Thank you all for coming on a night when I think everyone's mind is that you kept on becoming the first year to provide some information and an analysis. Just a thought. I'd like to welcome. Somebody who's. It's probably familiar to me, a very well known scholar of Iranian studies, to give me some very, very flattering associate professor and is very well known to us. But for those of you who are slightly newer to the subject phrased by Rick Rasmussen, Associate Professor of New Coordinator.
Recent studies at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, where he teaches not only the Middle Eastern history as well as cross-cultural studies. He is a social historian studying model, even on three, four occasion points out of his own ethnicity, political movements and ideology, and in his work through the Iranian society, culture and politics movement he is just written extensively on in order to international student elements of the modern revolution.
Before I hand over to the U.S., I mean, just a few remarks about the current two months total and perhaps also the issues that may arise in the question and answer period. The first thing that Brussels tells us is to locate this book in the phase of global history, of American history, of intellectual history. What can historians contribute to this failures?
Well, I think it's quite noticeable and worth remarking on how original this venture is, because for those of you all familiar with global history, you will know that the Middle East is barely represented in this protest. And Iran is really not represented at all. So this idea of establishing a discussion between the Iranian studies and the broader fields of global history is a very important. We have to be conscious of. Tonight.
Christine Romans is going to tell us about the minorities question. And finally, all the good things which must be highlighted do. One is the incredible resurgence of interest in the radical politics of the. It comes concern to several levels almost overnight, specifically in the 1970s, globally and world generally has come out recently. And this is interesting to us and says why it should be or perhaps is the case.
The passage of time is very conservative. So there's a. Perhaps it's to do with the fact that many of the problems which arose in the 1970s within the radical labour have not yet been resolved and are still ahead of communism in Russia the focus of the last few months. So I think Professor Robson and his talk tonight will be of great interest historically, but also of great significance in. All. The best of luck is happening here at the moment.
For those of us who don't have extensive networks, which become a little less of an opportunity for you to benefit from. Tell us any ideas to raise? Two questions. What was urban guerrilla movement of 1970? Such a phenomenon. But I think the 21st century tonight on minorities on your own geographical, personal right and the politics and ideology. Of such movies. So I think, you know, fortunate to be able to benefit from Professor Irving's expertise.
Thank you so much. I'm very, very happy to finally have just told you. This is the first time in three or four years that I'm travelling abroad to Cuba. It's also I'm more and more nervous for the U.S. and I'm very grateful for the invitation and for this the organisation of this event. And I'm sorry we have to compete with the World Cup. I understand that we can we can maybe still have time to watch Super Bowl game between the Great Satan and and Iran later.
And I feel like the more I work on Iran, it's real. And that's a problem coming from a tiny country like Denmark that can only apparently afford to professors in Iran, their studies, which means that when something happens in Iran, we are bombarded with questions from the public and media requests for media attention and commentary.
We are expected to know and understand everything about Iran ruling elite thinking, gender neutral practices, football politics, uranium enrichment, protest cultures. And to be honest, trying to make sense for British public about what is what I believe and understand from from secondary sources.
Obviously, being a distance for money and run right now is what I've been doing for the last 70 days is to sort of keep to try and provide credit and take whatever meagre input I could generate from a distance of the situation in Iran right now. Because obviously, as all of you know, something historic is going on in Iran today. A historic uprising against the Islamic Republic is taking shape, spearheaded by women and uniting across country, across class, across ethnic movement.
That is actually the first of its kind in history. And the centre of the demand, of course, is also the Persian woman by freedom as a key to unlock a range of struggles that are no longer treated as separate from each other. The struggle for women's equality, the struggle against discrimination of minorities, the struggle for civil rights, and a centuries long struggle for democracy.
And we have some of the finest scholars in this room to talk much more about that, the struggle of all the things that the Islamic Republic is not capable of giving its citizens. And when Gina, I mean, forcibly needs my son and by the authorities for Fareed, her mother put the following on the gravestone, Gina, you will not die. Your name will become a symbol. And that has indeed happened. Gina is the symbol, the key that locks together different demands.
There's also a key that unlocks 40 years of pent up rage and desire for a better future for Iran, for me to become a catalyst for a mass movement of civil disobedience. So when journalists call me up and ask me what happens next, I shall put behind my role as a historian. And I remind them of the unpredictability of revolutions. And yet I have to say at the end of the day, that nothing will ever be the same again. I don't think so much is clear by this stage.
Both the more than two months of protests in Iran, the movement started with the death of this Kurdish woman and with a brave protest during Gina's career in her hometown of supporters in the heart of Iran in Kurdistan on 17 September, it quickly spread to the rest of the country with slogans such as If Tehran becomes Kurdistan, Iran becomes Kurdistan. And also by John. Also by John is awake, standing beside Kurdistan.
