The Islamic Republic of Iran merits close attention in this time of crisis. A detailed understanding of the roots of its perception of the world, as well as of the realities that shape it, might help us to understand the motives that have induced it to set out down the potentially perilous path to nuclear proliferation. Despite having restructured itself as an Islamic Republic in 1979, Iran cannot escape its exclusively imperial past which, throughout the 51 centuries of its history since the Jiroft civilisation and then the Elamite kingdom, was based exclusively on a balance of power and territorial expansion, whether successful or rebuffed. One may very well wonder if the current crisis caused by its attempts to achieve a military nuclear capability in fact conceals a desire to protect existing national boundaries and to inhibit any challenge to territorial expansion or development of new influence, thereby reviving its imperial past.

This first article analyses whether the Islamic Republic has the means to fulfil the preconditions that would be crucial to any resurgence of its imperial past. A second article will endeavour to identify the territories that Iran might attempt to bring within its sphere of influence if it were to be successful in its ambitions.

‘The empire is a system that amalgamates physical space, diversity of populations, a unified government, the control of a bureaucracy, the power of an army, religion with a universal vocation and the deification of a sovereign,’ wrote Maurice Duverger⁽¹⁾ in 1977.