Rasmus C. Elling and Sune Haugbolle (eds.), The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East: Iran, Palestine and Beyond (OneWorld Publishers, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?
Rasmus C Elling and Sune Haugbolle (RCE & SH): We first discussed the idea of comparing our respective work on Iranian and Palestinian history of the late 1970s during the early lockdown. This period is incredibly interesting because during these years after 1976 or so, social movements formed during the Marxist 1960s—i.e. student movements, revolutionary cadres, and their internationalist affiliations—began to fracture. It is paradoxical, and therefore interesting, that the period leading up to the Iranian revolution is also a period of intense doubt about the revolutionary project. We wanted to study that paradox by focusing on Iran and Palestine as two revolutionary situations that we linked through the notion of Third Worldism. The idea matured and we submitted a proposal, and received a grant, for a series of workshops that would bring young and more established scholars together. Initially, we wanted to focus on the transformation of radical ideas before and after 1979 inside social movements. But as we engaged a sounding board of scholars—Abed Takriti, Toufoul Abou-Hodeib, Naghmeh Sohrabi, and Eskandar Sadeghi-Bojoujerdi—the focus gradually narrowed to the question of Third Worldism. We gave a group of emerging scholars micro-grants to examine how this idea of Third World solidarity and unity transformed before and after the Iranian revolution, which coincided with other epochal events in the region, not least the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon in 1982.
The key protagonists of the book’s chapters are student activists, guerilla fighters, volunteer nurses, militant intellectuals, and propagandists.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
RCE & SH: Generally, the book analyzes the factors that together placed Third Worldism in crisis in the Middle East and in the world from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. The years 1979 and 1982 are turning points for this history as we and the book’s other contributors delve into particular movements, individuals, and institutions that contributed to the transformation of Third Worldist ideas and practices. The key protagonists of the book’s chapters are student activists, guerilla fighters, volunteer nurses, militant intellectuals, and propagandists. Most of them are Iranians and Palestinians but they also include Cubans, Norwegians, Lebanese, and many others who were engaged in solidarity movements or in other ways engaged Palestine and Iran. We analyze the vehicles with which they transmitted and exchanged their visions and demands: their manifestos and declarations, organizations and networks, delegations and missions, conferences and festivals, newspapers and periodicals, slogans and obituaries, films, and memoirs. Most of the material in the book has been gathered from understudied archives, private papers, and other sources that have not been studied before.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
SH: I have long been interested in historiography of the Left in the region. The Palestinian cause has always been a central feature of states, movements, and ideas that navigate the spectrum from socialism to Marxism in the Middle East. In the past five years, I have researched the history of Palestine solidarity with my colleagues Pelle Olsen and Sorcha Thomson, whose work also features in this book. It is a transnational history that has taken me out of the region for the first time in my research, to focus on the way Palestinians created a global network of support. Third Worldism—the belief that revolutionary anti-imperialist militancy in what we today term the Global South would lead to national liberation and universal emancipation—was a cornerstone of Palestine solidarity as it emerged globally in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As such, this book contributes to the growing work on Palestine solidarity by putting it in conversation with intellectual and social histories of not just solidarity, as in the work of David Featherstone, but also Third Worldism.
