Abstract
This study employs Walker and Salt’s three-level resilience model (2006, 2012)—comprising resilience, adaptability, and transformability—to assess the effectiveness of the Islamic Republic of Iran in confronting four major existential threats: the negative legacy of the Pahlavi regime, targeted assassinations of key revolutionary figures, the eight-year Imposed War (1980–1988), and comprehensive international sanctions. Using a qualitative approach and historical document analysis, the research evaluates the system’s performance across these interconnected crises.
Findings reveal that at the resilience level, the Islamic Republic successfully absorbed severe shocks and maintained its core structure and identity, preventing collapse. At the adaptability level, it responded through the creation of novel revolutionary institutions (Literacy Movement, Construction Jihad, IRGC, Basij) and policies such as the resistance economy and technological self-sufficiency, purposefully reorganizing structures and processes to turn crises into opportunities for internal strengthening. At the highest level of transformability, the system generated fundamentally new paradigms: shifting national security from Western dependency to an independent, people-based defense model; transforming the economic paradigm from oil-dependent import orientation to a knowledge-based resistance economy; redefining Iran’s regional role from a Western-aligned proxy to a pole of resistance; and revolutionizing the knowledge and education system from Western imitation to indigenous Islamic-Iranian scientific production.
The results confirm that evaluating the effectiveness of a political system without considering the scale and intensity of its existential obstacles and structural threats yields incomplete and misleading conclusions. By successfully navigating all three levels of the Walker-Salt model, the Islamic Republic not only survived but demonstrated the capacity to create a fundamentally different and more functional system under extreme adversity.