted while in Iran.

Part I: The Civil Militia and State Control

Chapter 1

The Basij: Nongovernmental Organization, Administered Mass Organization, or Militia?

In the summer of 2009, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) was rocked by demonstrations throughout its major cities as people from all walks of life protested the disputed results of Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad’s reelection as president. In scenes that transfixed viewers from across the world, the “Green Movement” publicly protested the voting scam and then the clerical establishment itself. But no sooner had the protesters begun to mobilize popular support for ending the thirty-year theocracy than the Islamic regime’s shock troops, the Basij, and its cadet branches sprang into action to suppress the uprising.

Following the uprising, many questions arose concerning the paramilitary group, commonly referred to as the Basij, that had played such a large role in its suppression. Who are the Basij members? Why have they joined? To which social classes do they belong? What are their motivations? What is their level of commitment to the IRI? What is the Basij’s role in controlling Iranian society? There were many questions, but few answers.

Also, after the expansion of the Arab awakening in January 2011, which toppled several long-standing authoritarian regimes, there was much discussion about quietness and regime persistence within the IRI. Many questions came to the surface: Why had an Arab Spring occurred, and not an Iranian Spring? How has the IRI effectively controlled its population? And why is the regime steadfast in the face of significant regional change? This book attempts to provide some answers for these questions by analyzing the role of the Basij militia in imposing state control over Iranian society.

The Nature of the Basij

Although there have been many discussions regarding the Basij, the nature of this organization remains controversial. There are at least four different ideas about its nature and how it should be categorized. The first category—the official, state-supported designation—is as a nongovernmental organization (NGO). According to state propaganda, the Basij is an NGO that is completely independent from the state and represents the true will of the people. It depicts the Basij as operating independently from the IRI and as run solely by the people who join it voluntarily.¹ Needless to say, this approach is completely fabricated, because the Basij is part of Iran’s military apparatus, and it is legally, financially, and logistically dependent on the government, according to its Constitution. The remaining three categories require more in-depth anlysis.

The Basij as an Administered Mass Organization

The second approach categorizes the Basij as an administered mass organization (AMO).² According to Gregory Kazsa, who coined this term, AMOs are the products of World War I and have since been established by many fascist regimes. He defines an AMO as “a mass civilian organization created and managed by a political regime to implement public policy.”³ According to Kazsa, an AMO has three components:

• Organization: An AMO is a formal organization with offices and bylaws.

• Mass: The targeted membership ordinarily includes all or most people of a particular place of residence, employment, age, or gender.

• Administered: External agencies of the regime define the AMO’s structure and mission and appoint its top leaders.⁴

AMOs, which are financially controlled by the government, are very hierarchical and vertical.⁵ One of an AMO’s aims is to enroll all or nearly all individuals by “age, gender, workplace, industry, place of residence, or some mix of these criteria.” AMOs are the state’s tools for organizing the people, mobilizing the regime’s supporters, countering the formation of opposition movements, and implementing state policy.⁶ In fact, the states use AMOs as weapons against autonomous organizations.

AMOs have had several positive functions for authoritarian regimes. They often successfully destroy other civil society organizations, recruit and organize millions of members, and control them using several methods—for example, martial dependency, in which AMOs make people materially dependent on the state. Other methods include the following

• Consumption of time: AMOs occupy time and energy that members might otherwise give to autonomous activities;

• Ritual of loyalty: AMOs compel people to publicly demonstrate their loyalty to the regime;

• Honor: AMOs entice people to support the regime by bestowing honors onto the coherent administrative body;

• Pseudopolitics: AMOs retain the appearance of meaningful political activity without its substance, creating the illusion of members’ participation in ruling; and

• Self-directed local participation: Many AMOs allow their members to engage in some form of meaningful self-directed activity that will not threaten the regime, satisfying their desire for political participation without giving them any political clout.⁷

Neema Noori has applied the AMO framework to explain how the mobilization for the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 through 1988, the prosecution of the war, and the demobilization in its aftermath all have affected the politics of the present.⁸ Although the Basij is like an AMO in many ways, because it is financially controlled by the government and part of Iran’s military apparatus, it cannot be considered a completely civilian organization. As a part of the security establishment, the Basij has several military and security branches, which have been involved in both internal and foreign conflicts.

The Basij as a Political Party

The Basij’s hierarchical structure and the size of its membership (which numbers in the millions) have led some to compare it with other mass political parties. Reformist scholars, including Saeed Hajjarian, use the metaphor of the “barrack-based party” (hezb-e padegani) to refer to Iran’s political hard-liners’ systematic use of millions of Basij members as an organized collective of “electoral foot soldiers.”⁹ From this point of view, the Basij cluster network is like a mass political association that penetrates all corners of society. Like a political party, the Basij has also established several branches aimed at recruitment, indoctrination, and mobilization in political campaigns, whereby it functions as a voting machine. In this view, “the Basij are the closest thing Iran has to an organized political party.”¹⁰ In fact, one could argue that the Basij is very similar to the Iraqi Ba‘th Party under Saddam Hussein.¹¹ In his book Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime, Joseph Sassoon offers an in-depth depiction of the structure and scope of the Ba‘th Party and explains how its branches permeated Iraqi society. He writes that “the Ba‘th Party systemically penetrated every stratum of society and built an impressive political machine more powerful any other group, … which drew large numbers of people into its sphere of influence.”¹² Like the Basij, the Ba‘th Party made efforts to politically indoctrinate its members and prepared them for a range of security and cultural missions, including the gathering of information and surveillance.¹³ Thus the nature of the Ba‘th Party and its presence in every dimension of Iraqi society were very similar to the infiltration of the Basij and its twenty subbranches into Iran.

