학술논문

This article examines how Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) evolved into a coercive institution that is simultaneously embedded in the state and autonomous within Iran’s political order. Using qualitative process tracing across three phases of Iran’s state development, revolution and war (1979-1988), postwar reconstruction and reform (1989-2004), and recurring internal and external pressures (2005-2020), this article posits that repeated delegation to the IRGC became consolidated through mutual resource dependence. Building on principal-agent approaches, this article traces the institutional trajectory of the IRGC and explains how mutual resource dependence unfolds through three sequential mechanisms across these phases. Exchange emerges through crisis-driven delegation. Conversion then extends delegated coercive capacities into new domains as political conditions change, and routinization stabilizes repeated delegation over time. The logic of mutual resource dependence thus explains how the IRGC’s autonomy and embeddedness within state authority were strengthened simultaneously over time.