In a recent article, we had examined what could be defined as Iran’s hard power, i.e., the use of coercion and organized force to preserve the authority of the Islamic Republic in the face of persistent and, at times, also violent, counter-revolutionary pressures.

In the post-Westphalian conception of sovereignty, where the state claims a monopoly over legitimate violence, this coercive function has been exercised primarily through institutions such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which operates as a political and economic pillar of regime continuity rather than just a military actor.

However, as Joseph Nye famously argued, power is not reducible to coercion alone. Soft power (the ability to shape preferences, generate consent, and cultivate legitimacy) has been equally central to the endurance of the Islamic Republic. Iran’s ruling system has not only survived repression but also a dense architecture of redistribution, moral obligation, and ideological legitimacy rooted in Shi’ah thought and legalism. Of course, it must be noted that Shi’ah theology and jurisprudence are deviant and misguided.

Bonyad: The Foundation of Working & Middle-Class Shi’ah Conservatism

At the heart of this architecture lies the system of bonyads (lit. “foundation”). These are large quasi-state charitable foundations that function simultaneously as welfare institutions, economic conglomerates, and ideological instruments.

While often described in secular terms as “charities,” bonyads draw their legitimacy from core Shi’ah concepts embedded in jurisprudence (fiqh), particularly the religious obligations of khoms, waqf (religious endowments), and guardianship over the vulnerable (mostazafin). In Shi’ah political theology, especially as reinterpreted after the 1979 revolution, the state, under the doctrine of velayat-e faqih, assumes custodianship over religious wealth and moral redistribution, positioning itself as both political sovereign and ethical guardian.

Depending on the estimates, bonyads (often estimated at around 120) collectively control up to 30–40 percent of Iran’s GDP, making them one of the largest concentrations of economic power in the country outside the formal state budget. They operate largely beyond parliamentary oversight, are fully tax-exempt, and report directly to the Supreme Leader, reinforcing a parallel system of governance grounded in religious accountability rather than republican accountability.

Among the largest of these are the following:

• Bonyad-e Mostazafan (Foundation of the Oppressed) is frequently described as Iran’s second-largest economic entity after the National Iranian Oil Company, with asset estimates reaching the higher end of $20–25 billion. Its holdings span construction, petrochemicals, mining, agriculture, food production, and heavy industry. At peak estimates, it has been associated, directly and indirectly, with employment figures in the hundreds of thousands and potentially reaching over a million through subsidiaries and contractors.
• Astan Quds Razavi, built around the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, is often cited as the wealthiest religious foundation in the Muslim world. High-end external estimates place its assets between $30–40 billion, with tens of thousands of direct employees and influence extending across land ownership, industry, banking, and trade. Its legitimacy is explicitly religious: the shrine economy is framed as a sacred trust (waqf) under clerical guardianship, rendering its economic power doctrinally insulated from popular accountability.
• Bonyad-e Shahid (Martyrs and Veterans Foundation), which administers benefits to families of those killed in war or political violence, oversees millions of beneficiaries when including extended family networks. While precise asset figures are opaque, high-end estimates place its economic activities in the multi-billion-dollar range, tightly linking material welfare to ideological loyalty and revolutionary sacrifice.

Chase Toscano writes in Guardians of the Iranian Revolution: Clerical Authority, Bonyads, and the IRGC in Iran’s Economic Landscape (p. 25), that, as of 2025, there are in total “about 5 million Iranians working in a bonyad foundation.”

The Islamic Republic frames redistribution as religious duty administered by clerical authority rather than social policy. Assistance to the poor, martyrs’ families, and war veterans is portrayed as fulfillment of divine justice rather than state welfare, transforming economic dependence into moral obligation. In this way, bonyads function as instruments of religious legitimacy, not merely economic patronage.

From a political-economy perspective, Iran’s bonyads are often seen as institutional bases for a “pragmatist” faction that emerged from post-1979 elite bargaining between clerical authorities, revolutionary cadres, and bazaar interests. During the 1979 revolution, the bazaar functioned as a critical mobilizational and financial instrument, aligning merchant capital with clerical leadership. In the post-revolutionary order, this alliance was partially institutionalized through the bonyads, which linked ideological authority with control over semi-autonomous economic resources.

