Unstated
But the events of the last week suggest to me nearly the opposite of what Charles Tilly tells us. Reporting as an eyewitness, Roger Cohen recently wrote in the New York Times that at least some state actors are declining or resisting orders to direct violence against their fellow Iranians. Elsewhere, former Special Forces officer and DIA official Pat Lang wondered, two days ago, where regular Iranian army troops would come down in a conflict between the Iranian people and the Iranian state. It's not at all clear that the officers of the Iranian state have been able to direct all of the relevant state institutions to simply inflict violence on people in the streets. Some state institutions are apparently pulling away from the state.
It is, in other words, not at all clear that the government is an extremely efficient killing machine, possessing a clear monopoly on violence. In a magnificent turn of events, the efficient killing machine has even been forced to run away from crowds of citizens.
Absent this efficient monopoly on violence, the Iranian state has turned to a set of violent actors who don't draw government paychecks.
As the Guardian recently put it:"The violent interventions of the Basij militia - one of Ahmadinejad's bases of electoral support - armed with bicycle chains, batons and Kalashnikovs and dressed in a mixture of civilian clothes and fatigues, is an increasingly significant factor in the crisis...The Basij is a volunteer force, drawn mainly from the poorer section of society, who gain favours and privileges by acting as enforcers for the Islamic state."
Tilly famously compares (PDF) the state to the Mafia, with state makers as" coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs." It's hard to argue, especially this week, but the trouble is with the next part -- the part in which a band of warlords transitions into the state,"relatively centralized, differentiated organizations the officials of which more or less successfully claim control over the chief concentrated means of violence within a population inhabiting a large, contiguous territory."
My own view is that states never really complete this transition; rather, they take on the trappings of formalized, differentiated organizations, but remain coercive, self-seeking, and entrepreneurial just under the skin. A Mafia boss in a statesman's mask is still a Mafia boss. The state is just a social organization among social organizations, trying to throw a bigger shadow to convince the people it wishes to control that its significance is special; it's a mercurial coalescence that wants to convince us to reify its existence.
But state actors can't quite pull off that act themselves. Push a state, show it the tenuousness of its control on violence -- Cohen's police commander shouting, “I swear to God, I have children, I have a wife, I don’t want to beat people," to a crowd that is gathered to challenge the state -- and it turns to its other sources of violence, the favor-seeking volunteers"dressed in a mixture of civilian clothes and fatigues" and armed with bicycle chains and privately owned guns.
The twentieth-century state begins to seem like a deviation, not the thing itself. As Farley put it last week, describing the massive state-on-state wars of that period,"The modern nation-state could murder at such an efficient rate because competent, well educated, healthy, efficient people staffed its bureaucracies."
There are no well-educated bureaucrats here. Maybe the Iranian state is unmasked; but maybe the state is unmasked, and we can see that it doesn't work the way we thought it did.
Like the Basiji, the state is"dressed in a mixture of civilian clothes and fatigues," trapped between an identity it wants and an identity it has. State officials believe they stand above civil society, managing and directing, but they find themselves down in the streets with the rest of us. Looking beyond the violence to its effects, it's unimaginably beautiful to watch.