However, despite the parallels that exist between the Basij’s structure and that of organized political parties, one cannot classify the Basij as such. The Basij is a part of Iran’s military apparatus, and thus it falls under control of a branch of the military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Basij as a Militia

Because of this, some scholars have compared the Basij with the militia groups that were active during Iraq’s recent history, such as the Iraqi Popular Army and the Fadayeen-e Saddam.¹⁴ Both of these Iraqi militias were established to support Saddam’s Ba‘th Party against the Iraqi army, because the party did not trust the army as a loyal force. In this regard, these Iraqi militia forces are quite similar to the Basij, which was initially established to guard the clerical establishment in 1980. There are some additional commonalities between these militia forces and the Basij, including their use as an asymmetrical means of defense. However, there are important differences between the Basij and militias such as the Iraqi Popular Army and the Fadayeen-e Saddam. The primary divergence is that only a small group of the Basij’s members are armed and are involved in security and military operations. The other difference relates to “the ideological commitment of the members of the organization.” As Charles Western writes:

The Saddam Fedayeen [was] a secular force that was personally and viciously attached to Saddam Hussein, … while the ideology of the Basij is religious and therefore presented a much stronger link to the Islamic Revolutionary Government of Iran than the Saddam Fedayeen’s loyalty to an individual.¹⁵

Thus, most scholars categorize the Basij as a militia or a paramilitary group.¹⁶ Although many studies have examined militias, their origins, and their roles, especially in weak states, there has been less of a compromise on the definition of a militia and its characterization. That is why several names are used interchangeably to refer to nonstate actors—including “militia,” “paramilitary,” “irregular armed forces,” “vigilante,” “local defense groups,” and the like. In spite of these difficulties in establishing a coherent characterization for this type of organization, a “militia” is defined as an armed, substate group that has some level of organization. A civil militia is usually defined as a “citizen army made up of free men between the ages of sixteen and sixty who performed occasional mandatory military services to protect their country.”¹⁷

A militia differs from conventional military forces in many ways. One example is the difference in the degree and type of training that the members of a militia and a regular army receive. Militia members usually receive little training, and many scholars consider militias to be armed, state subsidiary forces that are not part of the regular security forces but have some level of governmental organization.¹⁸ However, contrary to popular belief, militia groups are not necessarily “anti-state” groups, like criminals or rebels.¹⁹ Instead, Bjørn Møller believes that the labels “non-state” or “not quite state” might be more appropriate for them.²⁰ Militias therefore can be categorized as either anti-state or pro-state military groups. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) is an example of anti-state militia, which aims to weaken the state and the political order. By contrast, in Sudan the Shurta Shabia (popular police) is a progovernment militia, which the state pays to assert its control over Sudanese society.²¹

In recent years, many studies have looked at the emergence and decline of militias. Many of the studies have focused on why governments use militias around the world. Although scholars have focused on the roles of militias in failed states, insurgencies, and even emerging new states, there has been little analysis of the militia’s role in a strong state.²² Some scholars have explained the emergence of state-sponsored militias as a response to persistent internal dangers, but according to Ariel Ahram, state-sponsored militias usually emerge in countries that have experienced revolutionary decolonization or state failure. These kinds of paths of dependence produce more opportunities for the emergence of a localized force.²³ Ahram argues that “differences in the initial endowment of military capacity locked states on a path dependent course of military development,” and that the absence or presence of paramilitaries as institutional forms has roots in how “historical events of early revolutionary wars and subsequent external dangers combine to delimit options for force centralization or decentralization.”²⁴

Progovernmental militias (PGM) are divided into two main groups: (1) informal PGMs and (2) semiofficial PGMs. Informal PGMs are loosely connected with the government but are not directly linked to the government, such as Sudan’s Janjaweed militia, which mainly involved implementing sharia (Islamic law) and Islamizing Sudanese society.²⁵ However, semiofficial PGMs have legal or semiofficial status and are more institutionalized. These groups might be subordinated to the regular security forces but be separate from the regular police or military, such as village defense forces in India.²⁶

PGMs perform a broad range of functions for the government. The militia is mainly involved in maintaining local defense, upholding law and order, counterinsurgency, repression, and population control.²⁷ Although militias usually are described as intelligence and initiative-poor groups that violate human rights and foster insecurity, they have a “crucial role in dispensing force and controlling security, especially in weak states.”²⁸ Militias are much cheaper for governments to operate than regular armed forces. They also require less training, and they remain under the control of the state. A further advantage of militias is their knowledge of the territory they control, because their members are often recruited from the local communities. Militia members tend to be more familiar with and more knowl...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Figures and Table
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: The Civil Militia and State Control
• Part II: The Basij and the Shaping of an Insiders’ Network
• Part III: The Basij and the Suppression of Others
• Part IV: The Basij and the Controlling of Societal Sectors
• Part V: The Sociology of the Basij—Motivations and Loyalty
• Conclusion: The Emergence of a Captive Society
• Appendix: Excerpts from Official Basij Documents
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index