When Mojtaba Khamenei’s elevation as Iran’s new supreme leader was announced, many observers treated it chiefly as a confirmation of a new hardliner order in Tehran. Subsequent rumours about his injury or even death, sparked by his disappearance from public view, have fuelled speculations of what that may mean for the Iranian regime.

What many analyses fail to register is that the power consolidation under way in Iran is structural rather than personal. What the war has reinforced is a broader regime of securitised rule whose logic exceeds any one successor. This process will continue with or without Mojtaba Khamenei at the helm.

Economic restructuring

To grasp the ongoing transformation in Iran, one has to move beyond succession intrigue and return to political economy. After the end of the war with Iraq in 1989, Iran went through a protracted phase of “market-oriented restructuring”. Under the banners of privatisation and economic development, the state did not simply retreat; it was reorganised.

Public assets were transferred into the hands of quasi-state conglomerates, parastatal foundations, and politically connected institutions. What emerged was not less statism, but a different configuration of state power: less accountable and more deeply entangled with mechanisms of upward redistribution.

It was on this terrain that what I call the military-bonyad complex took shape. Following the amendment of Article 44 of the 1979 Constitution, which authorised “public and non-governmental entities” to acquire up to 80 percent of shares in major state industries, the years after 2006 saw a large-scale transfer of assets from government ministries to firms affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the religious-revolutionary foundations (bonyads), including the Mostazafan Foundation, Setad, the Astan Quds Razavi Foundation, and the Martyrs’ Foundation.

Security-linked conglomerates were thus among the chief beneficiaries of market-oriented restructuring. By the end of the 2000s, this process had produced a dense bloc........

© Al Jazeera