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The Nation-State and the (Re)Construction of Religious, Ethnic and Gender Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2024

Azadeh Kian Open the ORCID record for Azadeh Kian [Opens in a new window]
Azadeh Kian*
Affiliation:
Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Director of the Center for Gender and Feminist Studies and Research CEDREF, université Paris Cité
*
Email: azadeh.kian@u-paris.fr
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Extract

Nationalism, nationhood, and ethnicity, as Eric Hobsbawm argued, are social processes constructed essentially from above, yet cannot be understood unless also analyzed from below.1 Inspired by European Orientalism, the intellectual advocates of Western-oriented nationalism attempted to establish a new Iranian identity based on Persian language and Iran's pre-Islamic past.2 This made Iranian nationalism an attractive ideology for some political elites, and was later endorsed by the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–79) when nationalist ideology replaced Iranianness with Persianity. In this conception, there was no room for the ethnic diversity of a nation-state that is the heir of an ancient empire. The elites’ aspirations to uniformity put pressure on members of ethnic groups to conform their way of life to a new model of Iranianness, Persianized and pro-Western. Every nonconforming element was regarded as a sign of backwardness and possible threat to the modern nation and its territorial integrity.

Keywords

Shi'ismPersianitygenderethnicityexclusionsecuritizationdiscriminationsocial changepower
Type
Round Table
Information
Iranian Studies , First View , pp. 1 - 6
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Association for Iranian Studies

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