On 25 January, Time magazine reported, citing Iranian government officials and Ministry of Health data, that at least 30,000 protesters were killed and thousands more injured—many critically—during a nationwide crackdown earlier that month. According to this internal tally, the scale of state violence overwhelmed morgue capacity and medical facilities across the country. Even this figure is widely believed to undercount the number of dead. If accurate, it would rank among the deadliest documented episodes of state repression in modern history.
The scale of the crackdown points to a deeper structural crisis. It reflects a long-standing collision between a highly centralised authoritarian state and peripheral peoples that have been systematically excluded from power. Explaining this level of force requires looking beyond the immediate trigger of the protests to the ideological and security architecture that shapes Iranian political authority.
Iran’s extreme centralisation rests on an ideological hierarchy that predates the Islamic Republic. Within this hierarchy, Persian identity is positioned as the normative standard. Both the Pahlavi monarchy and the current theocratic system have operated through a form of Persian supremacism that privileges one language, culture, and ethnicity while treating the cultural identities of peripheral peoples as deviations to be managed or assimilated. Political unity, in this framework, is equated with ethno-cultural homogenisation.
This continuity helps explain why successive regimes—despite their ideological differences—have relied on similar mechanisms of control. Diversity and pluralism have not been treated as constitutive features of the state, but as persistent threats that require routine suppression. The present scale of violence is therefore not an anomaly. It is the logical outcome of an ethno-sectarian system that treats non-Persian lives as expendable whenever central authority is contested.
Some Iranian intellectuals have openly acknowledged this hierarchy. In a 2011 interview, Sadegh Zibakalam, a professor at the University of Tehran, argued that ethnic prejudice is deeply embedded in Persian society, including among educated elites. Although he spoke most bluntly about hostility toward Arabs, he emphasised that the pattern extends far beyond a single group. Kurds, Baluchis, Azerbaijanis, Lurs, and other communities, he noted, are routinely ridiculed, marginalised, or treated as culturally inferior. In his account, this is not an aberration but a durable feature of Iran’s social and political order.
State Formation and the Structure of Internal Colonialism (1925–1979)
The unitary political model that governs Iran today did not arise organically from a social contract, nor was it created by the Islamic Republic. It took shape during the state-building project launched by Reza Shah Pahlavi after the establishment of the Pahlavi monarchy in 1925. That project sought to replace a plural, multi-ethnic system of governance with a centralised and monolithic national identity centred on the Persian language and culture.
This transformation depended on coercive state measures. Persian was established as the sole official language, and local governance structures in peripheral regions were dismantled or absorbed into centrally appointed bureaucracies. The state also systematically altered place names—particularly in Ahwazi Arab, Kurdish, Baluch, and Turkic regions—replacing indigenous toponyms with Persian equivalents.
In Ahwaz, the process took a distinct form. Unlike other peripheral regions, the state refused to recognise the region’s historic semi-independent status or even its established name. It was redesignated “Khuzestan,” reduced to provincial status, and fragmented into multiple administrative enclaves. This redrawing of territory broke up culturally cohesive Ahwazi Arab-populated areas into smaller, more manageable units. The move was widely understood as an attempt to weaken Ahwazi collective political identity and limit claims to autonomy.
The Pahlavi dynasty also pursued policies of forced resettlement and displacement against resistant peripheral peoples, particularly Ahwazi Arabs. After the 1925 military occupation of Ahwaz and its incorporation into a centralised state, local resistance was met with systematic suppression. Many Ahwazi residents viewed the Iranian state and its military presence as an occupying and alien force. In the early years of the takeover, thousands resisted in an effort to restore autonomous governance. Their displacement to northern and central Iran followed, and hundreds died from exposure while being forced to travel long distances on foot. Although official narratives described these campaigns as modernisation, they functioned in practice as mechanisms resembling colonial control, compulsory assimilation, and historical erasure.
While the 1979 Revolution altered the regime’s ideological language, it left this centralised structure intact. By replacing secular nationalism with theocracy while preserving a rigid unitary state, the Islamic Republic inherited a Pahlavi-era doctrine: diversity was treated as a security threat, homogeneity as a prerequisite for unity, and state violence as a legitimate response to decentralising demands. When peripheral peoples in Ahwaz, Kurdistan, and the Turkmen regions called for self-rule after the revolution, the new government responded with immediate and lethal crackdowns, framing autonomy as an existential danger to national integrity. In effect, the revolution repackaged an established system of centralised suppression under a new ideological banner. The underlying authoritarian structure remained substantively unchanged.