RCE: For the chapter I co-authored with Jahangir Mahmoudi, I was able to connect two strands of my research: one about the politics of ethnic and national identity in Iran; and the other about the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary guerilla, Fadaiyan-e-Khalq (Organization of Iranian People’s Fadais). We did so by zooming in on a chapter of Iranian leftist history that has been neglected and can be considered controversial, namely the view of the Fadais on the Kurdish emancipatory and national struggle in East Kurdistan / West Iran. We asked ourselves the question: what was the role of Third Worldism in generating Fadais sympathy and support for the Kurdish uprising against Khomeini and Tehran that started just a month after the ayatollah returned to Iran; and why did that support eventually end, at least for the majority of the Fadai movement? To answer, we had to delve into questions of Persian- and Tehran-centrism in the Fadai and similar movements, of issues connected to the highly centralized and doctrinally inflexible nature of Marxist-Leninist organizations, and, eventually, the question of limits to Third Worldist solidarity inside a revolutionary moment that has the potential of re-structuring all aspects of political and social life. This was a very difficult and immensely instructive task, and we feel that we have managed to put together an analysis of great importance for new histories of the Iranian left that do not marginalize ethno-nationalist concerns.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
RCE & SH: We want historians to read the book, naturally! But we also think that it will engage people in area studies, sociology, and anthropology. Third Worldism is a timely issue when considering the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and the various constellations of solidarity and support, resistance and struggle, which have reanimated Third Worldist notions. Both in terms of Asian, African, and Latin American countries suggesting alternatives to Western hegemony, as showcased in South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and of global solidarity with Palestine from civil society, including in the West. At the same time, Russia is using anti-colonial struggle against the West to justify its invasion of Ukraine and is ushering groups like the African National Congress—the very drivers of the ICJ case—to participate in anti-colonial fora in Moscow. We hope that our book will help people think through the contradictions inherent in the traditions and ideological vestiges that Third Worldism carries with it today. Far from a set of ideas that “ended” in the 1980s, as some histories have had it, Third Worldism transformed and has lingering effects on world politics to this day.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
SH: I am writing a book about the early history of Palestine solidarity (1950s to 1980s) with an emphasis on Scandinavia. It is a social history based on years of doing interviews and retrieving archives and it features a collection of interwoven and quite colorful (this being the 1970s) personal histories. I hope to publish it next year. I am also working on a side project about politics and humor. After the summer, I begin a new project on futurism and the environment in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
RCE: I am writing two books for the Danish audience about Iran—one of them a unique collection of primary sources from the Iranian Revolution in 1979 that I hope will one day also be published in English. But my big project, which has just launched with Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi as my co-PI, is about the transnational entanglement of Iranian diaspora politics with homeland politics and geopolitics. My own subproject is about contentions in Iranian digital publics, including the role of West-based Persian-language media and social media. Just after we had filed a grant request in 2022 that project took on new importance with the Jina Uprising in Iran and we are excited to welcome two new postdocs to the project soon.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pp. 12-15)
The fact that 1979 seems to embody many of the changes discussed above clearly makes it a pedagogical way to explain the fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East. Indeed, the 1979 revolution in Iran is still treated in much of the broader literature on the Middle East as the breaking point between the decades dominated by secular and left-leaning ideologies and the following decades dominated by Islamism. However, a too narrow focus on 1979 as the proverbial ‘sharp turning point’ entails the risk of downplaying the precursors. It also affirms a traditional historiographic focus on political leadership – as opposed to social, cultural, or economic history – as the main marker of historical periods.
When we turn our gaze to social movements, as the authors in this book do, it becomes clear that trends manifesting themselves in 1979 had been a decade or more in the making. These trends point to an emerging social order and include authoritarian co-optation of Third Worldist anti-imperialism, splits and infights between revolutionary groups, Islamic revivalism, and the global advancement of economic liberalism.
The social order that emerged in the Middle East in the 1970s was, as the Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim pointed out in an influential 1982 study, largely the product of the shift from Arab nationalist and socialist politics once embodied by Egypt’s President Nasser to the ‘Petro-Islam’ of the Gulf states.30 During the 1970s, this emerging Gulf power created great wealth disparity with clear social, cultural, and political ramifications: mass in-region migration, new capitalist values, and behavioural patterns linked to liberalisation alongside supposedly ‘culturally authentic’ identity projects propagated by authoritarian states. The Westernised capitalist turn also produced dissent, however, in the form of Islamisation, on one hand, and the enduring attraction of revolutionary currents, on the other. If Third Worldist revolutionaries were still fighting by the mid-1970s, they were largely struggling against the current.
Due to these trends, the basic sense of historical direction arguably began to change in the late 1970s as dilemma and even defeat replaced possibility as the primary ‘structure of feeling’ on the anti-imperialist left. These dilemmas partly resulted from the dynamics of the Cold War, in particular the Sino-Soviet conflict, as well as from the USA’s covert and open counter-revolutionary measures and increasingly broad overtures to states and movements. They also came from internal contradictions on the left concerning the role of women, the lack of democratic organisational culture, and, more generally, a sometimes-destructive debate about the degree of economic, social, and political liberalism that the left should embrace. Another debate that was particularly heated in the Middle East, and which already created significant fissures in the mid-1970s, concerned the role of political Islam in otherwise largely secular opposition movements and organisations.
