When the nation outlives the state: Necropolitical disarticulation and counter-stateness in contemporary Iran

This article theorises a historically neglected political phenomenon: the conditions under which citizens and diasporic populations sever national identification from their own state, to the point of welcoming external force against it as an act of national fidelity rather than betrayal. Advancing the concept of necropolitical disarticulation, the study synthesises Mbembe’s necropolitics, Puar’s theory of debilitation, state–nation decoupling frameworks, and Ahmed’s cultural politics of emotion to argue that sustained necropolitical governance progressively destroys the affective and symbolic infrastructure binding populations to the state, generating a normative inversion of patriotism and, ultimately, a counter-stateness in which national political identity is organised against rather than through the state. The article deepens Mbembe’s framework by engaging Al-Kassimi’s theological critique of necropolitics, demonstrating that the Islamic Republic’s governing logic is enabled not by revelation but by its systematic ideological distortion—a secularisation of scripture that insulates sovereign authority from theological accountability. Velayat-e Faqih is reframed accordingly as a secularised ideology of political power structurally analogous to other modern authoritarian formations. Through socio-historical analysis of Iran from 1979 to 2026, with comparative engagement with Syria and Belarus, the article contributes an exportable analytical concept to political sociology, nationalism studies, and diaspora politics.