The resulting pragmatist current occupies a middle position between Principlists and Reformists. It favors selective engagement with global markets and limited openness to the West, primarily as a means of economic stabilization and regime durability rather than social or cultural liberalization. This reflects an elite strategy of preserving revolutionary legitimacy while adapting to material constraints such as reconstruction, sanctions, and capital scarcity.

The late Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (a co-founder of the Islamic Republic and President of the country from 1989 to 1997) is widely regarded as the central figure of this tendency, particularly through his post-war reconstruction agenda and market-oriented reforms within an Islamic framework. Figures such as Hassan Rouhani (President from 2013 to 2021) and technocratic intellectuals associated with the state bureaucracy are often placed within this pragmatist orbit, which prioritizes economic rationality, elite consensus, and controlled external integration over ideological maximalism.

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A Total State

But the system of regime maintenance extends well beyond the bonyads alone. A report published by Iran International, a media outlet well-known for its critical stance toward the Islamic Republic (and with dubious links to Israel), offers a revealing quantification of what might be described as Iran’s state-dependent political economy. In an article titled “The Eight Million Iranians on the Islamic Republic’s Payroll,” journalist Amirhadi Anvari documents how the regime sustains its authority in part through an extensive network of direct and indirect economic dependence.

• According to the report, approximately 8 million Iranians receive income directly or indirectly from the state. Of these, around 3 million are employed directly by the government, encompassing civil servants, military personnel, members of the security services, and employees across the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. This group represents the core of the state’s formal apparatus and includes many of the institutions most closely associated with regime enforcement and administration.
• Beyond this, an additional 2.3 million people are employed in quasi-governmental or semi-public sectors. These include state-linked or state-controlled companies, public and semi-public banks, municipalities, and large institutions such as Islamic Azad University. While not always formally classified as government employment, these positions remain structurally dependent on state funding, regulation, or political patronage, placing their employees within the regime’s broader sphere of economic influence.
• Finally, the report identifies roughly 2.5 million pensioners and welfare recipients who receive regular payments from state-controlled foundations, relief committees, and social support organizations, many of which overlap institutionally and financially with bonyads and religious charities. Crucially, these payments often sustain entire households, meaning that state dependence extends well beyond the individual recipient to spouses, children, and extended family members.

The political significance of this system is considerable: during elections, protests, and periods of social unrest, the regime has historically relied on these economically dependent constituencies as a stabilizing force, calculating (often correctly) that the risk of income loss discourages overt opposition.

If one moves beyond individual payroll figures and attempts to estimate the total number of Iranians who directly or indirectly benefit from the state, the scale becomes even clearer. Assuming a conservative household size of three to four people per income earner or beneficiary, the 8 million individuals identified in the report plausibly translate to 24 to 30 million Iranians whose livelihoods depend, at least in part, on government salaries, pensions, subsidies, or state-linked institutions. In a country of roughly 90 million people, this suggests that between one quarter and one third of the population is structurally tied to the state’s economic distributive system, which would be impossible to justify in a secular configuration (as Reza Pahlavi attempts to engineer through American-Israeli help).

Taken together with the role of bonyads, religious foundations, and semi-public economic actors, this reveals a regime that governs not only through force or ideology but also mass economic incorporation. The Islamic Republic has constructed a political economy in which loyalty is cultivated through dependence, and dissent is rendered costly for not just individuals but entire families.

Seen through this lens, the resilience of the Islamic Republic emerges as the product of a theologically informed hybrid power structure. Hard power, embodied by the IRGC and the security apparatus, suppresses existential threats. Soft power, channeled through religious foundations, sacred endowments, and Shi’ah moral economy, absorbs social discontent, sacralizes redistribution, and binds loyalty to the Supreme Leader as both political ruler and religious guardian.

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How a Total State Encourages Ideological Maximalism

Taken together, these mechanisms form a system in which coercion and belief, force and faith, are not competing logics but, rather, mutually reinforcing foundations of regime survival. In this sense, what ultimately makes the Islamic Republic resilient is precisely its character as a “total state.”

