Abstract
This article theorises a historically neglected political phenomenon: the conditions under which citizens and diasporic populations sever national identification from their own state, to the point of welcoming external force against it as an act of national fidelity rather than betrayal. Advancing the concept of necropolitical disarticulation, the study synthesises Mbembe’s necropolitics, Puar’s theory of debilitation, state–nation decoupling frameworks, and Ahmed’s cultural politics of emotion to argue that sustained necropolitical governance progressively destroys the affective and symbolic infrastructure binding populations to the state, generating a normative inversion of patriotism and, ultimately, a counter-stateness in which national political identity is organised against rather than through the state. The article deepens Mbembe’s framework by engaging Al-Kassimi’s theological critique of necropolitics, demonstrating that the Islamic Republic’s governing logic is enabled not by revelation but by its systematic ideological distortion—a secularisation of scripture that insulates sovereign authority from theological accountability. Velayat-e Faqih is reframed accordingly as a secularised ideology of political power structurally analogous to other modern authoritarian formations. Through socio-historical analysis of Iran from 1979 to 2026, with comparative engagement with Syria and Belarus, the article contributes an exportable analytical concept to political sociology, nationalism studies, and diaspora politics.
Keywords
Introduction
In January 2026, as security forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran carried out a wave of killings against nationwide protesters that would ultimately claim thousands of lives, a striking and theoretically unaccounted-for phenomenon emerged across both domestic and diasporic Iranian publics: significant numbers of Iranians openly expressed support for U.S. and Israeli military strikes against the state they nominally belonged to, framing this position not as treason but as an act of loyalty towards the Iranian nation. This was not an isolated reaction. In the years following the Woman–Life–Freedom (WLF) uprising of September 2022, Iranians had already been enacting subtler but structurally related forms of disidentification, refusing to celebrate the national football team’s international victories on the grounds that such celebrations served the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy rather than any genuinely national cause. These phenomena share a common underlying logic, and explaining that logic is the central task of this study.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979 on the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, or the guardianship of the Islamic jurist, which transferred sovereign authority to senior clergy rather than grounding it in popular will, substituting theocratic for democratic legitimacy from the outset. What the existing literature has not fully theorised, however, is the epistemic character of this substitution. Drawing on Al-Kassimi (2022), the article demonstrates that Velayat-e Faqih does not represent Islamic theology in its revelatory or exegetical form; rather, it constitutes a secularised and ideologised appropriation of scripture that transforms religious authority into an instrument of political power. Khomeini’s reconceptualisation of the doctrine—which Grand Ayatollah al-Khoei famously denounced as blasphemous, placing the denunciation squarely within Shia jurisprudence rather than outside it—was precisely such a substitution: it inserted political meaning into revelation rather than deriving political limits from it, producing a form of sovereignty insulated from theological accountability and structurally continuous with modern secular authoritarianism. The state consolidated its authority through two key institutional pillars: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a parallel military apparatus with extensive economic interests and direct responsibility for suppressing domestic dissent, and the Guardian Council, an unelected body with constitutional authority to disqualify electoral candidates and nullify legislation deemed incompatible with Islamic law.
Existing scholarship addresses these developments in productive but partial ways. Research on authoritarian resilience and regime legitimacy explains why populations resist governments; diaspora politics scholarship explains how transnational communities sustain homeland identifications across distance; necropolitical theory explains how states govern through the administration of death; and political theology illuminates how sovereign authority can be grounded in—or distorted by—religious claims. What the literature has not yet produced is an integrated framework explaining the conditions under which populations come to perceive the state itself as the primary threat to the nation, and under which harming the state is reframed as protecting the nation. This gap is compounded by the absence, in Mbembe’s original framework, of an account of how necropolitical sovereignty operates through the theological register—a limitation this article addresses by drawing on Al-Kassimi (2022) and the distinction between sound reason, which remains oriented towards revelation as a moral horizon, and distorted reason, which instrumentalises rationality to subordinate revelation to ideology.
Three research questions organise the analysis. What are the structural and historical conditions that produce the disarticulation of national identification from state authority in the Iranian case? By what political, affective, and symbolic mechanisms does necropolitical governance convert state–nation congruence into state–nation opposition? And under what conditions does this disarticulation produce the normative inversion of patriotism—specifically the reframing of support for external force against the state as an expression of national fidelity rather than national betrayal?
To answer these questions, this article advances the concept of necropolitical disarticulation, synthesising Mbembe’s (2003, 2019) theory of necropolitics and Puar’s (2017) theory of debilitation with state–nation decoupling frameworks drawn from Gellner (1983), Anderson (1983), and Fukurai (2019), and integrating Ahmed’s (2004) cultural politics of emotion as the affective infrastructure through which disarticulation is experienced and enacted. The framework is further deepened by engaging Al-Kassimi’s (2022) political-theological critique of necropolitics, which allows the study to theorise how necropolitical governance in ostensibly religious states is enabled not by revelation but by the secularisation and ideologisation of scripture. This theoretical extension is supplemented by attention to the existing scholarship applying necropolitics to the Iranian context, including Saeidi and Osmanzadeh’s (2025) analysis of religious necropolitics in the Kurdish case and Mohammadpour and Javaheri’s (2025) and Saeidi and Osmanzadeh’s (2025) work on gendered necro-labour practices. The article also engages critically with the scholarship on the constructed nature of Iranian nationalism, particularly Zia-Ebrahimi (2016), Vaziri (1993), and Marashi (2003), to ensure that the concept of nation is treated as historically produced and contested rather than self-evident. The Iranian case is analysed with comparative reference to Syria and Belarus to establish the concept’s generalisability beyond a single national context.