Power and Geography: The Centre and the Peripheries
Iran’s political geography operates more as a structure of control than as a social contract. Power is concentrated on the central plateau—Tehran and its Persian-majority heartland—where political institutions, security agencies, and economic infrastructure are anchored. The country’s borderlands, by contrast, are shaped by transboundary ethnic continuities that complicate the state’s monopoly on authority.
The central government’s relationship with these peripheries often follows a coloniser–colonised dynamic. Policies seek to fragment border regions and weaken cross-border kinship ties. Yet peripheral peoples —particularly Kurds, Baluchis, and Ahwazis—retain enduring social and cultural links to ethnic kin across national boundaries. This persistence functions as a form of resistance to assimilation, sustaining identities that the central state has struggled to absorb or erase.
Because of this dynamic, cultural identity in these regions is routinely securitised. Authorities treat it as a potential channel for foreign interference, justifying heavy militarisation and surveillance. Identity itself becomes framed as a permanent security concern.
International observers have documented the consequences. In August 2024, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that Kurds, Baluchis, and Ahwazi Arabs were disproportionately targeted in state crackdowns, reflecting long-standing marginalisation and layered discrimination. The state reinforces this framing by labelling detained activists as “security prisoners” rather than political prisoners, criminalising collective demands and recasting political dissent as terrorism or espionage.
The System of Colonial Extraction
Long before the current wave of protests, non-Persian activists and analysts described Iran’s governing order as a form of internal colonialism: a system in which a dominant centre subordinates peripheral populations within the same state. Under this framework, marginalisation of non-Persian peoples is not incidental. Authority is centralised to extract resources, regulate identity, and prevent peripheral regions from shaping their own political futures.
The Ahwazi Arab regions illustrate this structure clearly. State policy has combined environmental degradation with intensive resource extraction while denying local populations meaningful economic participation. As a result, Ahwazi areas have been transformed into zones of underdevelopment and ecological damage. Within this logic, the land functions as what critics describe as racialised sacrifice zones—concentrated in communities predominantly inhabited by Ahwazis and treated as expendable. Resource extraction proceeds relentlessly, while local populations are marginalised socially, culturally, and politically.
The environmental consequences have produced a severe humanitarian crisis. Ahwaz consistently records Iran’s highest annual cancer rates, linked to industrial pollution, water scarcity, and toxic dust storms. Despite this emergency, medical infrastructure remains chronically inadequate. Many deaths result from preventable or treatable conditions, with residents lacking access to the facilities needed to address illnesses tied directly to extractive state policies.
Economic marginalisation reinforces this pattern. Key industries operate largely through non-local workforces, excluding indigenous populations from their own regional economy. Over a dozen major protest waves between 2005 and 2021 reflected mounting pressure under what many describe as a settlement-colonisation model designed to reduce the Ahwazi majority to a marginalised minority. State incentives encourage migration from the central plateau into newly constructed towns, while agricultural land is confiscated for national projects, including IRGC-linked sugarcane developments.
Displaced farmers are pushed into neglected peripheral settlements that are subsequently securitised and subjected to harsh crackdowns. Excluded from formal employment, many Ahwazi Arabs turn to underground economies to survive. One example is the shoti drivers who transport banned goods across cities. Because this work is criminalised, encounters with security forces frequently end in extrajudicial killings without accountability.
In this environment, Ahwazi existence approaches what political theorists describe as “bare life”—a condition in which legal protection is effectively suspended. Deaths are not treated as crimes, and lives are not reliably shielded by law. Exposure to arbitrary state violence becomes a structural feature of everyday life.
This pattern extends across Iran’s peripheral borderlands. In Baluchistan, protests following the killing of impoverished ‘fuel carriers’ (Sokhtbar) are routinely met with extreme violence and labelled as terrorism to justify collective punishment. In Kurdistan, decades of underdevelopment have pushed thousands into the hazardous labour of the Kolbar, porters who carry heavy goods across mountain borders. Like the Baluch fuel carriers, they are regularly targeted by border guards, and their struggle for survival is treated as a security threat answered with live ammunition.
Across these regions, the state responds in strikingly similar ways. Indigenous demands for rights and livelihoods are framed as existential threats to territorial integrity. Rarely acknowledged is that Iranian authority in many of these areas has been described by some analysts as resembling an ongoing form of belligerent occupation rooted in earlier military conquest.