To clarify, I do not intend by “total state” a fully totalitarian system in the classical sense. What I am referring to is a political order that seeks to integrate coercion, ideology, welfare, economy, and morality into a single governing logic. The Islamic Republic does not merely rule. It organizes large portions of social life through overlapping institutions (security forces, religious foundations, state employment, education networks, and welfare systems) that bind individuals to the regime materially and symbolically.

Political loyalty is not demanded only at the ballot box or enforced only through repression. It is cultivated through employment, pensions, subsidies, religious obligation, and narratives of moral guardianship.

In such a system, opposition is not only costly politically but also socially and economically, while compliance is often normalized as both pragmatic and virtuous.

This structural reality helps explain the continued electoral viability (and, in some constituencies, popularity) of hardline figures such as Saeed Jalili, someone who is often described as being ideologically more rigid than Khamenei himself. Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator and longtime member of Iran’s ideological-security elite, embodies a form of principled hardline politics that rejects compromise with the West, prioritizes revolutionary “resistance” over economic normalization, and frames governance explicitly in moral and civilizational terms. His political identity is rooted less in pragmatism and more in what his supporters view as ideological purity – an uncompromising commitment to revolutionary values, even at economic cost.

Thus, Jalili, who has written books on Islamic political philosophy, is often considered more “hardline” than Khamenei, though not because he “challenges” the Supreme Leader. Rather, it is because he represents the ideological maximalism that the Leader sometimes strategically tempers. Where Khamenei balances revolutionary rhetoric with tactical flexibility to “preserve the system,” Jalili articulates the regime’s most doctrinal reading of resistance, sovereignty, and Islamic governance. For a segment of the electorate (particularly those embedded in ideological institutions, conservative provincial networks, and parts of the security and welfare apparatus), this clarity is not a liability. It is an asset.

This was evident in the 2024 presidential election, where Jalili finished second in the runoff with approximately 13.5 million votes, following not too drastically behind the winner Masoud Pezeshkian, who received roughly 16–16.5 million.

While headline figures suggest a clear victory for Pezeshkian, the gap narrows when placed in proper demographic and institutional context: Iran has roughly 60–62 million eligible voters, meaning Jalili’s result represents around 22 percent of the voting-age population, not merely of turnout. In a political system where abstention is high and opposition voters often disengage entirely, securing over thirteen million votes for an explicitly hardline platform signals the presence of a large, socially anchored conservative bloc, not a marginal fringe.

Moreover, Pezeshkian’s relative advantage was unevenly distributed. His strongest support came from major urban centers, ethnically diverse regions, and segments of the educated middle class, particularly in Tehran and parts of the northwest. Jalili, by contrast, performed strongly in provincial areas, smaller cities, and regions more dependent on state employment, religious institutions, or welfare networks – precisely the constituencies most integrated into the regime’s distributive and ideological apparatus. When broken down by geography and social class, the election appears less a landslide and more a structural stalemate between two social coalitions, both operating within the boundaries permitted by the system.

It is also notable that, beyond Pezeshkian, most other candidates in the race occupied positions on the conservative or hardline spectrum, differing more in style and factional alignment than in fundamental orientation toward the Islamic Republic’s ideological core (e.g., Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf). Of course, even the Reformists like Pezeshkian aren’t secular liberals in the Western sense. They aim to operate through liberal codes from within the framework of the Islamic Republic.

Anyway, seen in this light, Jalili’s performance could be considered the electoral expression of a system in which tens of millions of citizens are materially dependent on the state, morally addressed by religious authority, and politically socialized through institutions that reward conformity and sacrifice.

The Islamic Republic’s strength, therefore, does not lie in so-called “unanimous support” (what Western “liberal democracy” enjoys such a consensus anyway?). Instead, it is found in its capacity to produce durable constituencies that perceive regime survival as synonymous with their own economic security, moral identity, and social stability.

This appears to be the logic behind the soft-hard hybrid power of Iran’s “total state,” with its strength remaining underappreciated by the more critical observers.

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