Methodology
The article employs a socio-historical method combined with structured comparative case analysis. The primary evidentiary basis consists of peer-reviewed scholarship in political sociology, nationalism studies, Iranian studies, diaspora politics, and gender studies, supplemented by formally published documentation from international human rights bodies including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (2026), and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Iran. Empirical claims about population attitudes are grounded in formally published survey data, including Maleki and Tamimi Arab (2023) and Maleki (2025), PAAIA (2026), and NIAC (2025), discussed in full methodological detail at the point of use in the 2026 analytical section, supplemented by diaspora studies scholarship and human rights reporting throughout. Future quantitative work could usefully extend these findings through probability-sampled panels across diaspora cohorts. The treatment of Iranian nationalism in what follows draws on the critical historiography developed by Zia-Ebrahimi (2016), Vaziri (1993), and Marashi (2003), which demonstrates that the Iranian national imaginary is historically constructed and contested rather than primordially given—a premise that is necessary for the theoretical coherence of the state–nation decoupling argument advanced here.
Necropolitical disarticulation of state and nation
This article proposes necropolitical disarticulation as an analytical concept to explain the conditions under which national identification is severed from the state, to the point where welcoming the state’s external diminishment becomes an act of national fidelity rather than betrayal. The argument rests on four interlocking theoretical layers. The foundational distinction between state and nation as analytically separable entities establishes the structural possibility of their decoupling. Mbembe’s (2003, 2019) necropolitics names the causal mechanism that actualises it. The affective infrastructure of disarticulation—through which necropolitical governance is experienced, transmitted, and collectively enacted (Ahmed, 2004; Berlant, 2011; Schatz and Lavine, 2007)—explains how that mechanism is lived and transmitted across social formations. And Al-Kassimi’s (2022) political-theological critique of necropolitics extends Mbembe’s framework to account for the specific epistemic conditions under which necropolitical sovereignty is exercised through a theological idiom—conditions directly relevant to the Iranian case.
State, nation, and the structural possibility of decoupling
Gellner (1983) defined nationalism as the principle that political and national units should be congruent, yet recognised this congruence as a continuous achievement rather than a structural given. Weber (1978) established that a state’s claim to sovereignty rests on the population’s subjective belief in its validity; where that belief is withdrawn, the state retains coercive capacity but loses the legitimacy that transforms coercion into authority. Anderson (1983) extended this insight by theorising the nation as an imagined community whose belonging is socially constructed and not inherently tied to any state apparatus, meaning the national imaginary can be re-routed towards alternative communities when the state violates the terms of its own claimed national representation.
It is important to note, however, that the concept of nation deployed in this study does not treat the Iranian national imaginary as a natural or primordial given. As Zia-Ebrahimi (2016) has demonstrated in his account of dislocative nationalism, modern Iranian national identity was historically constructed through selective engagements with Orientalist racial discourse, producing a self-image organised around an idealised Aryan ancestry and a denigration of the Islamic period. Vaziri (1993) similarly showed that Iran as an imagined nation was a product of 19th- and early 20th-century cultural and political projects rather than an unbroken civilisational continuity. Marashi (2003) extended this analysis by tracing how intellectual and bureaucratic elites nationalised Iranian culture through institutional practices rather than recovered essences. This critical historiography does not undermine the theoretical claim that necropolitical governance destroys the affective and symbolic bonds linking the population to the state; rather, it specifies that these bonds are themselves historical constructions that can be made, unmade, and remade—which is precisely what necropolitical disarticulation describes.
Fukurai (2019) built the most direct theorisation of state–nation decoupling from these premises, arguing that nations with diasporic extensions can assert transnational nationhood operating independently of, and sometimes in opposition to, the state sovereign. Lee (2020) further demonstrated that such strategies register a meaningful normative shift with tangible consequences for loyalty and civic behaviour. Linz and Stepan (1996) established the foundational corollary: in authoritarian states, the stateness problem—whether a population accepts the state as the legitimate container of national life—is always prior to questions of regime transition; where stateness is contested, all subsequent political dynamics are fundamentally altered. These premises establish the structural possibility of state–nation decoupling; what they do not yet specify is the causal mechanism by which that possibility is actualised—namely, the deployment of sovereign power through the administration of death and debilitation rather than through the cultivation of life.
Necropolitics and biopolitics: The causal engine of disarticulation
Foucault (2003) provided the conceptual precedent through biopower, the state’s capacity to determine which lives are worth fostering and which can be abandoned; however, Foucault’s framework treats death as a residual byproduct of the optimisation of life rather than as the primary instrument of sovereign power, which limits its explanatory reach for cases in which killing and debilitation are not incidental but constitutive of governance. It is necessary here to draw a clear analytical line between biopolitics and necropolitics, as the two concepts are sometimes conflated in the literature. Foucault’s biopower is oriented towards the administration of life—the maximisation of the productive capacities of the population—and treats death as a residual effect or a disciplinary exception. Mbembe’s necropolitics, by contrast, designates a mode of sovereignty in which death itself is the primary technology of governance, deployed not as the failure of biopower but as its replacement in contexts where populations are governed through their constitutive exposure to killing, injury, and chronic debilitation.
Mbembe (2003: 11) advanced a decisive revision, arguing that ‘the ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’. Necropolitics names this formation: a mode of sovereignty in which death, injury, and chronic debilitation are not the failures of governance but its primary technologies. Mbembe (2019) extended the framework beyond colonial domination to states that deploy their own security infrastructure against those they nominally represent, which is precisely where the concept becomes directly applicable to the Iranian case.
