In this monograph, published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (April 28, 2021), Brenda Shaffer challenges the common assumption that Iran is a Persian nation-state.
She shows that Persians make up less than half of Iran’s population, and that roughly 40 percent of Iranians lack fluency in Persian, with substantial minority communities including Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Baluchs, Lurs, and Ahwazi Arabs, many of them concentrated in border provinces adjacent to their co-ethnics abroad.
Shaffer details how the Islamic Republic enforces a Persian-centric national identity, restricting minority languages in schools and government, while ethnic minority regions bear a disproportionate share of environmental degradation, water scarcity, and economic neglect. She pays particular attention to Khuzestan, Iran’s main oil-producing province, as a potential flashpoint for unrest.
The monograph also finds that Iran’s mainstream opposition largely ignores minority rights, which has kept anti-regime movements fragmented, and argues that U.S. policymakers need to take Iran’s ethnic diversity seriously as a factor in the country’s politics and stability.
