A Modernização Militar Iraniana de (1991 - 2021): uma análise a partir da Teoria da Transição de Poder

Abstract

The present text has its main object the military recovery and modernization efforts of the Islamic Republic of Iran, initiated in the 1990s and analyzed here up to the beginning of the current decade. The theoretical and methodological bedrocks utilized here belong to the fields of Strategic Studies and Power Transition Theory, seeking to comprehend the interactions between industrial and technological development, military capabilities and the local and global hierarchies of the International System. The project takes as a starting point the analysis of the International System as a hierarchical space, in detriment to the perspective of international anarchy of realist and liberal theories, understanding the material determinants of those hierarchies in the industrial, technological and military fields. As such, the analysis of the iranian case begins with the country’s local and global position and its search for survival in the global sphere and leadership in the regional one, seeking to analyse the advances, and limits, of the internal efforts to transform the State’s international position. To do such, this research is divided in two sections, one analysing the economic and military recovery of the country, its absolute financial resources, contingents and arsenals, and another digging into the productive and doctrinal organizations of the security sector, its degree of technological sophistication and its capacity to incorporate new military technologies and methods to the military fronts faced by Iran. The iranian model has its success and limitations judged based on comparisons with its regional peers, selected based on a criteria of interaction capacity, invasion capacity and the presence of independent regional projects. The project takes as a starting point the thesis that Tehran managed to transform its regional and global position, ascending from a country with a technologically and doctrinally backwards security sector to one of the members of the intermediate echelons of the International System and the global arms industry, with a diverse productive base, with sectors capable of autonomous production, with military forces capable of incorporating new technologies to its operational doctrines. The analysis of the economic, industrial and military profile of the country seeks to prove the reality, and the limits, of this transformation, its advances and roadblocks, presenting the iranian model as a possible strategy for the internalization of the military technologies and methods of contemporary warfare, whose incorporation has become a necessity for maintaining national sovereignty in Global South States.