Imagine a place where you are unhappy with the system that confines you and denies you many of your basic needs, yet you remain afraid to resist. Imagine a political class that you no longer regard as legitimate within your social microcosm, and still you fear challenging it. And finally, imagine an army that, though supposedly national, serves private interests.

One might assume such a place exists only in the imagination of enduring totalitarian regimes whose populations have never known liberalism, free speech, or free will. Yet this is also a place that once experienced liberalism and democracy, and between 1910 and 1925 was even regarded as a constitutional monarchy, later becoming an important ally of the United States in a turbulent region caught between Arab nationalism and Islamism, between socialism and conservatism.

If you have not guessed already, this place was Iran, once a centuries-old dynastic empire that became constitutional in 1906, authoritarian in 1925, pseudo-democratic again in 1941, pseudo-authoritarian in 1949, authoritarian in 1953, and then theocratic in 1979.

All of these stages transformed the Iranian people and society, leading them to wish, dream, and expect repeated changes in life; they made the social contract with the political class increasingly arbitrary, and most importantly of all, they made the population more politically active than ever.

It reacted against the Qajar dynasty and the capitulations that effectively sold the state to British and Russian interests, in favor of a more balanced distribution of power and a monarch who was meant to reign, not rule. It welcomed Reza Khan in the 1920s, only to denounce his excesses two decades later. It accepted his son as the product of new British-Russian-American geopolitical calculations for the region at the start of the Second World War, only to force his abdication 35 years later following an intellectual revolution led primarily by Ali Shariati and Imam Ruhollah Khomeini, which ended with the establishment of today’s Islamic Republic of Iran.

And after four decades, Iranians are active once again in the perpetual renegotiation of the social contract that defines the terms of life in society: how many liberties politics may allow in exchange for how many political excesses civil society is willing to tolerate.

But today, that renegotiation is being conducted on the terms of the former, and not even by politics as a whole, but only by those determined to preserve the theocratic regime and defend it to the very end. Civil society, after decades of impunity in this renegotiation, may now find it difficult, even dangerously so, to voice the fundamental truth that has endured since the country was still called Persia: that the people have power.

At the root of this lack of impunity in acting naturally and courageously reminding politicians that civil society must be heard lies the security establishment, and not the army, but the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). In the past, the potential for civic participation or engagement was always tied to whether the army might react, or refrain from reacting.

During the 2011 Arab Spring, people could rise with relative impunity against Mubarak in Egypt and Ben Ali in Tunisia because the army refused to support those regimes. Even in Iran, during the turbulent years of 1978-1979, the Iranian people were able to act with impunity against the excesses of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi because the army officially declared neutrality.

But whereas the Iranian army was national and therefore expected to serve the Iranian state and nationhood, the IRGC is far more ideological and thus more loyal to the regime than to the nation. The brutality of the IRGC against protesters in recent years serves not a national interest, but a purely existential one, which causes its methods of maintaining order to far exceed the ordinary practices of other security establishments.

The IRGC is a product of the Islamic Revolution, and its very existence depends on preserving this revolutionary theocratic order. While an ordinary national army could survive a transition of regime, the IRGC cannot exist outside the current political order, which makes any uprising in Iran against the regime an exponentially greater threat to the IRGC itself.

The IRGC is far more invested in ideologically serving the regime than in pragmatically serving the national interests of the republic. In the Middle East in particular, the Revolutionary Guards are less reluctant to engage in military adventurism for Iran’s geopolitical interests than they are eager to spread revolutionary ideology further into Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

This condition within the security establishment of the Islamic Republic is even more significant today, during the protests that swept Iran following the death of the Kurdish Iranian Mahsa Amini as a result of the brutality of the morality police, who arrested her for not wearing the hijab according to government standards, because unlike the protests of 2009, 2017, and 2019, which were more inclined toward reform, the activism of 2022 was directed at the regime itself, not toward a renegotiation of the social contract, but rather toward a complete break with the past 43 years.

From the perspective of the IRGC, such a scenario cannot be tolerated. As a sacred creation of the theocratic regime, the Revolutionary Guards see any attack on their creator as an attack on the entire order of creation and on themselves.

The further the protests move away from demands for reform and toward exposing the contradictions and sins of the regime, the more the IRGC’s response is likely to remain what it has already been: frightening brutality.