By: Kamil Alboshoka
Understanding the Iranian regime’s internal architecture is essential for assessing its resilience and identifying conditions that could lead to its weakening or collapse. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has maintained a hybrid system combining religious authority, revolutionary institutions and republican mechanisms. Although the regime appears conventional, real power is concentrated in a layered system focused on ideological control and security. This structure has enabled the regime to survive war, sanctions, and internal unrest. However, the same features that have ensured its longevity also create structural vulnerabilities. Effective strategies to pressure or undermine the system must target these institutional foundations rather than superficial political changes.
The Ideological Core: Wilayat-e Faqih
The doctrine of Wilayat-e Faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist), developed by Khomeini and institutionalised after the revolution, is central to the system. It grants ultimate authority to a senior cleric serving as Supreme Leader. The current Supreme Leader, Mujtaba Khamenei (whose father, Ali Khamenei, was killed by US forces on 28 February 2026), holds a position that surpasses that of a conventional head of state, serving as both the apex of the constitutional order and the central decision-maker across all strategic domains.
The Supreme Leader holds decisive authority over foreign policy, regional proxy networks, and the appointment of key officials, including the commanders of the Armed Forces and the IRGC, the head of the judiciary, the director of state broadcasting (IRIB), and senior roles in the Guardian Council and the Assembly of Experts. This appointment power embeds loyalist networks throughout military, judicial, media, and supervisory bodies. Unlike presidents in other systems, the Supreme Leader is both the highest political authority and the final arbiter of ideological legitimacy. All institutions operate within boundaries he sets, and the system relies on hierarchical control rather than a balance of power.
The Dual State: Revolutionary Institutions vs Republican Façade
Iran’s political system consists of two parallel structures: a powerful revolutionary core and a republican layer that provides administrative and diplomatic legitimacy.
The Revolutionary Core
Revolutionary institutions were established to preserve the revolution’s ideological goals. They are not accountable to the electorate and operate primarily through loyalty to the Supreme Leader. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is the most powerful of these institutions.
The IRGC, originally created to safeguard the revolution, has evolved into a multi-dimensional power centre encompassing:
- Military forces (including the Basij militia)
- Intelligence networks: an extensive internal and external intelligence system operates within Iran and across its regional sphere of influence, enabling continuous surveillance, counterintelligence, and external operations.
- Economic conglomerates
- Political influence
- Regional operations
The IRGC wields significant influence over key sectors of the Iranian economy, including construction, infrastructure, and energy industries. Its affiliated conglomerates and engineering arms dominate large-scale national projects, especially in strategic infrastructure, including roads, bridges, dams, urban expansion, and port management. This economic presence has enabled the IRGC to develop a financial base independent of the formal state budget.
This economic empire allows the IRGC to circumvent sanctions and provides patronage resources that secure elite loyalty. The IRGC also acts as the main guardian of ideological purity, using military, intelligence, and economic leverage to deter internal dissent and external pressure.
The Republican Layer
Alongside the revolutionary apparatus are institutions that outwardly resemble those of a typical state: a directly elected president (currently Masoud Pezeshkian), a parliament (Majles), and local councils. In practice, these bodies have limited autonomy. Candidates for high office must be vetted and approved by the Guardian Council, a clerical body loyal to the Supreme Leader that can disqualify candidates and veto legislation. Ministers of intelligence and defence are usually drawn from the revolutionary security establishment, while strategic decisions on foreign policy and national security remain under the control of the Supreme Leader’s office and the IRGC. As a result, republican institutions primarily serve administrative and international legitimacy functions rather than enabling genuine political competition.
The Security Apparatus
A defining feature of the Iranian political system is the fusion of ideology, security, and coercion. The regime treats internal dissent as a national security threat rather than a political issue. This approach has led to an extensive security network comprising intelligence services, Revolutionary Guard intelligence units, Basij militias, and state-aligned judicial institutions. Security is underpinned by two interlocking doctrinal frameworks: (1) Twelver Shiite jurisprudence as the religious foundation of political legitimacy, and (2) a Persian-centred state nationalism that prioritises territorial integrity and regime continuity. Together, these ideological strands form the conceptual basis for state authority, blending religious legitimacy with a strong emphasis on national security and centralised control.
