Theocracy

A theocracy grounds the right to rule in divine authority and places religious leaders, or religious law as interpreted by them, above any human legislature. Many states have an established religion; what makes a theocracy is that clerics or religious law hold the final say over government.

The modern Iranian model rests on Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's doctrine of velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist: in the absence of the hidden Twelfth Imam, a just and learned jurist should lead the community. Said Amir Arjomand describes how, after Khomeini's death in 1989, the system combined clerical guardianship with elected institutions and a growing role for the Revolutionary Guards. In political-science typologies, theocracies are usually treated as a kind of ideocracy, in which a comprehensive doctrine rather than a person, party or army legitimates rule.

• Article 5 of Iran's constitution vests leadership of the community in a just and pious jurist; Article 110 gives the Leader command of the armed forces, the power to declare war, and the power to appoint the head of the judiciary, the head of state broadcasting and the jurists of the Guardian Council.
• The Guardian Council of six clerical jurists chosen by the Leader and six lawyers checks laws for compatibility with Islam and the constitution (Article 91) and supervises elections (Article 99), which in practice means vetting candidates.
• Citizens elect a president, a parliament, local councils and the Assembly of Experts, which chooses the Leader (Article 107).

• Iran since 1979.
• Vatican City, where the Pope holds the fullness of legislative, executive and judicial power, reaffirmed in the Fundamental Law of 2023.
• Afghanistan under the Taliban (1996–2001 and since August 2021), ruled by decree of a supreme leader, which has barred girls from secondary and university education.
• Historical cases include Tibet under the Dalai Lamas and the Papal States.

In March 2024 a UN fact-finding mission found that Iran's crackdown on the protests that followed the death in custody of Mahsa Amini in 2022 involved serious human rights violations, many amounting to crimes against humanity, including murder, imprisonment, torture, rape and gender persecution. Religious minorities such as Iran's Baha'is face systematic discrimination.

Theocratic rule removes the final word from voters and places it with interpreters of revelation, which makes peaceful change of the guardians difficult. Supporters argue that it protects a community's moral foundations; critics within the same traditions, including senior Shiite clerics, have rejected velayat-e faqih as a corruption of religion by power.

Iran's system has survived for over four decades through mass protest waves in 2009, 2017–19 and 2022, combining elections with vetting and repression. The Vatican is stable but tiny and exceptional; the Taliban's emirate is internationally isolated.