translated from Turkish

İran’da Savaş Koşullarında Toplumsal Meşruiyet

The analysis argues that whether war can produce regime change in Iran, and whether that change would bring Iran onto the course desired by the United States and Israel, depends above all on the sociology of legitimacy within Iranian society.

SETA — Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (Turkey) · 25 March 2026 · read the original in Turkish →

Although different factors and quests for tangible results were at work when, on February 28, the U.S.-Israel alliance opened war on Iran, in the final analysis the war’s conclusion is directly bound up with the questions of regime change in Iran and, whether connected to that change or not, the state’s entry onto the course desired by Israel and the United States. It must be emphasized that the war has ecopolitical, theopolitical, and geopolitical dimensions. Yet it must also not be overlooked that regime change in Iran requires a sociology. Does sociology in Iran possess the accumulated resources and factors that would furnish legitimacy for a change of regime? This question, and its answer, appear to have become far more important after the outbreak of the war and the killing of the religious leader Ali Khamenei and major figures among the ruling elites.

With the war, the questions both of whether there will be regime change in Iran and, depending on that, whether Iran will fall under the influence of Israel and the United States are directly tied to the state of social legitimacy in Iran and of the processes of legitimization among social actors. Does the mechanism of social legitimacy in Iran contain openings that would allow the United States and Israel, during the war or in the period after it, to set various opposition groups in Iran into motion? If such openings exist and an environment of conflict takes shape, could that environment have the capacity to produce an effect capable of leading to the breakdown of general relations of social legitimacy, or to the emergence of a powerful crisis of legitimacy that would disperse social unity? The matters contained in these and similar questions are the ones that must first be clarified in order to find the answer to whether, during the process of war in Iran and in the postwar period, regime change of the kind desired by the United States and Israel will occur, or whether, without regime change, it will be possible for the new political and religious authorities who come into office to pursue politics in the manner desired by the United States and Israel. This analysis examines whether, in the new process unfolding in Iran with the war, there exists a sociology that would open the way to regime change and make possible a political structuring in the direction desired by the U.S.-Israel alliance.