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Shah's Passive Revolution? Revisiting Development and Planning in Monarchic Iran

Top-down and state-led development based on central planning by an expanding professional technocracy became a central tenet of the Monarchy’s approach to social engineering and modernization. This panel investigates some of the lasting legacies of the transformative development projects and practices of that era. It focuses on the post-coup era (1954-1979) to elaborate its importance for understanding the present moment in Iran and invites considering discontinuity in continuity and continuity in discontinuity.
The panel participants explore (un)intended consequences of development in monarchic Iran, particularly in the post-coup era, and their relevance for the current conjuncture. The first paper works with the extra-economic aspects of progress and planning in Iran to discuss the 1979 revolutionary moment. It argues for a continuous tension in pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian state, which is crystallized for the first time in the post-coup era around the idea of progress and its temporal implication. Next presentation attempts to historicize the ecological crisis in south-west Iran and traces back the causes of ecological degradation of the Khuzestan province to the pre-revolutionary period. It argues that since the mid-twentieth century, Iran’s hydro-modernization projects (added up to the petroleum infrastructures at work since the beginning of the century) accelerated the transformations toward a capitalistic society-nature metabolism in this province. The third paper analyzes the current pronatalist policies in Iran by tracing the transformations of reproductive politics in the pre-revolutionary period. It focuses on how in the post-coup era, the population and reproductive practices of the families became the subjects/objects of development planning. Since then, it argues, reproductive politics transformed into a strategic site of governing. Finally, the last paper evaluates the paradoxical role played by the massive and costly major development projects that have symbolized Iran's attempts at modernization. Straddling the Monarchy and the Islamic Republic, grand projects such as the national railroad, dams and agribusinesses, or the controversial nuclear program, have in fact served to consolidate the rule of technical experts and factions of political elites, rather than act as the miraculous gateways to a promised modernity they were promised to be.

Presentations

Hydro-modernization Projects in Khuzestan as the Forerunner of Development in Iran
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Looking at the ecology of Khuzestan reveals the fact that the extremes (dust storms, acid rain, severe drought, etc.) are the new normal in this south-west province of Iran. Anthropocene, the geological age defined by human impacts, demonstrates itself clearly in this corner of the world, which was once called ‘the oil capital of the world’ and ‘’a key for Iran’s cosmopolitan turn’. I argue that there is a link between Khuzestan’s current dystopian landscape, oil infrastructure development and large-scale hydro-projects. To grasp the complexity of its ecological degradation, one must understand it as a process, a historical socio-ecological process. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the infrastructures of oil have triggered radical and sequential shifts in society-nature relations. The first period of rapid transformations was defined by the formation of Anglo-Persian Oil Company and its subsequent alteration in the ecology of Khuzestan.
In this paper, I focus on the second rapid shift in the society-nature relationship which was erupted by new forms of land and water governance in the 1950s and 1960s. Under the shadow of the cold war conflicts, and according to large-scale technological programs and top-down planning, Dez Dam Project was started in 1956. The planning was based on the Tennessee Valley Authority Act - a New Deal Development project, which its aim was to ‘rebuild Khuzestan province’. By the construction of this monstrous dam, a new era for Khuzestan’s physical geography took off, which necessarily entailed socio-ecological transformations. Whereas the oil industry initiated capitalist land tenure pattern, westernized land use and capitalist social relations in this region, this large-scale hydro-modernization, intensified such patterns and relations. New processes of dispossession and displacements, regulation of rivers and land (‘taming’ nature), construction of new roads, power plants and factories, etc. further rifted apart the socio-natural metabolism in this province. Khuzestan’s hydro-development in the 1950s could be understood as the pilot project for Development Plans after the 1960s and Shah’s White Revolution. The western technical and managerial ‘know-how’ continues to define the socio-natural metabolism of Khuzestan to date.

