Event

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), a revolutionary militia founded in the early days after the 1979 revolution in Iran, underwent bureaucratization soon after the Iran-Iraq war started in 1980, eventually becoming the dominant and influential politico-military force that it is in today’s Iran. Join us as two scholars -- Annie Tracy Samuel and Maryam Alemzadeh -- share their latest research into the IRGC.

Tracy Samuel will discuss her recent book, The Unfinished History of the Iran-Iraq War: Faith, Firepower, and Iran's Revolutionary Guards (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which presents an innovative and compelling history of the IRGC and, by using the Iran-Iraq War as a focal point, analyzes the links between war and revolution. She will provide an internal view of the IRGC by examining how the Revolutionary Guards have recorded and assessed the history of the war in the massive volume of Persian language publications produced by the organization's top members and units.

Alemzadeh will share work in progress, looking at the early history of the IRGC from the point of view of individual actors—founders, commanders, politicians, volunteers, young officers, and passionate critics—to present a new understanding of the internal dynamics of the IRGC. She argues that the IRGC’s self-proclaimed Islamic-revolutionary approach to domestic and international affairs is not just an ideological stance, but a deep-seated institutional practice that is rooted in everyday interactions of its founders, leaders, members, and volunteers of the early days.

The conversation will be moderated by John Ghazvinian, executive director of the Middle East Center.