Keith Mclachlan - The Boundaries of Modern Iran

Iran and neighbouring states.

Iran has functioned for at least 5,000 years as a state and the centre of an empire. During this considerable period its boundaries with its neighbours have been relatively fluid ( Nonetheless, despite the powerful influences working against the need for hard and fast borders, of which Islam is perhaps the principal one, contemporary Iran under both the Pahlavi regime and the Islamic republic has adopted very clear policies towards defining and protecting state territory.

The administration of Iran has historically been plagued with difficulties of exerting authority outside the main areas of population and, therefore, in fixing its national frontiers. Iran is a vast and diverse country of 1,648,000km2, only a tenth of which is under settled forms of economic use. The rest is desert, steppe and high mountain. In many ways Iran was until the early 20th century a set of diverse ethnic and linguistic groups unified under a single government and sharing a common literature, social ethos and culture. The largest single provincial region by population size was Azerbaijan, where there was a concentration of Azhari speakers of the Turkic group of languages. Other coherent areas with a regional consciousness could be defined, including Kurdistan in the west, the Arab zone of the Khuzistan lowlands in the southwest, the Turkmen steppe of the north and the Baluch area of the southeast.

The Iranian territorial inheritance from the Qajar dynasty in 1921 was much reduced from earlier periods and weakly defined in international practice. This volume attempts to examine the evolution of the countrys international boundaries in the contemporary epoch during which Iran has been buffeted by an apparently unending series of international and internal crises.

Riza Khans and Sayyid Zia al-Din Tabatabais coup detat against the Qajars in February 1921 gave Iran a short breathing space of strong central control during which the idea of a modern nation-state was imposed on the country and the national borders made generally secure. This experience was important for Iran because it enabled the government to tie its many varied provinces firmly to the centre. Beginning in 1921, Riza Khan put down regional revolts by the tribes of the Khamseh and others before beginning the process of reducing rebellion elsewhere in the west. Riza Khan took advantage of the Russian withdrawal from Iranian soil in September 1921 to put down the revolt of Kuchik Khan in the northern province of Gilan, marking the clear beginning of the centralization process. In the following year Riza Khan attacked rebel forces in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan and settled the northeast province of Khorasan. The process continued in 1923 in the south where the main tribes, the Bakhtiari and Qashqai, were put down and Shaikh Khazal, the regional ruler of Khuzistan, removed to Tehran.