Golden Key to Modernity? Genealogy of Grand Development Projects in Iran
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This paper is a critical, comparative, historical analysis of a succession of spectacular grand development projects conceptualized and implemented by Iran’s central state since early 20th Century, with the promise of delivering a golden age of modernity and development. The case studies include the Trans-Iranian Railroad, the multi-purpose Dez Development Project, Isfahan’s Iron Smelting Compound, Khuzestan’s Sugar Cane Development Project, and the Nuclear Energy Program. These projects have straddled the rival political regimes of Pahlavi Monarchy and Islamic republic. Their scale and complexity came to symbolize the state’s will to overcome a perceived backwardness and dependence, and to act as a rapid pathway to prosperity, national independence, and a guarantee to a deserved high status among advanced nations. At inception, all these spectacular projects were highly contested. They stretched public and social resources to the limit, and has significant consequences for local societies. Their implementation was often violent, and adversely affected populations and environments. Virtually none performed as promised, economically, but they continued to be referred to as models. Paradoxically, overtime, the practice and politics of conceptualizing and implementing these white elephants has been embraced by successive political regimes and the technical experts responsible for them, and used to mobilize popular support and to fan sentiments of national grandeur. This paper investigates the genealogy of these grand projects, the social actors who championed them, and the social and spatial consequences of their implementation. It documents the material conditions that allowed their conceptualizations, and documents the resistance, rivalries, and obstacles that faced their implementation. It evaluates the material, economic, social, spatial, and environmental consequences of the projects, and the extent to which they accomplished their lofty initial promises. The paper concludes that these projects seem to reflect the discursive and material power struggles and alliances among rival factions of technical experts and political actors, rather than accomplish the miraculous pathway to a promised modernity that was at their inception.

The Politics of Reproduction in Iran: Transformations of Family Policies and Population Control in Iran
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After two decades of a very successful and effective family planning, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic harshly criticized the reproductive policies of the government since the 1990s. His concerns on the aging population as well as the decline of the family’s values and their negative impacts on the prosperity and development of the country led to the introduction of a series of pronatalist and family-oriented reproductive policies by the government since 2006. Nevertheless, it was not the first time that the biological reproduction in relation to the population dynamics had gotten special attention by the high ranked politicians and decision-makers in the modern history of Iran. In this context, this paper provides a historical account of how the population and reproductive practices of the families have been appeared and developed as a strategic means of the governing regime. In doing so, through reviewing the detailed governmental instructions, regulations, the national development plans, laws, and public debates, this paper traces the transformations of the reproductive policies of the modern state in Iran.
The historical study primarily reveals that reproductive practices became an important site of political contestations and therefore a strategic means of governing after the first national census (1956) when the census’s result triggered the rise of public concerns about the negative impacts of overpopulation and the importance of population control for advancing developmental policies. The global attention on the effects of overpopulation, at the same time, the domination of the discourse of development in social and economic planning, inspired by modernization theory and advocated by the technocrats of the plan organization in the late 1950s, along with the immediate social and demographic consequences of the shah’s White Revolution in the 1960s, made the population control not only as a strategic tool for controlling reproductive bodies, particularly women, but also as an essential development factor. This shift in family and reproductive policies of the state eventually led to the official introduction of family planning in 1967 and also had direct impacts on the enactment of the family protection law in the same year. Concurrently, in the realm of the social policies, the nuclear family slightly have evolved as a primary welfare unit and therefore as the regulative site of the state power from the 1960s onward.

Time, Progress, and the Iranian State
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This paper focuses on the extra-economic aspects of progress and planning in the post-coup era (1954-1979), when progress was translated into economic development, to discuss the 1979 Revolution and the present moment in Iran. This era is marked with the (extra-)discursive domination of Modernization Theory, the White Revolution (1963), and comprehensive development plans which introduced massive economic and social reforms in Iran and influenced, framed and limited the post-revolutionary politics and policies. The paper argues for a continuous tension in pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian state, which is crystallized for the first time in the post-coup era around the idea of progress and its temporal implication. The Pahlavi state in pre-revolutionary Iran and in particular in the 1970s carried this tension between the two rival state projects, namely, ‘Imperial Iran’ and ‘Iranian national state’.

The 1979 Revolution transformed this duality to a tension between the ‘Islamic Revolution’ and the ‘Islamic Republic’ in the post-revolutionary era. The ‘Imperial Iran’ and ‘Islamic Revolution’ are based on a messianic time that understands Iran at the most critical moment of its history. In contrast, the pre-revolutionary ‘Iranian national state’ and the post-revolutionary ‘Islamic Republic’ work with a homogeneous empty time manifested in the Development Plans. The Development Plans in pre- and post-revolutionary era rest on a linear historical narrative that regards progress as forward movement on the road to modernization. The Plan Organization and the rise of oil revenue in the post-coup era, institutionally and discursively, influenced the idea of progress in the Islamic Republic. Thus, in contrast to conventional accounts of the 1979 Revolution in Iran that often emphasize discontinuities more than continuities, this paper rejects the ruptural assumption of 1979 as a general reference point to account for the present moment.