In October 2025, a leaked video of a lavish Tehran wedding, showing the daughter of Ali Shamkhani, former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, wearing a low-cut gown and entering a grand hall on her father’s arm, set off a wave of anger. The clip surfaced just as the government had deployed 80,000 new police to patrol the “morality” of Iranian women. The video exposed more than hypocrisy. It revealed how Iran’s revolution has hardened into a kinship system.

The marriage linked two well-connected families, part of a long tradition of elite unions that fuse security, clerical, and business circles. Sanctions and protests have only tightened these bloodlines, turning the state itself into an extended family, a republic of relatives, not citizens.

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How Kinship Networks Quietly Anchor Power in Iran

Research on nepotism within the Islamic Republic’s elite has long traced the family and clerical ties that quietly structure and bolster power. The leaked video showed how revolutionary virtue has aged into dynastic privilege and revealed a ruling class so interwoven by kinship that it can display its own immunity without fear.

Building on the foundational mapping of Iran’s post-revolutionary elite by academics Mehrzad Boroujerdi and Kourosh Rahimkhani in Post-Revolutionary Iran: A Political Handbook, newer research analyzing nearly 2,800 members of the Iranian political elite found that about 15% are linked by blood or marriage.

Examples range from the Shamkhani, Rafsanjani and Larijani families to the network surrounding the household of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. These interrelated families now occupy the upper tiers of government, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the semi-private conglomerates that........

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