Within this security framework, internal opposition is viewed not as political disagreement but as a direct threat to national security and regime stability. This securitised interpretation especially applies to non-Persian ethnic groups, including Ahwazi Arabs, Kurds, Balochis, Azerbaijani Turks, and Turkmen. The state often frames its mobilisation for cultural, linguistic, or political rights as separatist or externally influenced, justifying a security-based response.
In contrast, dissent from Persian populations is typically framed through a religious-ideological lens, using Shi’a doctrinal narratives to delegitimise opposition as deviation from Islamic Republic principles. This differentiated approach shows how the state adapts its ideological strategies in response to the perceived source of internal threat, combining ethno-political securitisation with religious-ideological containment.
As a result, intelligence agencies, internal security forces, and paramilitary structures operate in a highly integrated manner, ensuring continuous coordination in surveillance, enforcement, and counter-opposition activities. This multi-layered security architecture is designed to detect, deter, and dismantle organised dissent early, especially in non-Persian regions. The judicial system, particularly the Revolutionary Courts, functions as an integral component of this security architecture. Rather than operating as an independent arbiter of law, it is closely aligned with the ideological and security priorities of the revolutionary state. These courts are primarily responsible for adjudicating cases involving political dissent, national security charges, and activities deemed to threaten the Islamic Republic.
In practice, the Revolutionary Judiciary imposes severe penalties, including long-term imprisonment and capital punishment, for perceived political or ethnic dissent. This is especially evident in cases involving mobilisation among non-Persian groups, where charges are often framed as separatism, foreign collaboration, or threats to national unity.
Centre–Periphery Relations
Another critical element of Iran’s internal structure is the relationship between the political centre and peripheral regions. Power is highly centralised in Tehran, where political, military, and economic elites are concentrated. Iran is a multi-ethnic state, with non-Persian peoples—Azerbaijani Turks, Ahwazi Arabs, Kurds, Baloch, and Turkmen—likely comprising over 60% of the population. Non-Persian regions often experience economic marginalisation and heavy security presence. These regions are governed primarily through security management rather than political integration. The centre–periphery dynamic, therefore, represents a latent structural tension within the state.
A significant proportion of Iran’s strategic natural resources is based in non-Persian regions. For example, 80–90% of hydrocarbon output comes from the Ahwaz region, which also holds significant agricultural and water resources. However, resource revenues are disproportionately redirected to Persian heartlands and regime priorities. This redistribution, combined with heavy security presence and restricted cultural and linguistic rights, has deepened local grievances.
In contrast, many of Iran’s Persian regions, such as Yazd, Kerman, and parts of Khorasan, have arid or semi-arid geography and limited natural resources. Despite this, state investment has prioritised infrastructure, urban expansion, and industrial projects in these central areas. This has created a long-term structural imbalance, with wealth from Ahwaz and other non-Persian regions disproportionately redirected to the political and administrative centre. The centre and non-Persian regions can be understood as a form of structurally embedded extraction, where resource flows are oriented towards sustaining the political and strategic priorities of the central state rather than fostering balanced regional development.
Economic Foundations of Power
Despite decades of sanctions, the regime has built a resilient economic system based on state-owned enterprises, IRGC-linked conglomerates, religious foundations (bonyads), and informal networks. These entities control significant resources with little transparency, fund state operations, and distribute patronage to loyal elites. Transnational channels, especially through aligned political and paramilitary groups in Iraq, provide additional liquidity, procurement routes, and sanctions-bypass mechanisms. Iran’s support for regional allies serves both strategic and economic purposes, creating diversified pathways that reduce reliance on formal international finance.
Following the 2003 intervention in Iraq, several Iran-aligned political and paramilitary organisations with longstanding ties to Iran became embedded in the new Iraqi state system. Groups such as the Badr Organisation and other Iran-linked militias evolved from exile-based formations into influential actors within Iraq’s political, security, and economic institutions. In practical terms, these networks have helped maintain economic channels between Iran and Iraq that operate partially outside formal state-to-state financial mechanisms. This has allowed trade flows, procurement networks, and informal financial transfers to continue, partially mitigating the impact of international sanctions on Iran’s formal economy.
Iraq serves as both a geopolitical buffer and a semi-permeable economic corridor, allowing Iran to maintain access to liquidity, markets, and strategic goods. This network of aligned non-state and hybrid actors creates alternative economic pathways that support Iran’s domestic patronage structures.
Structural Vulnerabilities
The same architecture that has ensured the regime’s durability also contains critical weaknesses:
- Hyper- centralised decision making
Authority concentrated in the Supreme Leader’s office, and a narrow circle of advisers creates bottlenecks and heightens the strategic miscalculation.