Mbembe’s framework has attracted two critiques this article must address. The first—that it overgeneralises the colonial condition (Puar, 2017). This carries force as a warning against mechanical application but does not invalidate the framework here; the relevant question is not whether Iran is formally colonised but whether its governing apparatus exercises sovereignty through managing its population’s exposure to death and debilitation, which the evidence of the 2009, 2019, and 2022–2026 crackdowns confirms. The second is that Mbembe’s original formulation undertheorises gender as a structuring axis of necropolitical governance (Puar, 2017). This is directly relevant to the Iranian case, where compulsory veiling, morality policing, and the killing of Zhina Amini place women’s bodies at the explicit centre of the state’s necropolitical authority. Puar’s (2017) concept of debilitation addresses this gap, extending Mbembe’s framework to account for chronic, gendered techniques through which states maim and incapacitate populations as a form of governance continuous with spectacular killing. Applying Mbembe’s framework to the Iranian case therefore requires two explicit adjustments that together constitute the study’s theoretical contribution: first, the integration of Puar’s (2017) debilitation framework to account for the gendered and chronic dimensions of necropolitical governance—dimensions that are constitutive rather than supplementary in the Iranian case, where women’s bodies are the primary surface of sovereign inscription; and second, the incorporation of Al-Kassimi’s (2022) theological-epistemic critique to account for the specific mechanism through which necropolitical sovereignty is exercised and legitimised in states that govern through a theological idiom. Neither adjustment is merely additive; together they respecify the conditions under which necropolitical disarticulation becomes possible.
The existing literature applying necropolitics to the Iranian context also demands engagement. Saeidi and Osmanzadeh (2025) provide the most directly relevant analysis, theorising Khomeini’s fatwa against Kurdish movements in Iran as an instance of religious necropolitics: the sovereign invocation of infidel status to legitimate mass killing under the guise of religious obligation. Their analysis of the Qarna and QaraGol massacres in Rojhelat demonstrates that necropolitical governance in the early Islamic Republic operated through a specifically religious idiom in which enemies of the state were classified as kafir (infidels) and therefore as lives that could be taken without moral or juridical consequence. Mohammadpour and Javaheri (2025) extend this analysis to the everyday dimension, showing how Kurdish kolbers (cross-border labourers) are subjected to a gendered necro-labour practice that positions them in a liminal space between life and death through the Iranian state’s structural indifference to their survival. These contributions confirm the applicability of necropolitics to the Iranian case while pointing towards a dimension—the theological mediation of necropolitical authority—that Mbembe’s original framework does not adequately theorise. Yet these contributions, while confirming the framework’s applicability, simultaneously expose a gap that none of them closes: the need to theorise the specific epistemic mechanism through which necropolitical authority is claimed and legitimised in a state that governs through a theological idiom. That is the task of the following subsection.
The theological-epistemic dimension: Sound reason, distorted reason, and necropolitical sovereignty
Mbembe’s analysis emphasises racism, coloniality, and the sovereign ban as the primary enabling conditions of necropolitical governance—a framing that does not, by itself, capture the specific epistemic mechanism through which death-power is exercised and legitimised in a state governing through a theological idiom. Al-Kassimi (2022) offers the necessary corrective by advancing a theological critique of necropolitics, arguing that modern regimes of sovereign violence frequently arise not from religion as revelation but from the secularisation and ideologisation of scripture—a process by which theological authority is transformed from an exegetical practice constrained by moral and interpretive limits into an instrument of political power. The importance of this intervention for the Iranian case is immediate: it allows the analysis to identify not just what the Islamic Republic does (governs through death and debilitation) but the epistemic condition that makes that governance possible and insulates it from accountability (the subordination of revelation to political reason).
Al-Kassimi’s (2022) framework introduces a distinction that is directly relevant to the Iranian case: the distinction between sound reason and distorted reason. Sound reason remains oriented towards revelation as a moral horizon, placing ethical constraints on political authority and binding power to accountability and restraint. Distorted reason, by contrast, instrumentalises rationality to subordinate revelation to ideology, transforming revealed truth into a political resource rather than a moral limit. This distinction is crucial for understanding how necropolitical regimes emerge within ostensibly religious frameworks: what enables sovereign authority to decide who may live and who must die without moral constraint is not revelation itself but the distortion of reason that ideologises theology.
Relatedly, Al-Kassimi’s framework draws a critical distinction between exegesis—interpretation that remains disciplined by revelation and constrained by its moral horizon—and eisegesis—the insertion of political meaning into scripture in order to legitimise prior political decisions. This distinction clarifies the specific character of Velayat-e Faqih as an epistemic formation. Rather than treating Velayat-e Faqih primarily as a theocratic alternative to popular sovereignty—which risks inadvertently naturalising its claim to be Islamic—it is more analytically productive to frame it as a secularised approach to scripture that over-relies on juridical reason at the expense of revelation. Khomeini’s expansion of the doctrine from limited clerical guardianship over vulnerable individuals to absolute political sovereignty over the entire state was not a derivation from revelation but a reading into revelation of a prior political project. The fact that Grand Ayatollah al-Khoei, one of the most senior Shia scholars of the 20th century, denounced Khomeini’s formulation as blasphemous is itself evidence that the doctrine departs from the exegetical tradition of Shia jurisprudence: it is eisegesis—the projection of political ideology onto scripture—rather than exegesis constrained by the moral obligations of revelation.
This epistemic reframing has significant consequences for the necropolitical disarticulation thesis. If the Islamic Republic’s governing logic is understood as the product of distorted reason—a secularised ideology of power that mobilises theological rhetoric while subordinating revelation to political ends—then necropolitical disarticulation is not only a response to the state’s killing practices but also the outcome of a deeper epistemic rupture: the recognition, among significant segments of the population, that the state’s claims to divine authorisation are themselves a distortion. The Islamic Republic is, in this sense, structurally comparable to other modern authoritarian ideologies—fascism, Stalinism, ethno-nationalist movements—that mobilise metaphysical or transcendental claims while remaining fundamentally modern political projects. Just as Zionism is analytically distinct from Judaism, the Ku Klux Klan from Christianity, or Khomeinism from Islam, the governing ideology of the Islamic Republic is not Islamic in any substantive theological sense but a product of secular modernity’s capacity to instrumentalise religion. Making this distinction carefully and explicitly strengthens the necropolitical disarticulation thesis and prevents the analysis from inadvertently conflating necropolitical governance with religion as such.