The structural change of Third Worldism played out inside and between states in the region, but it also echoed in the transnational revolutionary alliances and networks in which movements were embedded. In this way, the drift towards authoritarianism and Islamism had consequences for how the Western world viewed the rest of the world. By 1979, many Western leftists, who had generally viewed the southern political subject as inspiration for their own revolutionary ambitions in Europe and elsewhere during the Third Worldist period, became disenchanted and instead increasingly began to regard the Global South as an object in need of development and assistance.
In short, it is possible to trace many of the reasons why Third Worldist movements were weakened or underwent significant changes in the latter part of the 1970s. Therefore, this book argues, the focus on 1979 also obscures the possibility that the ‘breaking point’ might be periodised differently. While the Iranian Revolution certainly had a major impact on the Palestinian (yet-to-be-fulfilled) revolution, there are also limits to the explanatory power of 1979. Rather, in a Palestinian historiographical lens, it is arguably 1982 that stands out as the marker of the end of an era. Following the Israeli military campaign that included full-scale bombardment of west Beirut in the summer of 1982, Arafat and the PLO were forced to leave Lebanon, ending the revolutionary stage of the Palestinian struggle, and starting a new stage that would culminate in the PLO’s transformation to a state-like entity in the West Bank in the 1990s.
Third Worldism, as indicated above, from the beginning encompassed a statist and a non-statist project. If Iran’s revolution built on earlier postcolonial liberation and state-building projects – only with a new religious colouring – the Palestinian liberation movement until 1982 embodied the spirit of guerrilla struggle. In this sense, 1982 signals a very important shift away from the broader appeal of local military mobilisation that brought initial successes in Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Not that guerrilla activity ceased – as witnessed, for example, by the Iran-inspired and -sponsored Hizbollah movement in Lebanon, founded that year. Rather, the problem-space of Third Worldism transformed from one overwhelmingly concerned with revolution from below, and its contiguous forms of transnational networks, to one concerned with state-driven interventions.
Mirrored in this shift was the gradual decline of Marxism–Leninism as the overarching ideological framework for Third Worldist alliances and the rise of a diverse range of anti-imperialisms throughout a decade of internal splits that had begun around the 1967 war. Dominant political discourse shifted as militants began to question their tactics and commitments, from what remained of the leftist, Marxist discourse towards discourses of political Islam. As Homa Katouzian has put it, the late 1970s saw the face of resistance against imperialism change from the secular fida’yi to the religious mojahed. Iran played a key role in that transition, but it also involved decades of deliberation in Arab societies. Regional tensions and fault lines meant that resistance had now acquired a wider meaning than the straightforward anti-imperialism of the 1950s and 1960s.
Lines that had begun to blur in the 1970s between former allies in the Third Worldist project became deadly in the 1980s. In fact, the most common themes in political studies of the Middle East today refer back to the conflicts of that decade: the solidification of authoritarianism, Islamism as the main oppositional camp, the decline of Arab nationalism, the bifurcation of regional politics between a normalisation camp led by Egypt and the Gulf states versus a rejection camp led by Syria and Iran, the decline of Marxism and the suppression of liberalism, and the rise of the authoritarian-neoliberal axis of power centred in the Gulf countries.
As states adopted different positions and alliances, transnational revolutionary actors were often caught between their agendas. Many militants ended up on the receiving end of state repression, as they ran afoul of the official positions of authoritarian regimes. For their part, the regimes of leaders like Ruhollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad, and Muammar Gaddafi sought to monopolise and instrumentalise the antiimperialist struggle in this new age. Conflicts such as the Iran–Iraq War and the Lebanese civil war pitted them against each other, and at the same time exacerbated state repression across the region. The competition for hegemony and ownership of the Third Worldist mantle meant that authoritarian states took a firmer grip on their control over cultural expression, sidelining, exiling, incarcerating, and killing dissidents. This meant that by the mid-1980s, the dominant expression of Third Worldism in the region was no longer organically produced material from social movements, dissident intellectuals, and artists, but rather regime-sponsored propaganda.
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