Guardianship and Democracy in Iran and Turkey

A comparative analysis of the political consolidation and popular contestation of regime guardianship in Turkey and the Islamic Republic of Iran

• Moves beyond the Secular vs. Islamic, Sunni vs. Shia dichotomies to highlight Turkey and Iran's understudied hybrid institutional architecture
• Compares and contrasts the foundations, consolidation, internal frictions and popular contestation of regime guardianship in two ideologically inimical republics
• Provides insights for the democratisation and hybrid regime scholarship into how tutelary institutions shape and constrain electoral institutions and processes
• Analyses the key actors, dynamics and turning points of the power struggles that shaped and transformed Iran and Turkey in the 21st century
• Critically assesses the causes and consequences of the fragility of democratic governance and the persistence of patriarchal power structures in both countries

This book offers the first comparative study of the foundations, consolidation and contestation of regime guardianship in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Turkey. For decades, the military in Turkey and the clergy in Iran acted as the guardians of Atatürk and Khomeini’s ideological legacies. At the turn of the 21st century rising popular actors in both countries started challenging the tutelary control of the state and society. While in Turkey the clash between the Kemalist guardians and their Islamist-led rivals resulted in a victory for the latter, although not for democracy, in Iran, traditionalist guardians were able to thwart popular challenges to their authority at the expense of the regime’s democratic legitimacy. How was guardianship established, consolidated and contested in these republics with seemingly inimical founding ideologies? Why did it unravel in Turkey but survive in the Islamic Republic in the early 2010s? And what do these power struggles and their outcomes tell us about political contestation in tutelary hybrid regimes?