This theological-epistemic dimension also clarifies the IRGC’s transnational role. As Al-Kassimi (2022) demonstrates, distorted reason permits the mobilisation of scripture in service of necropolitical ends that extend beyond the territorial state. The IRGC’s reliance on proxy formations—including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shia militias in Iraq, and Assad’s forces in Syria—illustrates how the necropolitical logic enabled by eisegesis is externalised and exported across borders. The documented massacres in Syria and Lebanon, as well as transnational acts of violence targeting opposition figures in the Gulf region and beyond, do not reflect sound revelation bound by moral restraint; they demonstrate the tribalisation of scripture through eisegesis, transforming theological claims into a secular ideology of regional power. This analytical clarification strengthens the comparative dimension of the article without requiring equal analytical depth in each case: the point is not that Syria or Lebanon can be explained through the same framework in full detail, but that the IRGC’s transnational violence is legible as the external actualisation of the same distorted-reason logic that produces domestic necropolitical governance. This popular repudiation of the IRGC’s regional logic is also enacted at the discursive level: the widely circulated slogan ‘Na Ghazzeh, na Lobnan, janam fadaye Iran’—‘Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran’—constitutes a grassroots rejection of that transnational necropolitical extension, as Ashouri Talooki’s (2026) corpus analysis of WLF protest slogans documents. This epistemic layer thereby completes the causal architecture of the framework: necropolitical governance (Mbembe, 2003, 2019; Puar, 2017), enabled by theological-epistemic distortion (Al-Kassimi, 2022), generates the affective rupture and normative inversion that the following section formalises as necropolitical disarticulation.
Necropolitical disarticulation: Affective infrastructure and conceptual formalisation
Necropolitical disarticulation is not only a political and epistemic process but is also experienced and transmitted through affect. Ahmed (2004) theorised emotions not as private states but as cultural practices that circulate between bodies and social formations, accruing directional force through repetition. Her concept of sticky emotions is particularly relevant: under necropolitical governance, the state and its symbols become durably loaded with grief, rage, and disgust that are transmissible across diasporic networks and resistant to state propaganda. Schatz and Lavine (2007) demonstrated that national symbolism operates through two registers: a symbolic register of identity and belonging, and an instrumental register of appraisal of whether institutions deliver protection and dignity. Necropolitical governance corrupts both simultaneously, producing withdrawal from state-claimed symbols as populations seek national identification in forms the state cannot appropriate. Corpus analysis of WLF protest slogans confirms that this affective transmission is not merely psychological but discursively performed: the call-and-response structures, triadic rhythms, and collective oral enactments documented in Ashouri Talooki (2026) are the material form through which Ahmed’s (2004) sticky emotions of grief, rage, and disgust are amplified and collectively transmitted across protest networks, providing empirical evidence at the level of linguistic practice for the affective mechanism theorised here.
Berlant (2011) added the temporal dimension: each cycle of political investment in reform the state cannot structurally deliver produces an affective rupture rendering continued emotional investment psychologically untenable. Bayat (2017) documented the collective consequence, showing how populations disengage from state-centred imaginaries towards dispersed non-movements operating against state-sanctioned frameworks. Together, Berlant (2011) and Bayat (2017) confirm that disarticulation is cumulative rather than sudden, and that the affective rupture it produces is the experiential infrastructure through which the causal sequence formalised below is lived, transmitted, and collectively enacted.
This article proposes necropolitical disarticulation as a distinct analytical concept naming the following causal sequence: when a state exercises sustained necropolitical and debilitating governance, including through gendered techniques of bodily control (Mbembe, 2003, 2019; Puar, 2017); this governance is enabled by a theological-epistemic distortion—the replacement of exegetical reason bound by revelation with eisegetical reason that subordinates revelation to political ideology, producing a form of sovereignty insulated from moral accountability (Al-Kassimi, 2022); this governance destroys the affective and symbolic infrastructure of state–nation identification, generating sticky emotions of grief, rage, and disgust that adhere to the state as an institution and render continued identification psychologically untenable (Ahmed, 2004; Berlant, 2011; Schatz and Lavine, 2007); and alternative national imaginaries are available through diasporic and transnational networks (Anderson, 1983; Fukurai, 2019; Lee, 2020)—the result is the active disarticulation of national identification from the state.
The legitimacy dimension of this framework requires careful theoretical grounding. Weber (1978) established that legitimacy depends on the subjective belief of the governed; necropolitical disarticulation names the process by which that belief is not merely withdrawn but inverted. Yet legitimacy is not a simple binary threshold. The Islamic Republic has always governed a population that partially accepted its authority on different grounds—religious obligation, nationalist identification, clientelism—and the erosion of legitimacy has proceeded unevenly across class, generation, ethnicity, and geography. This article makes sociological and theoretical claims about structural political subjectivity at a collective level rather than claims about uniform individual dispositions, and it acknowledges that the process of disarticulation is uneven and contested rather than total.
Classical nationalism theory, from Gellner (1983) to Linz and Stepan (1996), assumes national attachment and state loyalty move in the same direction. Necropolitical disarticulation names the conditions under which this assumption breaks down: loyalty to the nation is expressed through opposition to the state, and welcoming external pressure on its coercive apparatus is reframed as patriotic fidelity rather than treason. This inversion represents a structural transformation in political subjectivity with direct implications for political sociology, international relations, and political psychology (Bayat, 2017; Linz and Stepan, 1996; Weber, 1978).
