A New Strategy to Instill Loyalty in Iran

This article is brought to you by American Purpose, the magazine and community founded by Francis Fukuyama in 2020, which is proudly part of the Persuasion family. The creation of a police high school in the Islamic Republic of Iran marks a new attempt to recruit personnel and professionalize the force. The Police Commander recently declared that initially 400 students will be admitted to police schools in three provinces, Tehran, Alborz, and Qom. While the stated aim is to educate the elite, build disciplinary knowledge, and train the next generation of police, the political importance of this plan is much greater than the number of students or the quality of education. The creation of a police high school should be seen as a continuation of the Islamic Republic’s reliance on security and coercion for the survival of the regime—but with one difference. In the past, the government’s main problem was recruiting loyal individuals for the police. Now, it seems that the Iranian police are trying to develop and train their people much earlier, starting in the teenage years, before inducting them into a police environment. To understand this transformation, we must first look at the history of police forces in Iran after the 1979 revolution. The Islamic Republic created Revolutionary Committees to guard cities, maintain political order, and—more importantly—identify and arrest counter-revolutionary forces. Despite the purification of the pre-existing city police, Shahrbani, and gendarmerie, the regime still believed that these forces were not trustworthy enough. The Islamic Revolutionary Committees were usually formed out of religious and conservative networks, and became active in repressing the opposition, controlling neighborhoods, enforcing Islamic rules and dress codes, gathering intelligence, and conducting surveillance in neighborhoods. In 1991, after the end of the Iran-Iraq War and the election of Hashemi Rafsanjani as president, the regime merged the city police, the gendarmerie, and the Islamic Revolutionary Committees to form a new disciplinary-security force called Niru-ye Entezami-ye Jomhuri-ye Eslami, or NAJA. The new organization had one important political characteristic from the beginning: NAJA’s chief commander came from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—created to safeguard the revolution—and was appointed directly by the Supreme Leader. In addition, like other military and security organizations, NAJA created two parallel organizations: an ideological-political organization representing Ayatollah Khamenei in the police, and a counterintelligence organization. From its creation, almost all NAJA commanders and many high-ranking police commanders came from the IRGC, bringing the organization closer to the security core of the Islamic Republic. Therefore, the professionalization of the police in the Islamic Republic was never only about professionalizing a nonpolitical institution with the goal of implementing the law. From the beginning, the expansion of police capacities coincided with the expansion of its capacities to control protests, conduct surveillance of society, and maintain and defend the Islamic Republic. The experience of urban riots from 1991 to 1994, the student protests of 1999, the Green Movement of 2009, and subsequent protests, gave the police opportunities to renew its organization, expand its branches and capacities, acquire additional equipment, and create new operational and intelligence branches. One of the most important developments in the 2000s was the “Basijization” of the police. During the commandership of Ismail Ahmadi Moghadam, a former IRGC commander who became police commander in 2005, the police shifted from recruiting Iranians from the general society to relying more and more on the Basij militia (the paramilitary wing of the IRGC) to recruit new cadres. According to the police commander, more than 75 percent of police personnel recruited in 2006 and more than 80 percent of those recruited in 2007 were selected from among Basij members. They also announced that, in the future, they would try to recruit all police personnel from the Basij militia. This was not only a change in the recruitment process. The aim was to strengthen the political identity of the police and the ideological core of the Islamic Republic. Basij members, because of their organizational backgrounds, ideological selection, and indoctrination, were considered much more loyal to the security and police apparatus than ordinary Iranians. In addition to the Basij, the police usually recruited from the families of martyrs or police personnel and other armed forces for their new cadres. The result was the strengthening of conservative attitudes and the ideological mentality of the police, and an increasing cultural gap between police forces and parts of Iranian society—especially the younger generation, which is less religious, more secular, and more progressive. From this perspective, the creation of police high schools can be seen as the next step in addressing the same question of political loyalty. The police now have the opportunity to become involved in the selection and socialization of Iranian youth much more actively and directly. This development is not completely new. Iran’s police have previously tried to shape a voluntary police force from Iranian youth, most notably in 2010. Under the name of “Honorary Police,” there were two levels of volunteers: first, people over eighteen who worked with the police and performed limited law-enforcement duties; and second, teenagers above fifteen years old who took part in educational activities, public awareness programs, and some forms of local cooperation with the police. In some cases, these people helped collect information in their local communities as police informants in exchange for benefits, such as priority in future recruitment by the police. Police high schools can be seen as a more organized and professional version of the same idea. The main difference is that the relationship between teenagers and the police is no longer only voluntary or temporary. The school is part of the process of preparing future personnel for the police and security system. Authoritarian regimes are usually more concerned about political loyalty than professional skills and expertise. This is also true of the Islamic Republic, whose main philosophy prioritizes Taahod (ideological commitment) over Takhasus (expertise). This prioritization becomes especially important in security organizations, including the police, which are expected to repress ordinary people during crises and protests. Since its inception, the regime has used several methods to ensure the political loyalty of its security forces, including ideological screening, mass indoctrination, recruitment of Basij members and families connected to the regime, and the creation of specialized universities and training centers. Police high schools will complete this system, giving the Islamic Republic more time to identify, evaluate, and train the people it needs for political repression. Saeid Golkar is an associate professor of political science at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, a senior advisor at United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), and a writing fellow at the Middle East Forum. 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