Tribal Politics in Iran

Cronin, Stephanie

doi:10.4324/9780203968628

Cited by 111 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Here one of the largest bandit gangs, together with tribal rebels, again captured the government opium store, took out the government percentage of ten per cent, and returned the remainder to the peasants, taking receipts. 60 In the late nineteenth-early twentieth century, modernization, as well as stimulating banditry, also produced modernized types of crime, and led to further innovations in the panoply of subaltern avoidance and resistance. As new states consolidated their control over national territories, imposed controls and taxes on the movement of goods and people, and established borders of theoretical and legal impermeability, smuggling erupted on a massive scale.…”

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confidence: 99%

Noble Robbers, Avengers and Entrepreneurs: Eric Hobsbawm and Banditry in Iran, the Middle East and North Africa

Cronin¹

2019

Crime, Poverty and Survival in the Middle East and North Africa

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confidence: 99%

Noble Robbers, Avengers and Entrepreneurs: Eric Hobsbawm and Banditry in Iran, the Middle East and North Africa

Cronin¹

2019

Crime, Poverty and Survival in the Middle East and North Africa

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“…As senior tribe members came to buy and assert their right to land and be drawn more into urban politics, junior khans and subaltern tribesmen began to resist the inequalities in wealth and loss of customary rights. 65 This was symptomatic of a wider process of 'hegemonic contraction' , whereby the existing systems of consent and forms of authority were becoming undermined by the prevailing trends of modernization and integration into the world economy. 66 Several sources testify to the hegemonic contraction within the Qashqai and Khamseh tribal confederations at the time.…”

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confidence: 99%

A State of ‘Tribal Lawlessness’? Rural and Urban Crime in Fars Province (c. 1910–15)

Biglari¹

2019

Crime, Poverty and Survival in the Middle East and North Africa

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As has now been well established, Iran's modernizing elites in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw overcoming the country's supposed 'tribal problem' as crucial for national salvation. 2 Central to the 'myth of the saviour' built around the person of Reza Shah was his ability to suppress the tribes after a period of so-called 'disintegration ' between 1911 and 1921, following the Constitutional Revolution. 3 This was unquestionably partly due to the power possessed by the large tribal confederations that had the potential to undermine central authority. But it was also because on a more local level these pastoral nomadic groups seemed to represent the absence of authority, especially by virtue of their association with banditry on the country's main trade routes. 4 By their very nature, tribes were seen as a 'dangerous class' on the margins of society, culturally imbued with criminality. 5 Indeed, such perceptions shared many similarities with the concept of a 'criminal tribe' existing elsewhere, which assumed tribespeople were habitually or even hereditarily inclined to a life of crime. 6 Such a view has been reproduced in historiography, meaning banditry in modern Iran has often been explained away with culturally essentialist references to a supposedly traditional tribal culture of raiding, leaving little or no room for other contributing factors. For example, Mansoureh Ettehadieh, in her study of criminality in the late Qajar period, asserts:We see that most of the robbery and looting was done by tribes, which was probably as much a way of life as due to economic circumstances. The worst affected areas were not necessarily those suffering most from economic regression. 7 Granted, there had been a long-established culture of raiding amongst the tribes in Iran, as there had been across most of the Middle East and North Africa. Yet there are several problems with solely relying on this fact in explanations of banditry.

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“…Later, the ill-fated attempt to incorporate Aden Colony into a wider Federation also sought to offset Britain's collaborative relationships in the desert against rising urban nationalism 21. In Iran in the 1940s the British reactivated their connections among the Bakhtiyari and other southern khans, this time as a bulwark against a weakened central government, Soviet infiltration and the rise of the Tudeh Party 22. Proposals for the retention of a British Negev appeared before the Cabinet in 1943, 1946 and 1948; more than once in the 1950s, Parliament discussed the possibility of annexing the Sinai peninsula outright on the grounds of its strategic potential and apparent isolation from anticolonial protest.…”

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confidence: 99%

Decolonization and the Arid World

Fletcher

2018

The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire

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Decolonization transformed political geographies; in many ways, it made the world in which we live. But the constraints and possibilities of physical geography were not as readily disregarded. This chapter considers the comparable and connected histories of the world’s desert environments in the era of decolonization. It explains how decolonization and the Cold War took a distinct path in the arid world, asks whether we’ve given enough weight to the place of arid regions in these wider histories and reflects on how, in many ways, these regions still resist being folded into the national stories of imperialism’s successor states.

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Tribal Politics in Iran

Cited by 111 publications

References 0 publications

Noble Robbers, Avengers and Entrepreneurs: Eric Hobsbawm and Banditry in Iran, the Middle East and North Africa

Noble Robbers, Avengers and Entrepreneurs: Eric Hobsbawm and Banditry in Iran, the Middle East and North Africa

A State of ‘Tribal Lawlessness’? Rural and Urban Crime in Fars Province (c. 1910–15)

Decolonization and the Arid World

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