Analysis
The structural origins of disarticulation: 1979 and the founding contradiction
To understand why necropolitical disarticulation in Iran has reached its present intensity, it is necessary to begin not with the Woman–Life–Freedom (WLF) uprising of 2022 but with the founding contradiction of the Islamic Republic itself. The 1979 revolution drew on a broad coalition of secular nationalists, leftists, women’s organisations, and religious constituencies united by opposition to the Pahlavi monarchy and its perceived subordination to foreign interests (Abrahamian, 1982). The revolutionary moment was, in Gellner’s (1983) terms, a demand for national congruence: a political order that would finally align the state with the people it claimed to represent. What emerged instead was the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, which transferred sovereign authority not to the people but to the senior clergy, substituting theocratic legitimacy for popular sovereignty (Parchami, 2024).
As the preceding theoretical discussion establishes, this substitution is more precisely characterised as an epistemic distortion: the transformation of religious authority from exegetical practice constrained by revelation into eisegetical ideology that subordinates revelation to political power (Al-Kassimi, 2022). Khomeini’s expansion of Velayat-e Faqih from limited guardianship over vulnerable individuals to absolute state sovereignty had no foundation in the mainstream Shia jurisprudential tradition—a point confirmed by Grand Ayatollah al-Khoei’s denunciation of the doctrine as blasphemous. The product of distorted reason in Al-Kassimi’s (2022) terms, this was a political project clothed in theological language that claimed divine authorisation precisely by eliminating the exegetical constraints that would have placed moral limits on sovereign power. Necropolitical governance was therefore not an accidental outcome of the Islamic Republic’s founding but a structural consequence of its epistemic foundation: a sovereignty insulated from theological accountability by the very distortion of reason that constituted it.
This substitution planted the foundational seed of state–nation disarticulation at the moment of the republic’s birth: a state brought into existence by a popular revolution immediately reorganised itself around a principle of sovereignty that structurally excluded popular will. Abrahamian (1982) documented how this exclusion was not merely ideological but organisational. Weber (1978) established that legitimacy depends on the subjective belief of the governed in the validity of the authority claiming their obedience; from the outset, the Islamic Republic governed a population whose revolutionary expectations it had appropriated but whose substantive political claims it had simultaneously foreclosed. Anderson’s (1983) framework clarifies what was at stake: the Islamic Republic attempted to re-imagine the nation itself, substituting a religiously defined community of Shia believers for the broader secular imagined community that had driven the revolutionary coalition.
The early necropolitical consolidation of this founding distortion was immediate and documented. Saeidi and Osmanzadeh (2025) have analysed Khomeini’s 1979 fatwa against Kurdish separatists—in which he labelled Kurdish nationalists as kafir (infidels) and authorised military force against them—as an instance of religious necropolitics: the sovereign’s use of eisegetical classification to position an entire population as lives that can be taken without juridical consequence. The massacres at Qarna and QaraGol in Rojhelat in September 1979, where Revolutionary Guard forces killed Kurdish civilians who invoked the Quran in the hope of protection, are paradigmatic of this formation: the Quran was literally torn from suppliants’ hands and discarded before the killings proceeded, demonstrating that what was at work was not revelation but its instrumentalisation. These events confirm that necropolitical governance in the Islamic Republic was operational from its founding weeks, applying not only to the immediate political left but to ethnic and religious minorities whose existence complicated the state’s eisegetical claim to represent a unified Islamic nation.
The reformist interlude and the exhaustion of cruel optimism: 1997 to 2009
The election of Mohammad Khatami in 1997 represented the most significant attempt within the Islamic Republic’s own institutional framework to close the gap between state and nation through liberalisation, civil society development, and a more pluralist interpretation of the republic’s democratic as distinct from its theocratic commitments. For a significant segment of the Iranian population, the reformist moment generated precisely the kind of political attachment Berlant (2011) theorised as cruel optimism: an intense investment in an object whose structural constraints made it incapable of delivering the transformation it promised. Arjomand (2002) demonstrated that the reformist project was structurally dismantled from within by the Guardian Council, the judiciary, and the supreme leadership, which disqualified reformist candidates, shut down newspapers, and imprisoned journalists and intellectuals. Arjomand (2002) argued that this dismantling exposed a fundamental constitutional contradiction within the Islamic Republic between its theocratic and republican poles, a contradiction the system resolved consistently in favour of theocratic authority whenever the two came into direct conflict.
The gendered dimension of this failure is analytically significant. Hoodfar and Sadr (2010) documented how Iranian women’s movements during and after the reform era developed sophisticated legal and civic strategies to press for equality within the existing constitutional framework, only to encounter systematic institutional blockage demonstrating the state’s structural incapacity to accommodate gender justice within its theocratic foundations. The One Million Signatures Campaign, analysed by Hoodfar and Sadr (2010) as a paradigmatic case, represented an attempt to work through the state’s own legal mechanisms that was met with arrests, harassment, and criminalisation of its organisers. From the perspective of the theological-epistemic framework elaborated above, this pattern is predictable: a sovereignty constituted by distorted reason that subordinates revelation to political ideology cannot accommodate demands for gender justice precisely because such demands invoke a moral horizon—the equal dignity of persons—that sound reason would recognise but that eisegetical sovereignty must suppress in order to maintain its claim to divine authorisation.
The contested presidential election of June 2009 and the emergence of the Green Movement compressed this disengagement into a sharper political crisis. Reisinezhad (2015) analysed the Green Movement as a case of fragmented collective action in which dispersed protest networks constructed a collective identity explicitly opposed to the ruling power and grounded in a civic rather than theocratic imagining of the nation. The movement’s violent suppression constituted in Mbembe’s (2003) terms an unambiguous assertion of necropolitical sovereignty directed explicitly at the population that had publicly contested the state’s authority. For many Iranians, the 2009 crackdown was the point at which the cruel optimism of reformism was affectively exhausted and at which Ahmed’s (2004) sticky emotions of grief, rage, and humiliation began adhering not to specific leaders or policies but to the state as an institution.