- Generational legitimacy crisis
A youthful population born long after the revolution feels diminishing attachment to the founding ideology, as evidenced by the sustained protests following Mahsa Amini’s death.
- Economic pressure
International sanctions have placed long-term strain on Iran’s economy, particularly after the withdrawal of the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. High inflation, unemployment, and currency instability have fuelled public dissatisfaction.
- Institutional fragmentation
Rivalries among clerical networks, conservative factions, and IRGC elements can lead to policy paralysis.
- Ethno-political fragmentation
Another structural vulnerability is Iran’s deep ethno-political fragmentation. Iran is a multi-ethnic state in which non-Persian populations, including Ahwazi Arabs, Kurds, Baloch, Azerbaijani Turks, and Turkmen, constitute a majority and are present across many regions.
In many of these regions, socio-economic marginalisation, limited political representation, and uneven development have led to persistent grievances. Higher poverty rates, lower infrastructure investment, and restricted cultural and linguistic rights reinforce perceptions of structural inequality between the political centre and non-Persian groups.
Consequently, ethno-regional fragmentation is not just a peripheral governance issue but a structural factor affecting Iran’s long-term stability. It interacts with economic pressure, institutional centralisation, and security governance to create multiple internal vulnerabilities.
Strategic Approaches to Undermining the System
Effective pressure must address the system’s integrated nature rather than isolated symptoms. Key approaches include:
Economic isolation – Targeted measures restricting the IRGC’s financial networks and patronage channels can erode elite cohesion.
Institutional isolation – Diplomatic and economic sanctions targeting revolutionary organs, particularly the IRGC, can reduce the regime’s domestic and regional influence.
Information and legitimacy warfare – Greater transparency and uncensored information flows can accelerate the erosion of ideological legitimacy among younger generations.
Peripheral dynamics as a pressure vector – non-Persian regions are zones of governance stress and strategic sensitivity. Coordinated political, economic, media, and, where appropriate, security support for these populations could help them assert greater local control over territory, resources, and borders. Such support, potentially including targeted external assistance, would disrupt Iran’s internal connectivity, limit access to oil and water resources, and constrain the regime’s freedom of action without large-scale foreign ground deployment.
As noted, a key geopolitical dimension of Iran’s internal structure is its reliance on secure, uncontested border management. Non-Persian regions form the state’s primary interface with external geography, including maritime access to the Arabian Gulf and overland connections to Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
Any significant deterioration in centre–periphery relations would directly affect border stability, trade flows, and internal mobility, increasing the strategic sensitivity of these regions within the national security framework. Support for non-Persian peoples in Iran is justified as they are more politically active and potentially more capable of confronting the regime, including through military means.
Thus, supporting these groups facilitates their efforts on the ground against the Iranian regime. Providing support, potentially including military assistance such as US airpower, would allow the United States to help establish control over these territories without deploying ground forces.
In this framework, local populations would control their own territories with US support. Such local control would mean severing Iran’s connectivity with external economic systems, including control over oil, water resources, and border areas. As a result, Iran would become internally contained and economically and strategically isolated within its internal regions. Because the system’s revolutionary and republican layers reinforce each other, pressure must be applied to both simultaneously. Targeting only one while leaving the other intact risks merely vertical restructuring rather than horizontal collapse.
Conclusion
The Iranian regime is a sophisticated hybrid construct that derives its resilience from a dual architecture: a republican façade for international engagement and a revolutionary core that drives ideological militancy, proxy networks, and domestic repression. This duality has allowed the system to survive nearly five decades of external shocks and internal upheaval.
However, the regime’s defining features—hyper-centralisation, economic opacity, and ethno-political fragmentation—have become exploitable structural vulnerabilities, exacerbated by a widening generational legitimacy gap. Within this framework, empowering Iran’s non-Persian populations serves as a strategic lever to establish local territorial control and disrupt internal security cohesion. Such a shift would effectively isolate the central state, severing its ability to project power externally.
Ultimately, coordinated pressure targeting both the revolutionary and republican layers simultaneously is more effective than focusing on either in isolation. This integrated approach offers a pathway to accelerate systemic change while minimising the long-term military and economic costs for international actors.
Kamil Alboshoka is an Ahwazi researcher and international law specialist at the Dialogue Institute for Research and Studies.