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IRAN Captive Society: The Basij Militia and Social Control, by Saeid Golkar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 289 pages. $60.
Much has been written about revolutionary Iran. However, precious little scholarly work has been done on the Islamic Republic's security services. This is striking considering how important security organizations have been to the power structure of Iran's theocratic system. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its Basij paramilitary division are pillars of Iran's regime and the enforcers of the Supreme Leader's authority. When the Basij received widespread condemnation for its role in the violent suppression of popular demonstrations that followed the contested 2009 reelection of Mahmud Ahmadinejad, for a brief moment, foreign governments (including the United States) and international media outlets cared about the Basij. The attention cast a transitory light on the Islamist militia and its all-volunteer foot soldiers, but it did not inspire much additional scholarly consideration.
Saeid Golkar should therefore be commended for producing the first extensive monograph on the Basij. As Golkar notes in his preface, "Conducting research in this field is very difficult" (p. xiii). That can assuredly be said of numerous fields of inquiry, but it is nonetheless true in the study of Iran's security services. Such research often rankles political sensibilities in both Iran and the United States. The American academy has not shown itself to be particularly rewarding to those who write on Islamist groups that engage in political violence, especially if the writing is critical of those groups This can be discouraging to doctoral students who are often (and understandably) steered toward topics more favorable to hiring committees...