Escalation and structural entrenchment: The Aban killings of 2019
The November 2019 protests marked a qualitative escalation in the necropolitical governance of the Islamic Republic and a correspondingly deeper phase of state–nation disarticulation. What began as an economic protest against an overnight tripling of fuel prices rapidly transformed into a nationwide confrontation across more than 100 cities (Parchami, 2024). The state’s response included a near-total internet blackout and a killing campaign whose scale Amnesty International (2020) documented in detail, recording the confirmed deaths of at least 321 men, women, and children by security forces. The deliberate communication blackout was itself a necropolitical technique in Puar’s (2017) extended sense: it sought not merely to conceal the killings but to incapacitate the population’s ability to bear collective witness, to mourn collectively, and to organise collective response.
Parchami (2024) argued that the Aban events exposed a fundamental transformation in the relationship between the state and its population: the protests were no longer oriented towards reform, recognition, or incremental change but towards a systemic rejection of the state’s authority. This transformation corresponds precisely to the theoretical sequence proposed here. Berlant’s (2011) cruel optimism had been exhausted through the reformist cycle; Bayat’s (2017) non-movements had demonstrated the limits of informal everyday resistance; and under the pressure of Mbembe’s (2003) necropolitical escalation, a structurally significant portion of the population had ceased to invest in any version of the state as a potential vehicle for the nation’s interests.
Woman–Life–Freedom: Disarticulation as collective practice
The WLF uprising that erupted in September 2022 following the killing of Zhina Amini in morality police custody represented not the beginning of state–nation disarticulation in Iran but its full public articulation as a collective political practice. Assa (2023), in a peer-reviewed analysis published in Atlantis, theorised the uprising as a feminist strike organising cross-sectoral withdrawals from the structures of exploitation and assault that constitute everyday life under theocratic gender governance, in which women’s bodies had become the primary site of the state’s disciplinary and necropolitical authority. The movement’s Kurdish slogan, ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadî’ (Woman, Life, Freedom), did not address the state with demands for reform; it asserted an alternative political imaginary organised around life, embodied freedom, and gender justice that was structurally incompatible with the Islamic Republic’s foundational claim to govern through divinely mandated clerical authority (Assa, 2023).
The WLF uprising is legible, in the theological-epistemic framework advanced here, as a popular rejection not only of the state’s violence but of its epistemic foundation. The compulsory veiling regime, morality policing apparatus, and criminalisation of women’s bodily autonomy are the most publicly visible instruments of the eisegetical sovereignty theorised above: they are the surface on which distorted reason writes its authority onto female corporeality, claiming divine sanction for the regulation of women’s bodies. The chant ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadî’ is therefore not merely a feminist slogan but an implicit counter-epistemology: it asserts the priority of life, freedom, and women’s embodied dignity over the state’s claim to govern in the name of an ideologised scripture. This reading extends and deepens Assa’s (2023) analysis by situating the WLF movement’s political imaginary within Al-Kassimi’s (2022) theological-epistemic critique. Discourse-analytic evidence corroborates this reading: Ashouri Talooki’s (2026) political discourse analysis of the WLF slogan corpus demonstrates that the triadic structure of Zan, Zendegi, Azadi performs what van Dijk (1997) identifies as delegitimisation through categorisation—stripping sovereign authority of its theological register by recoding leadership within secular political categories, which constitutes the popular discursive enactment of the eisegetical rupture theorised here.
Najmabadi (2005), in a peer-reviewed study of gender, sexuality, and national identity in Iranian modernity, demonstrated that the regulation of women’s bodies has historically functioned in Iran as a primary technology of national and political boundary-making, through which competing projects of modernisation, nationalism, and theocratic governance have inscribed their authority onto female corporeality. Read alongside Puar (2017) and Assa (2023), Najmabadi’s (2005) analysis confirms that the killing of Zhina Amini was not an aberration but the lethal endpoint of a governing logic in operation since 1979.
Sadri and Benjamin (2025) analysed the WLF movement as having decisively ended the regime’s ideological domination of the public sphere, which maps directly onto the theoretical concept proposed here as the moment at which the population’s active counter-imagining of the nation crossed a threshold from private dissent into publicly enacted collective identity. Fukurai’s (2019) framework of transnational nationhood is essential for understanding how this domestic disarticulation was simultaneously a diasporic phenomenon. Mobasher (2025) demonstrated that the diaspora functioned as a cultural carrier group, echoing collective trauma transnationally and actively translating domestic protest into international political pressure. McAuliffe (2008) documented how diasporic communities reproduce and renegotiate homeland political identities through networks shaped by class, generation, and host country context. The WLF movement reorganised these heterogeneous networks around a shared affective and political axis, the rejection of the Islamic Republic as the legitimate representative of Iran, confirming Lee’s (2020) observation that transnational nationhood strategies produce tangible consequences for loyalty and civic behaviour.
The 2026 massacres and the inversion of patriotism
The events of January 2026 represent the most acute phase of necropolitical disarticulation and the most direct evidence for the normative inversion of patriotism that the concept predicts. The mass unlawful killings carried out primarily on 8 and 9 January 2026, under a nationwide internet shutdown imposed to conceal their scale, constitute the deadliest crackdown against the Iranian population since the 1979 revolution, with death toll estimates ranging from over 3000 by official Iranian government admission to upwards of 5000 as reported by the United Nations Human Rights Council, and considerably higher figures documented by independent human rights organisations (Amnesty International, 2026; Iran Human Rights, 2026; United Nations Human Rights Council, 2026). This scale of killing constitutes, in Mbembe’s (2019) terms, the most unambiguous construction of a death-world within the Islamic Republic’s own territory.
