خرید و دانلود نسخه کامل کتاب Destructive Coordination, Anfal and Islamic Political Capitalism A New Reading of Contemporary Iran – Original PDF

1 CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1.1 Problem Statement Two types of crises should be distinguished: crisis as antinomic to order and as part of a specific order. The former pertains to the crisis as a transi- tory moment from one order to another. This meaning of crisis prevails in conventional economics in which order is generally defined as a state of equilibrium. Accordingly, the crisis is considered to be an exogenous ran- dom shock that moves the system away from its initial state of equilibrium and brings it to a new state of equilibrium. The crisis is then nothing but a transition from one equilibrium (order) to another. The second type of crisis is not exogenous but endogenous to order in the sense that crisis becomes an order insofar as order becomes critical. In this second type, the crisis is not temporary but chronic detaining the property of autopoiesis or self-replication. Using an analogy with the human body, the former type of crisis is akin to infectious diseases and the latter to chronic diseases such as cardiovascular and bipolar disorders. This book is about the type of economic systems that can arise from a critical order and sustain in its turn a critical order. In other words, our main line of inquiry consists of exploring a type of economic system that maintains reciprocal causation with critical order in the sense that while it feeds on critical order, it contributes to its reproduction. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Vahabi, Destructive Coordination, Anfal and Islamic Political Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17674-6_1 2 A close but different question has already been addressed in the vast literature on political Natural Resource Curse (NRC)1 which asks what type of natural resources can sustain critical orders such as protracted civil wars in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Burma, Colombia, Peru, Cambodia, and many other coun- tries? It has been suggested that “lootable goods”, namely goods with a high ratio of value-to-weight that can be exploited by non-qualified labor such as alluvial diamonds, gemstones, and narcotics, can sustain critical orders for a long time (Le Billon, 2001). Accordingly, opium in Afghanistan, alluvial diamonds in many African countries, and narcotics in Latin America are assumed to be the source of durable civil wars or criti- cal orders. In my critical survey of this literature (Vahabi, 2018), I have demon- strated the primacy of institutional rather than a natural curse in explaining the durability of political and military conflicts. The real issue is not what a good or a bad natural resource is; the crux of the matter is what type of economic systems comprising fundamental institutions are compatible with critical orders. Keen (2012) identified the transformation of warfare into “business as usual” as a possible explanation of the durability of civil wars in many countries like Sudan, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Uganda, and Afghanistan. In all these cases, the regime and the rebel were not merely adversaries, but covert allies and partners in preying on natural resources such as diamonds and narcotics, raping women, and racketing the civil population. To put it differently, both contenders were interested in waging war rather than winning the war, since the war was a continuation of economics by other means. Contrary to the NRC, Keen’s analysis focused on political collu- sion between soldiers and rebels and not natural resources. The predatory rule tacitly accepted by belligerents could sustain critical order and deter- mined the use of natural resources.