The Invisible Role of Ethnic Relations in Iran’s Current Crisis

[This article is part of the Jadaliyya Iran Page's dossier, "Iran in Crisis: Seven Essays on the Obstacles to Freedom." Click here to read the dossier's introduction and browse the rest of the dossier.]

Beneath Iran’s current turmoil lies a deeper and still understudied question of ethnic relations and center–periphery power dynamics. This relationship has shaped not only the country’s authoritarian political order but also many of the political and environmental crises that underpin the present moment. Yet despite its centrality, ethnicity and the periphery’s view of Iran’s past and future remain largely absent from mainstream debate; in both Persian and Western media, these questions are consistently silenced and sidelined. The question of ethnicity is often treated as too dangerous to confront directly. 

This silence is particularly notable in discussions of authoritarianism in the country. For more than a century, demands for the rule of law and democratic governance have been central in Iranian political life. Yet despite political mobilizations and revolutions, authoritarianism has reproduced itself and reemerged in different forms. Scholars have tried to explain the failure of democratization in the country, pointing to factors ranging from institutional weakness and foreign intervention to the dynamics of the rentier state.  Yet, it is remarkable how rarely the persistence of authoritarianism is examined through the lens of ethnic relations, while it is not difficult to see how the fear of territorial disintegration and potential ethnic tension play a significant role in the story. 

This anxiety, above all, shapes how political futures are imagined and how political projects are weighed. Political debates frequently revolve around the risk of state collapse and territorial disintegration. This anxiety surfaces in discussions about the potential U.S. war with Iran, analyses of popular uprisings, and discussions about transitional strategies away from the Islamic Republic, among others. The fear, of course, is not new, and since the formation of the modern Iranian state it has functioned as a powerful ideological apparatus that has marginalized and even erased the periphery from public debates and conversations. However, over time it has come to entrap the center itself. As fear of losing the country dominated and structured political thinking, it also narrowed strategies and constrained actions for democratization. It channelled politics toward faith in reformism, arguably an exercise in cruel optimism^[1] that was effectively suppressed after the 2009 stolen election, or openly promoted regressive choices such as support for monarchy or complicity with the Islamic Republic, all of which have played a central role in Iran’s current political impasse. And in one way or another, all of these paths were (in)consistently chosen to avoid jeopardizing the country’s unity and current balance of power in its center-periphery relations.  

Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, the state’s authoritarian modes of governance have largely emerged and gained legitimacy through this fear of territorial and state fragmentation. In the absence of any credible political project for fair incorporation, repression has remained the only tool at the state’s disposal for maintaining control over ethnic regions. And when this coercive order breaks down, struggles over sovereignty, redistribution, and recognition come to the fore. 

This dynamic becomes especially apparent in the history of modern Iran, when the country faced power cacuums.After Reza Shah's rule ended in 1941, and again after the Pahlavi monarchy fell in 1979, Iran's periphery erupted as ethnic minorities across the country demanded political and cultural rights that had been denied since the establishment of the modern Iranian state. In both cases, the new political order quickly reestablished state authority in the peripheries through militarization and violence. Once the state reestablished and consolidated its coercive apparatus, which in the center was justified as necessary to maintain territorial integrity, it changed the way the state governed the entire country. In other words, the technologies of repression developed to rule the periphery were eventually extended to manage other forms of dissent in the center. In this sense, the authoritarianism that people oppose in today’s Iran is not only rooted in Shia clerical theology or the militarized structure; it is also rooted in center-periphery dynamics that have been systematically suppressed and evaded by Iranian scholars, intellectuals, and politicians out of fear of disintegration. The consequences, however, continue to shape and haunt the present.

Concerns about territorial disintegration have also fractured political forces, including among the opposition to the Islamic Republic. Alliances have failed along a single fault line: whether territorial integrity takes precedence over political inclusion and whether representatives from the periphery are even admitted into coalitions. Many ethnic minority political parties have rejected the opposition as a whole, viewing it as rooted in a Persian-Shia ethno-religious nationalism that leaves little room for genuine pluralism and inclusion. On the other hand, the Iranian opposition from the center is concerned that giving space to ethnic minorities will destabilize the country. Conversely, opposition groups view the inclusion of ethnic minority actors in coalitions as a threat to national unity, while the state uses ethnic uprisings to instill fear in the public.