The claim that significant segments of the Iranian population have come to support or endorse external pressure against the state, up to and including military force, rests on a convergent documentary record that, while not equivalent to a nationally representative probability sample under non-authoritarian conditions, constitutes the most methodologically rigorous data available for a population under systematic informational constraint. GAMAAN’s September 2025 nationwide online survey, conducted via the Psiphon VPN network with 30,372 respondents inside Iran and weighted to represent the literate adult population at the 95% credibility level, found that 18% of respondents identified ‘foreign pressure and intervention’ as the most effective method for bringing about political change in the country, the second-ranked response after civil protests (31%), and higher than electoral participation (14%) or violent struggle (6%; Maleki, 2025). Crucially, this figure must be read in the context of political polarisation: among the 41% of the population who identify as regime-change supporters or structural-transition supporters, support for external pressure is substantially higher. GAMAAN’s December 2022 survey of 158,000 respondents, the largest survey of Iranian attitudes on record, conducted in the immediate aftermath of the Woman–Life–Freedom uprising, found that 73% of respondents inside Iran agreed that Western governments should ‘seriously pressure’ the Islamic Republic to defend protesters’ rights, and that 70% agreed with specific interventionist measures including IRGC proscription, expulsion of ambassadors, and seizure of state assets (Maleki and Tamimi Arab, 2023). These figures establish that support for external pressure, at minimum, constitutes a numerically substantial minority and, under specific political conditions, a majority position within the domestic population. Among the diaspora, support is higher and more explicitly operationalised: a March 2026 PAAIA/SurveyUSA survey (n = 450 Iranian Americans, ±4.7%) found that 58% supported U.S.–Israeli airstrikes on targets in Iran and that 60% identified regime change as the top U.S. policy objective (PAAIA, 2026). The divergence between domestic and diaspora support levels is not an anomaly to be explained away but is itself consistent with the necropolitical disarticulation argument: those most directly subject to the risk of physical retaliation express more measured support for measures whose consequences they would bear, while those operating from the relative safety of diasporic distance express the disarticulated political will more fully. Countervailing data must also be acknowledged: the NIAC/YouGov May–June 2025 survey (n = 585 Iranian Americans) found that 53% of Iranian Americans opposed U.S. military action (NIAC, 2025), and GAMAAN’s own data show that civil protest remains the preferred mechanism of change even among opponents of the regime. The claim advanced here is accordingly bounded: not that a majority of Iranians support foreign military intervention in any simple or uniform sense, but that necropolitical disarticulation has produced a documented, quantitatively evidenced population, substantial in scale and unprecedented in the Islamic Republic’s history, that has severed the normative equation between loyalty to the nation and loyalty to the state to the point of endorsing or welcoming the state’s external diminishment.
Classical nationalism theory, from Weber (1978) to Linz and Stepan (1996), would predict that even populations deeply hostile to their government would mobilise against external military force as a matter of national solidarity. The concept of necropolitical disarticulation explains why this prediction fails in the Iranian case. By January 2026, the process of affective and political decoupling accumulating since 1979 had progressed to the point where a significant portion of the population no longer experienced the Islamic Republic as continuous with or representative of the Iranian nation. The state had been so thoroughly recoded, in Ahmed’s (2004) terms, as a sticky object of grief, rage, and disgust that supporting military strikes against its coercive infrastructure could be reframed not as collaboration with foreign enemies but as an act of fidelity towards the nation the state was in the process of destroying.
Comparative dimensions: Syria, Belarus, and the limits of analogy
The comparative cases in this study are deployed as analytical controls rather than parallel case studies. Their purpose is to isolate which conditions are necessary rather than merely correlated with necropolitical disarticulation, not to provide equal-depth historical accounts of Syria or Belarus. Future research should develop each case more fully in its own terms.
The Syrian case offers the most structurally proximate parallel. Heydemann (2013) documented how the Syrian opposition systematically articulated a distinction between ‘Syria’ as a nation of people and ‘the Assad regime’ as a state apparatus that had declared war on its own population, producing precisely the kind of state–nation disarticulation the present framework theorises. The Syrian case differs from the Iranian one in important respects: Syria’s state collapsed into fragmented armed conflict, and the national imaginary was itself fragmented along ethnic, sectarian, and regional lines in ways that complicate the clear state–nation binary the Iranian case presents more cleanly. Iran’s pre-Islamic Republic national identity is considerably more consolidated—itself a product, as Zia-Ebrahimi (2016) and Vaziri (1993) demonstrate, of modern nation-building projects—which makes the disarticulation from the state more legible as a unified social phenomenon.
The Belarusian case after the fraudulent election of 2020 offers a comparison in a different register. Marples (2021) analysed the Belarusian opposition’s systematic reclamation of the historical white-red-white flag as an alternative national symbol, mirroring Ahmed’s (2004) account of withdrawal from contaminated state symbols and the search for alternative national identification the state cannot appropriate. Marples (2021) further noted that the Belarusian opposition constructed a parallel national public sphere, a network of civic, cultural, and communicative practices operating as if the state did not exist as a legitimate national representative—a formulation that directly anticipates the concept of counter-stateness developed below. The absence of the military intervention dimension in Belarus confirms that necropolitical disarticulation as a political and affective process can proceed independently of the external force question, which means the latter is better understood as a downstream behavioural consequence of disarticulation rather than its cause or defining feature.
The analytical synthesis: Counter-stateness and political subjectivity
What the preceding analysis demonstrates is that necropolitical disarticulation is neither a spontaneous popular sentiment nor a product of foreign manipulation but the structured outcome of a long causal sequence operating simultaneously at the political, social, affective, and epistemic levels. Politically, the sequence runs from the founding substitution of theocratic for popular sovereignty (Abrahamian, 1982; Parchami, 2024), instantiated through an eisegetical transformation of religious authority that eliminated the moral constraints revelation would otherwise impose on sovereign power (Al-Kassimi, 2022), through the systematic suppression of reformism (Arjomand, 2002; Hoodfar and Sadr, 2010) to the escalating deployment of necropolitical and debilitating force against the population (Mbembe, 2003, 2019; Puar, 2017; Saeidi and Osmanzadeh, 2025). Socially, it runs from the cross-class and cross-ethnic coalitions of 1979 through the progressive narrowing of the state’s imagined national community to the transnational counter-imagining of the nation through diasporic and protest networks (Anderson, 1983; Fukurai, 2019; McAuliffe, 2008). Affectively, it runs from the cruel optimism of reformism through the accumulation of sticky emotions of grief, rage, and disgust attached to state symbols to the affective rupture in which continued identification with the state becomes psychologically untenable (Ahmed, 2004; Berlant, 2011; Schatz and Lavine, 2007).
