Security Without Security
Four Decades of Engineering a Securitized System in Iran, Without Security
Over the past four decades, “security” has become one of the most costly and most frequently invoked words in Iranian politics. From dress codes and employment to travel, media, and thought itself, everything has been defined within a security-centered framework. Yet the central question is not how securitized Iran has become, but what this vast project of security-making actually has to do with security itself.
During these years, a permanent architecture of control has come to dominate society as a whole. From the simplest personal choices to professional and social trajectories, everything has been defined under the gaze of security forces. Checkpoints, constant surveillance, media restrictions, filtering, the imprisonment or systematic removal of dissenters, and the control of foreign movement have functioned not as temporary policies, but as stable mechanisms of governance. Within this architecture, security was defined not as the reduction of risk, but as the expansion of monitoring. Society became a field of continuous observation, and the citizen a subject who must constantly prove that they are not dangerous.
But what has been the outcome of this project? If the security logic had been effective, at least one of two signs should have appeared: either a decline in the desire to leave the country, or an increase in the sense of safety during moments of crisis. What has occurred points in the opposite direction. More than ten percent of Iran’s population has emigrated over the past four decades—a phenomenon that does not occur at this scale in any genuinely secure system. A country whose borders are symbolically protected, while its citizens collectively abandon it, signals the failure of a project, not its success.
Recent events have laid this contradiction bare. The twelve-day war and the protests of 2025 showed that the security for which the Islamic Republic has paid an enormous price, and which it has made its central slogan for decades, has been less a reality than an institutional illusion. Infiltration from the air, infiltration from within, the collapse of alliance networks, and the inability to anticipate and prevent crises all demonstrated that the security apparatus not only failed to secure society, but also rendered the very structure of power deeply vulnerable.
What matters in this historical experience is not merely the failure of a political system. The deeper issue is that when security turns into an ideology, it gradually changes its nature—from a goal into a tool. Security is no longer employed to reduce danger, but to stabilize order, suppress difference, and engineer society. Under such conditions, the greater the pressure applied in the name of security, the deeper structural insecurity becomes.
What we are facing today is not the absence of security policy, but its excess—an excess that has itself turned into a source of insecurity. The experience of the past four decades shows that it is possible to construct a society in which the state is insecure, society is insecure, and the citizen is insecure. It is neither safe from external threats nor stable from within.
A wise individual—and by the same logic, a wisdom-based system—does not turn its critics into enemies. Instead, it keeps them close, not out of tolerance, but as part of a mechanism of feedback and self-correction. In such a system, criticism is not a sign of threat, but a sign of health: a tool for identifying error, correcting course, and preventing the accumulation of structural mistakes. By contrast, over four decades the Islamic Republic has responded to nearly all forms of criticism with repression, exclusion, and intimidation, gradually transforming every critic into an “enemy.” As a result, the system has not only lost its natural feedback network, but has deprived itself of its most vital source of reform: a society without criticism, and a power without the capacity to correct its own errors.
Such a system—a wisdom-based system—extends this logic even to its adversaries; even to those who from the outset have fixed their gaze on its geopolitical position and sharpened their knives. Within this framework, the enemy is not made “more enemy,” is not provoked, is not fed through stone-throwing or emotional spectacle. On the contrary, hostility is managed rather than intensified. When necessary, adversaries are invited to the negotiating table, received through diplomatic hospitality, and relations are kept in a state of balance: neither too cold nor too warm; neither so distant as to breed misunderstanding and accumulated tension, nor so close as to result in dependency or reckless concession.
What we need is not security, but a Rise of Wisdom—a rise of wisdom in both the individual mind and the collective mind. Without such a rise, appealing words like freedom, justice, democracy, and even development will remain trapped at the level of populist campaign slogans, while authoritarianism quietly returns, this time dressed in more refined and decorative forms. What is required is not another security doctrine, but a deliberate movement toward wisdom itself—a Wisdorise.