The Jina uprising demonstrated this dynamic. As Kurdistan and Baluchistan became the front lines of resistance, middle-class Iranians in the central provinces became hesitant to participate, and some withdrew from the uprising entirely. Around the same time, videos of Sunni Baluch militias, Kurdish organizations such as PJAK (the Kurdistan Free Life Party), and Pan-Turkist groups, among others, were widely shared by accounts close to the government. Similarly, during the June 2025 12-day war, pro-government accounts falsely claimed that Baluch and Kurdish "smugglers" were used to bring weapons into the country. The underlying message of all these narratives is clear: in the absence of a strong central state, chaos will prevail and ethnic parties will seize control of their territories. The question posed here is, what does this fear do to democratic and progressive forces, if such forces exist?  How does it further fracture already fractured forces and weaken the base needed to mobilize an effective alternative to authoritarian rule? 

Center-Periphery Relations and Environmental Ruin

The current political impasse in Iran cannot be explained by political closure alone. It is also influenced by the worsening environmental crisis, which includes water scarcity, drought, and widespread pollution. Many people interpret these conditions as technical failures or the result of government inefficiency. To some extent, this is true. However, these crises, which have now escalated into mega-crises, are inextricably linked to Iran’s long history of ethnicized governance, which has shaped the country’s uneven development. By uneven development, I refer to the structural geographical inequalities through which economic resources, infrastructure, and political power are concentrated in the center, while peripheral, ethnic regions remain underdeveloped and marginalized. It is a type of internal colonialism in which peripheral regions are subordinated to the center through extraction, dispossession, and unequal development within the boundaries of the nation-state (see Hechter 1975).

This becomes obvious when the geography of resources and power is considered. The vast majority of Iran's natural resources—oil, gas, and major water sources—are found outside the central plateau, in areas with non-Persian communities and a sizable Sunni population. By contrast, the Shia-Persian majority is concentrated on the central plateau, an arid region bounded to the west by the Zagros Mountains, to the north by the Alborz range, and to the east by Iran's central desert. However, as political authority and decision-making power consolidated in these areas, resources transferred from the periphery to the centre.

Khuzestan exemplifies the devastation caused by uneven development, a type of internal colonialism in which peripheral regions are treated as sources of extraction and sacrificed to enrich the center. The province, which is home to an Arab minority, accounts for approximately 80% of Iran's oil reserves. It is also abundant with water, accounting for nearly one-third of the country's surface water. Yet, Khuzestan remains one of the poorest provinces in the country, with Arab communities receiving almost none of the wealth. 

Instead, oil and gas revenues were used to fund urban development and infrastructure in major cities in the center. The government also carried out large-scale water diversion and dam projects to transport water to overburdened metropolitan areas, as well as increased agricultural and industrial projects in arid and desert areas. Population flows followed these resource transfers, and this uneven development eventually led to overpopulation, environmental degradation, and resource scarcity, all of which could no longer be addressed by additional water transfers.

Furthermore, the province's main rivers and the Hawr al-Azim marsh, which is part of one of the largest wetland ecosystems in the Mesopotamian basin, have all vanished as a result of state water projects, putting the region on the brink of environmental collapse. These conditions culminated in 2021's “thirst uprising,” in which marginalized Arab communities marched for water in an area once known for its abundance. 

These capital-intensive, resource-extractive projects may be familiar to readers, as they resemble development models imposed on many Global South countries by the IMF and the World Bank and have been widely condemned by anti-colonial and environmental justice movements. In Iran, however, it is the central state that acts as the agent of extraction and dispossession, and these policies are structured through long-standing ethnic hierarchies. My focus here, however, is not on documenting the marginalization of ethnic minorities, which is important in its own right. My goal, rather, is to show how ethnic relations, a topic frequently marginalized by the majority, have been deeply embedded in the country’s overlapping environmental and socio-political crises.

Finally, and within this context, we must ask the question directly: does separatism pose a significant threat to Iran’s future? The answer is determined less by ethnic aspirations than by how the state chooses to govern. As long as political order is maintained primarily through coercion, the possibility of separatism remains latent, waiting for a crisis or state collapse to emerge. Repression does not resolve the national question; rather, it defers it. Moving beyond this condition necessitates a new political logic based on negotiation, fair inclusion, and democratic governance capable of accommodating the periphery as a political constituency rather than a threat to the national entity. Any long-term political future in Iran depends on confronting these issues, and the first step is recognition.