The resulting transformation in political subjectivity demands a second-order concept beyond disarticulation itself. This article proposes counter-stateness to name the positive political subjectivity that emerges from completed necropolitical disarticulation: not simply the absence of identification with the state but the active construction of a national political identity organised explicitly around the nation as against the state. Counter-stateness is distinct from mere opposition or dissent, both of which remain oriented towards the state as a referent and implicitly accept its claim to represent the national community even while contesting its specific actions or leadership. Counter-stateness, by contrast, withdraws that acceptance entirely, constructing an alternative national political subject—the people, the martyrs, the diaspora network, the protest community—that claims national representativeness independently of and in competition with the state. At the discursive level, the content of this alternative national political subjectivity is not abstract: Ashouri Talooki’s (2026) analysis of WLF slogans identifies what can be termed ‘inclusive nationalism’—national identity constructed through rather than against ethnic and linguistic diversity, as evidenced by the movement’s simultaneous circulation of Persian and Kurdish variants of its core slogan—as the specific discursive form through which counter-stateness is enacted in the Iranian case.
Linz and Stepan (1996) established that stateness is the prior condition of all other political dynamics in authoritarian states; when stateness is sufficiently contested, the normal coordinates of political behaviour are fundamentally altered. The Iranian case demonstrates that necropolitical governance, sustained over sufficient time and intensity, does not merely contest stateness but actively produces counter-stateness: a political subjectivity in which the population’s primary identification is with the nation against the state rather than with the nation through the state. Counter-stateness is not the absence of political loyalty but its structural inversion, and it is this inversion—more than any specific event or leadership decision—that constitutes the phenomenon this study set out to explain.
Conclusion
This article has argued that the phenomenon of Iranian citizens and diasporic populations actively welcoming the external diminishment of their own state is neither a product of foreign manipulation nor a symptom of political irrationality. It is, rather, the structured and predictable outcome of a long causal sequence that this article has theorised as necropolitical disarticulation: the process by which sustained necropolitical governance progressively severs the affective and political bonds linking national identification to the state, until the population comes to experience the state not as the guardian of the nation but as its primary existential threat.
The analysis traced this sequence across more than four decades, from the founding substitution of theocratic for popular sovereignty in 1979 through the systematic suppression of reformism documented by Arjomand (2002) and Hoodfar and Sadr (2010), the mass killings of 2009 and 2019, the counter-national imagining of the Woman–Life–Freedom uprising theorised through Assa (2023) and Najmabadi (2005), and the intensified necropolitical violence of January 2026. The article has extended Mbembe’s framework by engaging Al-Kassimi’s (2022) theological critique of necropolitics—demonstrating, as the theoretical section elaborates, that the Islamic Republic’s governing logic is enabled not by revelation but by its distortion through eisegesis and juridical over-reach—and by incorporating Puar’s (2017) debilitation framework to centre gender as a constitutive axis of necropolitical governance. This extension allows the study to show that necropolitical disarticulation in the Iranian case is not only a response to physical killing and debilitation but also to the epistemic rupture produced by a state whose claims to divine authorisation are experienced as fraudulent by the very population in whose name they are made.
The article makes four contributions to existing scholarship. It first synthesises necropolitics and state–nation decoupling theory into a single causal framework and extends that framework through the theological-epistemic dimension provided by Al-Kassimi (2022; see also Al-Kassimi (2025) for the framework’s application to the Arab-Israeli conflict, which confirms its cross-contextual reach): by demonstrating that the distinction between sound reason and distorted reason, and between exegesis and eisegesis, is analytically necessary for theorising necropolitical sovereignty in states that govern through a theological idiom, the article moves beyond Mbembe’s largely secular account of sovereign violence to offer a conceptually distinctive intervention with implications for political theology and international political theory wherever necropolitical governance claims religious authorisation. It centres gender as a constitutive rather than supplementary axis of necropolitical governance, drawing on Puar (2017), Najmabadi (2005), Mohammadpour and Javaheri (2025), and Saeidi and Osmanzadeh (2025). It identifies and names the normative inversion of patriotism as a theoretically distinct outcome of long-term necropolitical governance. And it proposes counter-stateness as a second-order concept naming the positive political subjectivity that emerges from completed disarticulation.
The comparative cases of Syria and Belarus confirm that necropolitical disarticulation is not specific to the Iranian context but emerges wherever the three conditions of sustained necropolitical governance, affective rupture, and available alternative national imaginaries converge. Future research should test the concept’s limits by attending to cases where these conditions are partly present but disarticulation or counter-stateness does not follow. North Korea is the most instructive negative case: its governing apparatus is unambiguously necropolitical in Mbembe’s (2019) terms, and its population is subjected to chronic debilitation of the kind Puar (2017) theorised, yet counter-stateness on the scale observed in Iran has not emerged. The most plausible explanation is the absence of the third condition: North Korea’s extreme information control and systematic suppression of diasporic connectivity have prevented the development of alternative national imaginaries (Lankov, 2013). For international political theory, this means that judgements about intervention and non-intervention cannot be read off formal sovereignty alone; they must also account for the internal processes of necropolitical disarticulation and the availability of transnational imaginaries that make counter-stateness, and the reframing of external force as patriotic, possible.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.