Business, Economics & Law

Capitalism in contemporary Iran

Capital accumulation, state formation and geopolitics

by Kayhan Valadbaygi

Description

By situating Iran within the neoliberal global capitalism and resulting geopolitics, this book traces the patterns of capital accumulation and transformations in class and state formation emanating from it. It shows that Iranian neoliberalisation has brought about two capital fractions, namely the internationally-oriented capital fraction and the military-bonyad complex. It substantiates that the co-existence of these competing class fractions with different accumulation strategies has generated hybrid neoliberalism. The book further demonstrates how this new class formation has reorganised the function and operation of state institutions and transformed state ideology. By documenting the ways in which Iranian neoliberalisation has reshaped the subaltern classes and formed Iran's volatile foreign policy, it also provides a novel account of major events and processes in contemporary Iran, such as the post-2017 wave of uprisings, the nuclear programme and international sanctions.

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Reviews

This book traces the patterns of capital accumulation and changes in class and state formation emanating from it in Iran during the global neoliberal era. This analysis proceeds from a relational methodology based on the philosophy of internal relations that problematises the dualism of local/global and national/international. In the first place, this relationality implies that there are inner connections between the nature of contemporary development in Iran, the form of the state, the ongoing socio-political transformations in the society and the geopolitical tensions with the West. At the same time, it stresses that these issues should be explored in terms of their internal relations to the motions and tendencies of neoliberal global capitalism and resulting geopolitics. Accordingly, the book demonstrates that Iranian neoliberalisation as a result of global and local shaping factors has brought about new contested class dynamics that have fundamentally reconstructed the Iranian ruling class and aggressively shaped/reshaped the working class and the poor. It also analyses how the same process has generated a fresh, pivotal impetus that has transformed the state institutions and directly contributed to Iran's volatile foreign policy, particularly opposing approaches regarding the nuclear programme, relations with the global centres of power (the United States, the European Union, China and Russia) and regional policy. This centrality to class analysis and emphasis on framing Iran inside global class politics and economic processes makes the book an original and transformative contribution to the critical research on the political economy of Iran.

Author Biography

Kayhan Valadbaygi is a Lecturer in International Relations of the Middle East in the Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) at Leiden University

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Bibliographic Information

  • Publisher Manchester University Press
  • Publication Date January 2024
  • Orginal LanguageEnglish
  • ISBN/Identifier 9781526161789 / 1526161788
  • Publication Country or regionUnited Kingdom
  • FormatPrint PDF
  • Pages272
  • ReadershipCollege/higher education; Professional and scholarly
  • Publish StatusPublished
  • Dimensions234 X 156 mm
  • Biblio NotesDerived from Proprietary 5538
  • SeriesProgress in Political Economy
  • Reference Code14388

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