When the Nation Outlives the State: Necropolitical Disarticulation and Counter-Stateness in Contemporary Iran
Written by: Reza Ashouri
This article theorises a historically neglected political phenomenon: the conditions under which citizens and diasporic populations sever national identification from their own state, to the point of welcoming external force against it as an act of national fidelity rather than betrayal. Advancing the concept of necropolitical disarticulation, the study synthesises Mbembe's necropolitics, Puar's theory of debilitation, state–nation decoupling frameworks, and Ahmed's cultural politics of emotion to argue that sustained necropolitical governance progressively destroys the affective and symbolic infrastructure binding populations to the state, generating a normative inversion of patriotism and, ultimately, a counter-stateness in which national political identity is organised against rather than through the state. The article deepens Mbembe's framework by engaging Al-Kassimi's theological critique of necropolitics, demonstrating that the Islamic Republic's governing logic is enabled not by revelation but by its systematic ideological distortion—a secularisation of scripture that insulates sovereign authority from theological accountability. Velayat-e Faqih is reframed accordingly as a secularised ideology of political power structurally analogous to other modern authoritarian formations. Through socio-historical analysis of Iran from 1979 to 2026, with comparative engagement with Syria and Belarus, the article contributes an exportable analytical concept to political sociology, nationalism studies, and diaspora politics. Keywords: necropolitics, state–nation disarticulation, Iranian politics, diaspora nationalism, counter-stateness, Velayat-e Faqih Introduction In January 2026, as security forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran carried out a wave of killings against nationwide protesters that would ultimately claim thousands of lives, a striking and theoretically unaccounted-for phenomenon emerged across both domestic and diasporic Iranian publics: significant numbers of Iranians openly expressed support for U.S. and Israeli military strikes against the state they nominally belonged to, framing this position not as treason but as an act of loyalty towards the Iranian nation. This was not an isolated reaction. In the years following the Woman–Life–Freedom (WLF) uprising of September 2022, Iranians had already been enacting subtler but structurally related forms of disidentification, refusing to celebrate the national football team’s international victories on the grounds that such celebrations served the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy rather than any genuinely national cause. These phenomena share a common underlying logic, and explaining that logic is the central task of this study. The Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979 on the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, or the guardianship of the Islamic jurist, which transferred sovereign authority to senior clergy rather than grounding it in popular will, substituting theocratic for democratic legit…
diaspora nationalism · Iranian politics · necropolitics · state–nation disarticulation
