Genealogy of security-oriented cultural policy in Iran

From the perspective of the security-oriented cultural discourse, culture has strategic importance for governance, because it is linked to security and development of society. From this point of view, cultural engineering is essential for creating a unified nation. A nation that is capable of reviving the Islamic civilization. Basically, this discourse sees the population as a raw material for nation-building and it will be a cause for concern if they are not. According to this discourse, the cultural policy is the most effective apparatus for turning people into subjugated individuals. In this research, genealogical methods have been used to understand the conditions that led to the formation of the discourse. The findings suggest that the failure of government in creating subjugated subjects leads to the dominance of a conservative approach to the cultural policy. Structurally, the ability of the government to create desirable subjects depends on the government's capacity to provide welfare to citizens. But in the post-war era, the economic reforms based on structural adjustment and the government's obligation to withdrawal of social policy led to widespread social exclusion. As a result, the subjectizing capacity of the state weakened drastically. Under these circumstances, social reality is seen as a threat to the eyes of the policy-making elite, resulting in intensifying the government's tendency to securitize and policing cultural policy to stand up to the threat.