This structure amounts to what theorists describe as necropolitical domination: a system in which the state determines who remains protected and who is exposed to death. Despite the human cost, protest has not disappeared. It has shifted form, moving from spontaneous street confrontations toward organised strikes and cross-regional solidarity that challenge the foundations of this system. This material system of extraction is inseparable from a parallel system of identity control, where language, naming, and everyday cultural expression become objects of state security.
The Securitisation of Identity, Language, and Everyday Control
One of the clearest expressions of internal colonial governance is the regulation of language and identity. The Iranian state has long restricted the public use of non-Persian languages in education and administration, treating civic efforts to preserve mother tongues as acts of sedition. Teaching, publishing, or organising in indigenous languages is routinely reframed as a national security issue.
This securitisation-oriented approach has produced targeted repression of educators and intellectuals. Kurdish teacher Zara Mohammadi received a five-year prison sentence for linguistic activism. Dozens of Ahwazi educators, including Hashem Shabani and Hadi Rashedi, faced even harsher outcomes after promoting Arabic language education; both were imprisoned and executed in 2013.
The same logic extends into everyday civil life. Naming regulations require parents to select from state-approved lists dominated by Persian and sanctioned Islamic forms. Families from Kurdish, Ahwazi Arab, and Azerbaijani communities are frequently prevented from registering children under names drawn from their own traditions. The result is a dual identity: one imposed in official documents and another maintained in lived social reality.
Mahsa Amini’s case illustrates the policy’s reach. Known to her family as Jina, she was officially registered under a Persian name because her Kurdish identity was rejected by civil authorities. Her experience reflects what some scholars characterise as a form of cultural genocide in which the state reshapes personal identity at the bureaucratic level, affecting millions across peripheral communities.
In these ethnic periphery regions, dissent is consistently recast as a security matter. Political mobilisation is stripped of civic meaning and labelled extremism, separatism, or terrorism. This framing converts social grievances into grounds for coercion and is often echoed by segments of nationalist opposition discourse.
The distinction is unevenly applied. Protests in Tehran are debated in political terms, while unrest in ethnic borderlands is presumed to signal disloyalty. Environmental demonstrations in Ahwaz, protests over the killing of fuel carriers in Baluchistan, and Kurdish civic activism are quickly subsumed under security narratives. Non-Persian identities become associated with suspicion, enabling racialised justifications for repression.
The cycle is self-reinforcing. Repression generates resentment, which the state cites as evidence that further force is necessary. Stability is not achieved; dissent is managed through recurring violence. Increasingly, this management has been militarised. Units of the Revolutionary Guard and associated paramilitary networks—designed for external conflict—are deployed in domestic policing, and protest zones are treated as hostile territory.
The recent decline in large-scale street demonstrations does not signal political quiet. It reflects adaptation. In Ahwaz, communities have emphasised lower-visibility tactics such as graffiti campaigns, market closures, and targeted strikes. These methods reduce exposure to lethal crackdowns while sustaining resistance. For peripheral populations, the absence of spectacle does not indicate passivity; it represents a strategic recalibration shaped by long experience.
Peripheral movements also confront marginalisation within opposition discourse. Dominant narratives centred in the political core often treat decentralisation or self-determination as secondary or divisive concerns. Peripheral peoples are expected to contribute to political change without defining its terms. Postponing debates over power-sharing in the name of unity risks reproducing the very hierarchies that generated exclusion in the first place. These patterns of economic extraction and identity securitisation converge in the present crisis.
Beyond Survival, Toward Political Equality
The scale of violence reported in January 2026 underscores that this crisis is not episodic. It is the outcome of a political system built on extreme centralisation and the systematic exclusion of peripheral populations. For more than a century, non-Persian communities—including Ahwazi Arabs, Baluchis, and Kurds—have pressed for autonomy and control over their resources and cultural institutions.
The state’s response has been consistent: securitising identity and treating cultural difference as disloyalty. Under both monarchy and theocracy, repression has functioned as a governing principle rather than an emergency measure.
Persistent unrest shows that these demands have adapted rather than disappeared. The central question facing Iran is not only the survival of the current regime but whether any future political order will break with the inherited logic of centralised domination. A transition that preserves the same structure under a new ideological banner would reproduce familiar cycles of violence.
A different outcome requires de-securitising identity and recognising peripheral peoples as legitimate political actors. It requires genuine power-sharing rather than managed compliance. Political autonomy and equality cannot be treated as threats to unity. They are the necessary foundations of any shared and durable political future in Iran.
By Rahim Hamid And Mehdi Ramezanzadeh
Rahim Hamid is an Ahwazi freelance journalist and researcher at the Dialogue Institute for Research and Studies.
