Iranian Identity and National Oppression: Crafting the Modern Iranian Nation–State

Abstract

During Iran's 2022–2023 countrywide uprising, the intensity of popular protests in Kurdistan and Baluchistan drew attention to the question of national oppression. Some scholars then revisited a debate, originally articulated in Marxist circles, on whether Iran's culturally and politically oppressed communities, like Azeris, Kurds, Baluchis or Arabs, are ethnic or national minorities. This article approaches the debate within the frame of national oppression as a historical construction. It argues that in Iran, as in almost all modern nation-states, nationhood was established through the forcible creation of minoritized communities whose potential claims to nationhood, or an equal place in a politically democratic and culturally pluralist nation, have been denied.