Rasmus Christian Elling

Tribal hands and minority votes: ethnicity, regionalism and elections in Iran

Ethnic politics is a serious domestic challenge in Iran. Non-Persian communities are mobilizing to claim their rights and to demand representation in a system that activists claim is biased against minorities and the peripheral regions. Yet the inner workings of contemporary Iranian ethnic politics are largely understudied. This article explores recent evolutions in the role that ethnicity, regionalism and tribalism plays in Iranian domestic politics. It focuses on how these interconnected factors figured in the 2013 presidential and local council elections in Iran in a particular province that has a history of ethnic tensions. Incidentally, these elections brought Hassan Rouhani, a moderate cleric, to power as president. Among his electoral promises was to end the securitization of the minority issue. This article illustrates some of the barriers to a transformative ethnic politics – barriers that political leaders will have to overcome to enact real change.

Ethnic Minorities and the Politics of Identity in Iran

The present review essay is of a novel format: two authors working in the same field introduce each others works, and then pose a number of questions to each other. The aim is to facilitate dialogue between scholars occupied with similar issues, theories, methods or problems, and to share their discussions with others. Here, Alam Saleh, Lecturer in Middle Eastern Politics, University of Exeter, and Rasmus Christian Elling, Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies, University of Copenhagen, introduce each others recent books on ethnic minorities, identity and nationalism in post-revolution Iran. These introductions are then followed by questions and answers in relation to the topics covered by the books.

Matters of Authenticity: Nationalism, Islam, and Ethnic Diversity in Iran

During a ceremony in 2010, cameras caught Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a somewhat awkward situation: he was tiptoeing to place a keffiyeh around the neck of a tall man on a podium. The checkered keffiyeh scarf, recognized as a Palestinian national symbol in most of the world, is seen by Iranians as an insignia of the hard-line Basij militia. The absurdity of the scene lay in the fact that the man on the podium was dressed not as an Islamist storm trooper, but as a soldier of the ancient, pre-Islamic Achaemenid dynasty. The ceremony marked not only the return of an important antique relic to Iran—the so-called Cyrus Cylinder—but also an important shift in ideological discourse. Ahmadinejad’s clumsiness in bestowing the keffiyeh seemed to suggest his unease not so much in the presence of the foreign guests attending the ceremony but rather with the potential reaction of the wider domestic audience—in particular those of his Islamist supporters who would be shocked by the scene. Yet, Ahmadinejad’s keffiyeh bestowal did little to cover what was a blatant show of nationalist pride, unprecedented in Iran’s 30 years as Islamic Republic.

The Minority Issue

The downfall of the Pahlavi monarchy during the 1978–9 Iranian Revolution brought about a short, intense period of activity in Iran’s minority regions. The movement against the shah was a broad coalition that spanned Persian speakers and non-Persian speakers alike, and its leaders presented the revolution as an Islamic road to social justice for women, minorities, industrial workers, students, farmers and shantytown-dwellers.