Iran’s military policy is a contentious subject. Ofira Seliktar and Farhad Rezaei provide a comprehensive look at how Iran has been implementing asymmetrical warfare strategy and proxy war since the establishment of the Islamic Revolution in their book Iran, Revolution, and Proxy Wars. Drawing upon comprehensive primary and secondary sources, the authors do due diligence by analyzing, case-by-case, how Iran’s proxy war strategies through Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps– Quds Force (IRGC-QF) are multifactional and target-oriented and to what extent these proxy war tools are correlated with Iran’s revolutionary ideology and geopolitical ambitions. The first chapter provides historical background and elaborates on how Khomeini’s Islamic revolution legitimized the requirement of political violence to export the revolution beyond Iran’s borders. To carry out this mission, this chapter illustrates how the IRGC has been established and how IRGC-QF is the main responsible structure to embark its proxies through Shiite militias in neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain. The authors also underline the relationship between Foreign Ministry and IRGC-QF as the Iranian embassies and cultural centers in Muslim countries as “these dual-use proxies garnered political legitimacy while offering a cover for terror” (p. 17). Lastly, the chapter lays the foundation of how Revolutionary Guards have systematically developed asymmetrical warfare strategies, preventing Iranian authorities from becoming a direct target on the international stage

Reviewed by Ahmet Furkan Ozyakar for Insight Turkey