UC Santa Barbara

This study investigates the socioeconomic and ethnic dimensions of center-periphery dynamics in Iran through a comparative analysis of four cases, all located at the geographic peripheries: Anzali and Kish, as free-trade zones (FTZs), and Mariwan and Bandar Anzali, as the non-FTZ cases. Using interviews, regional data, document analysis, and participant observation as methods, this research examines the relationships between FTZ project development and: 1 – the local exercise of power; 2 – provision of public goods; 3 – the working class living conditions; 4 – the recentralization of economic ownership of lands and businesses, and 5 – the deterritorialization of the ethnic population living in and around such projects.Through a discussion of the rentier state theory and integrated vs. parallel governance, it is argued that although the FTZs as local governments and state-owned enterprises suffer from instances of political dependence on the center, they practice a comparably high level of local autonomy at the administrative level. However, as the socioeconomic indicators show, the FTZ organizations are less accountable to the local population. Regarding the FTZ treatment, there is no significant change in public goods provision. Still, there is an evident decline of the working class living and labor conditions through central policies of deregulation, contractization, and cheapening of labor. By utilizing the cases as mediators to read the bigger picture of recentralization in Iran, I claim that the administrative decentralization inherent in Iranian FTZs aligns with the general recentralization process of political, economic, ethnic, and power control. Through intentional and institutional mechanisms, rather than “mismanagement” and “bureaucratic difficulties,” the central government utilizes economic dependency conditions of the peripheries to securitize the nation-building project and establish its political authority. Critical of the crude economist Marxist explanations, I contend that the security necessities of the central state against the ethnic mobilization potential have incentivized it to execute politics of de-development in the peripheral regions of Iran. It is hard to account for exploitation of ethnic human labor, value production in the workspaces, and capital flow toward the peripheries for reinvestment. Therefore, some of the significant economic requirements of theories such as internal colonialism are absent. The politics of de-development in peripheries of Iran does not support the theory of unequal exchange either. Through an analysis of deterritorialization, militarization, and land dispossession, this work proposes that peripherality, as a form of dependency and control, better explains the unequal political and economic positions between the center and the peripheries in Iran. Although ethnicism is not theoretically an essential element of uneven development and central capital accumulation, it serves as a social and cultural domination principle. Eventually, that paves the way for political and economic recentralization. The work concludes by presenting the peripheral dependency structure as an alternative to the ethnic-blind theories of uneven development.