Modern state-building is often presented as a story of unity and nationhood. For many people, however, it’s also a story of loss. For the Ahwazi Arab people, the past century has been defined by systematic erasure and exclusion.
To examine Ahwaz is to face a truth Tehran prefers to ignore or deny: that the modern Iranian state, in consolidating central authority, was built on the subjugation, exploitation and colonisation of another people while seeking to absorb, marginalise, and ultimately obscure them.
Ahwaz, an occupied and colonised region in south-southwest Iran, comprising provinces of present-day Khuzestan, Bushehr, and Hormozgan, and historically connected territories, sits atop massive oil and gas reserves. Despite its vast resource wealth and strategic importance for Iran, however, the local Ahwazi Arabs remain excluded from the prosperity built upon their lands and assets.
Across Ahwazi towns and villages, the local Ahwazi population endures chronic neglect, dilapidated infrastructure, limited or non-existent services, environmental decline, horrendous pollution, and economic exclusion. Meanwhile, nearby corporate compounds were constructed to accommodate Persian settlers working in the oil and gas sector. These economic settlers enjoy welfare systems and various opportunities that are inaccessible to the local Arab Ahwazi population.
One of the first features of Ahwaz city to catch the attention of visitors and lifelong residents alike is its layout: a collection of neighbourhoods that are geographically adjacent yet vastly disparate in character. In other words, the current urban planning in Ahwaz reveals a clear division between luxurious, affluent neighbourhoods—often called the ‘high-end areas’—and marginalised, neglected neighbourhoods, which we may refer to here as peripheral or impoverished districts.
In this context, the term ‘high-end areas’ refers to the city’s wealthier, more modern neighbourhoods, characterised by better infrastructure, services, and housing, which are typically inhabited by Persian settlers or the urban elite. These areas symbolise the city’s centre of power, wealth, and modernity. These pleasant leafy neighbourhoods contrast sharply with the overcrowded, dilapidated and marginalised working-class neighbourhoods—poor, neglected, and often located on the outskirts—that are primarily inhabited by members of the local majority Ahwazi Arab population.
Similar glaring disparities in affluence and poverty are also seen between adjacent neighbourhoods in other Iranian cities —especially in Tehran, which is famously split between the affluent ‘Paleh Shahr’ in the city’s north and the poverty-stricken ‘Bayein Shahr’ areas in its south. In these cases, however, the underlying reason for the shocking contrast is primarily related to stark class differences rooted in massive income inequality. This socioeconomic, class-driven divide creates a chasm between the working-class residents in the capital’s poorer southern ‘Payein Shahr’ areas and those in the more developed ‘Baleh Shahr’ neighbourhoods which affects all aspects of life, including the religious, cultural, and social facets.
The underlying cause of the disparity between wealthy and impoverished neighbourhoods in Ahwaz city, however, is fundamentally different. Unlike the economic and class-based split seen in Tehran and other Iranian cities, the vast discrepancies between Ahwaz city’s wealthier and poorer neighbourhoods are rooted in ethnicity and origin. This unofficial urban apartheid reflects a division between Ahwazi Arab inhabitants, given no choice but to live in the impoverished, overcrowded neighbourhoods on the city’s outskirts, marginalised in every sense, and the Persian settlers occupying the central, more expansive, better developed, more ‘civilised’ districts. In other words, it mirrors the reality of a predominant Ahwazi Arab ‘backward’ majority spread across tribes, contrasted with the supposedly more advanced’ Persian urban minority—an image that reinforces the idea that the majority Ahwazi Arab population should emulate Persians to attain “civilisation” (from the Persian perspective), avoid expulsion, and gain acceptance into the dominant identity that privileges Persian culture over Arab.
This stark contrast is not in city layouts alone, however, but lies at the heart of the Ahwazi experience: a land of immense natural wealth alongside impoverished indigenous communities very deliberately excluded from it.
This is not, therefore, simply a story of poverty. It is a tale of land, power, identity, about who is permitted to benefit from the wealth beneath the land and who is excluded from doing so.
The system sustaining this reality can be understood through what might be called the Triangle of Oppression: settler colonialism, securitisation, and necropolitics. Together, these three forces shape land, identity, and survival itself—controlling territory, transforming existence into suspicion, and determining whose lives are protected and whose are rendered expendable.
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Settler Colonialism and Forced Deprivation
The first side of this triangle is the combination of settler colonialism and forced deprivation. Settler colonialism refers to a system in which settlers seek permanent occupation of land and the displacement, assimilation, or replacement of Indigenous societies, rather than solely exploiting labour or resources, while forced deprivation can be defined as the deliberate restriction or denial of access to essential resources, rights, services, or living conditions, resulting in material, social, or economic hardship.
Historically, prior to 1925, Ahwaz had maintained significant autonomy and political distinctiveness. The rise of the modern centralised system imposed by Tehran brought a different vision: one built around consolidation, territorial control, and demographic transformation.
The paradox is stark: Ahwaz contains much of Iran’s energy wealth, yet many indigenous communities continue to live at the margins of that prosperity. Poverty-stricken villages lacking paved roads, medical facilities, schools, or any green spaces sit within sight of affluent corporate compounds, complete with their own clinics, shopping malls, schools, and parks, created solely for the Persian workers brought in to run and staff the oil and gas sector and their families. Locals are banned from entering.
The message is difficult to ignore: the land and what’s beneath it remain essential, while the people tied to it are essentially disposable. Economic exclusion is far more than inequality alone; it is a mechanism of control.
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Securitisation and the Politics of Suspicion
The second side of the oppression triangle is securitisation, the process by which political, social, or cultural issues are redefined as security threats requiring exceptional measures or state intervention. Through the use of this framework, Ahwazis’ language, culture, and very existence are recast as an existential threat to Iranian national security.
Rather than engaging with or even acknowledging the legitimacy of the people’s grievances over inequality, representation, cultural rights, environmental damage, or other concerns, the state responds with automatic hostility, suspicion, heavy militarisation, and the complete denial of fundamental civil rights.
The state’s automatic response to Ahwazi protests over cultural preservation or political representation is a dismissive sneer of rejection, usually accompanied by casually racist anti-Arab rhetoric: “Back to the desert; let them go to one of the other Arab countries.”
When defenders of this status quo are confronted with their naked bigotry and the reality of the Ahwazi people’s suffering, rather than expressing any contrition, they double down, weaponising the very poverty created by state neglect against the Ahwazi people, mockingly telling activists to go back and live in their “backward” neighbourhoods. This reveals a cruel and ruthless colonial rationale: by transforming an entire homeland into a heavily policed, securitised zone, the state uses the structural ruin it creates and maintains to stereotype the victims’ Arab identity as inherently “unruly” or “underdeveloped.”
In this weird Through the Looking Glass inversion, the Ahwazi Arab population in all their areas, subjected to neglect, are judged for the conditions produced by that state-sponsored neglect. Poverty becomes evidence. Marginalisation becomes a way for further ethnic humiliation. Structural deprivation is repackaged as cultural deficiency. The result is a colonial logic in which an entire population is viewed not as citizens with grievances, but as subjects requiring surveillance and control.
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Necropolitics and the Slow Violence of Environmental Destruction
The third side of the oppression triangle is necropolitics: the use of political power to determine who may live and who may die, through systems that expose particular populations to violence, deprivation, or abandonment.
In Ahwaz, necropolitics extends far beyond overt repression and the now routine imprisonment, torture, and execution of activists. For the authoritarian centre in Tehran, the driving motivation in maintaining a stranglehold over this region is its vital, parasitic economic dependence on Ahwazi oil, gas, and petrochemicals. To this end, all else is regarded as expendable, with ecocide essentially weaponised as realpolitik; thus, necropolitics is exercised through the catastrophic and wholly deliberate drying of the once-vast marshlands, wilful environmental degradation, horrendous industrial pollution, destruction of agricultural systems, loss of fisheries, and erosion of livelihoods that sustained communities for generations.
The consequences are profound and cataclysmic. When ecosystems collapse, displacement follows. When land becomes unlivable, migration becomes a necessity rather than a choice. When traditional economies disappear, dependency replaces autonomy. Environmental destruction is political. This struggle is no longer only over territory but has become a struggle for survival itself; under such conditions, the majority of people are too busy struggling for existence to fight those responsible for their ruin.
Beyond the Language of “Minorities”
The dimensions of this triangle of oppression are routinely obscured or downplayed on the global stage due to a near-reflexive reductionism around international legal discourse. International forums and human rights organisations consistently reduce the nakedly colonial and racist policies inflicted by Tehran to anodyne academic formulas – “structural discrimination” or “ethnic oppression,” terms that fail to capture the deeper lived experience of internal colonialism, securitised governance, and mass dispossession which Ahwazis are subject to, and which obscure the degree and magnitude of the structural problem.
Global institutions routinely explain this situation merely as a natural byproduct of the current Iranian regime’s authoritarian nature, forcing the identity and demands of this society into the narrow, inadequate legal categories of “ethnic minorities” or “minority groups.”
Despite decades of resistance, the Ahwazi struggle still faces major obstacles in conveying the reality of internal colonialism imposed upon the region to the rest of the world. International institutions have overwhelmingly interpreted Ahwaz through the language of minority rights: discrimination, repression, unequal representation, and restrictions on identity and language.
For the people of Ahwaz and other peripheral colonised territories, however, these are not isolated grievances but features of a larger structure in which land, resources, demographics, security policy, and environmental conditions are shaped by a dominant centre exercising control over the periphery.
The issue, therefore, is not only discrimination but also the colonial structure that produces it. Minority-rights frameworks describe exclusion; internal colonialism explains how that exclusion was built and sustained. To address the former without acknowledging the latter is to study the branches while ignoring the roots. Until international organisations recognise this structural foundation of injustice and acknowledge the triangle of oppression that sustains it, therefore, they will continue examining the branches and disregarding the roots.
The Persistence of the Centralist Mindset
The mindset of supremacist centralisation is not confined to Iran’s current ruling regime. Ironically, many figures in and outside Iran who present themselves as dissidents or opponents standing against it reach automatically for the same language of denial, dismissal, and condescension when confronted with Ahwazi grievances and historical memory. The same blind spot persists: an inability or unwillingness to see Ahwazis beyond the conditions imposed on them. Communities shaped by dispossession, exclusion, environmental destruction, and securitisation are judged through the damage itself, while the system that produced it escapes scrutiny.
Under these conditions, as the past century has proved, a change in regime does not mean a change in the underlying rotten colonial foundation, which easily survives transitions of power, adapting to new authoritarians at the centre while preserving the same parasitic relationship between centre and periphery.
Internal colonialism, sustained through securitisation and the slow strangulation of violence directed at land, livelihood, and survival, cannot be justified indefinitely in the name of territorial integrity or national unity. No appeal to stability can excuse the dispossession of a people or the theft of wealth from a land whose inhabitants remain marginalised.
For Ahwaz, there must be a limit. Genuine stability will never come through control alone, but can arrive only when the centralist mindset moves beyond the oil fields and the strategic value of the land, recognises the people who have remained there despite a century of pressure, and dismantles the Triangle of Domination that has shaped a bleak century of colonialist history.
By Rahim Hamid, a freelance journalist and researcher at the Dialogue Institute for Research and Studies.