And the slogan that they brought about is Kurdistan the Graveyard of Fascists, which of course, really resonates with the research I want to talk with you about today. And above all, the movement has united around this slogan, which was originally a Kurdish slogan and has now been embraced, as has all the Iranians slogan. London's exactly in the phrase shift from Kurdish to national.
But we are going to talk about today, as always, with protest movements in modern Iran, repression is unequal, distributed, roughly speaking rubber bullets, buttons and tear gas for people in the centre, with many exceptions life bullets, tanks and military repression for the periphery. Kurdistan has seen some of the most violent clampdown Baluchistan has experienced massacre.
Iranians everywhere are being brutally repressed by the Chechens. Nonetheless, the ethnic minority regions are suffering the most. I think what is important here is that this time around there seems to be an awareness of this fact in the broader public. And again, this is based on anecdotal evidence and what I do from friends and what.
I read all the experts who are much closer to this saying, I'm under no illusion that all segments of the protesters are with ethnic discrimination or that they all move in solidarity with the struggles of minorities. But I do believe strongly and I'm not alone in this thinking that something is changing in this regard.
Reporters and observers and participants all say that in comparison with earlier protest movements such as the student movement in 99 or the Green Movement in 2009, there is a pronounced sense of solidarity and solidarity between centre and periphery. And unlike 2017 and 19, there is a clear sense of unity between members of the middle class and the working classes. So we're witnessing the unfolding of a new political culture.
And I think history can teach us that this unfolding in itself is fraught with challenges and dangers and pitfalls. So in line with this thinking of sort of trying to make historical research relevant to a moment that seems historic, for lack of a better phrase, thinking about how current events sometimes make new research seem, urgent approaches. And I decided to slightly change the topic of the column and focus on one of the two things I had originally planned.
So my original plan was to discuss what Iranian history can provide in terms of insights for global history, including global intellectual history and urban history, and in turn, what we can learn as historians of Iran from global history. And I think we can discuss that maybe in the Q&A as a as an extension of this, because when I sent my abstract for this, it was just before the uprising started.
And I proposed to talk about two examples of my research on the science monitoring posed by the the Iranian People's Party organisation, which henceforth will be the title of a young teenager. So I would instead focus on one example tonight.
So a couple of years ago I got funding with my colleagues who were helpful from the US to the University Centre for a project exploring what we first termed the end of Third World as we were in the Middle East, which could contribute to the fate of Third World Vision in the Middle East.
Originally with a focus on 79. But quickly, as you can see in the title of the book that's going to come out of this project, we also had to improve and I think do we revisit this moment in time where the power of Third World was as an ideology or a worldview, and then of brother or friends of anti-imperialist movements that once peaked and dramatically declined in the Middle East, a region where it had up until then represented a strong promise for change.
So what we did is we got a broad range of scholars, some of them also from here to look at the late 1970s and early 1980s with a focus on two different struggles for national liberation in West Asia, namely Palestine. We learned that not only were pivotal to political developments in the region, but also for its significance to a global solidarity movement, which was one of the key interests we had in this in this topic.
So in Iran, in Palestine, opposition, the liberation movement saw themselves and were seen by their supporters all over the world as holding a torch lit by the energy of 50 years of courage with the sixties and seventies by an array of socialism, nationalist revolutionaries and revolutionary states, guerilla organisations, popular uprisings, student rebellions, activist campaigns, artistic, intellectual and academic activism that spanned from Vietnam to Angola to Algeria, Paris and beyond.
And yet, by the early 1980s, the two movements in Iran and Palestine have arguably failed to bring about the progressive vision of freedom and independence. They have been seen by the protagonists and supporters to embody instead the Iranian Revolution of 79 that produced an Islamist theocratic regime. And by 82, the Palestinian revolution has been eclipsed by a civil war in Lebanon, by the PLO, symbolised by Israeli aggression, by from Arab fratricide.
And historians tell us what as we came to an end in the Middle East somewhere around 1979. So in the book, coming out of this project, we ask if this is true, then how did those championing the Third World, this revolution from Palestine, perceive all that? And so in this project we aim to that. So the natural history of Third World reason was a global phenomenon.
So new micro histories of personal, social and political ideological change in the two movements in question and in the transnational entitlements of their struggles in the seventies and early eighties. Such a connection between the different scales, we argue, can help us explain how long gestating. Inter-related, unresolved dilemmas and challenges for Third World revolutionaries materialised in crisis.
These, of course, included formidable external challenges hostile to counter insurgency, intelligence operations, disinformation and propaganda, surveillance and infiltration, assassinations, intimidation. But there were also internal dimensions of this crisis that pertained to questions about inclusivity and priorities,
about theory and practice and about means. And hence, in the case of Iran, we had a number of studies in the book showing how gender and gender inequalities played into the revolutionary movement, specifically among female revolutionaries who travelled to Iran to join the profile rebellion, but also to focus writing about the original book.
We have a chapter on the issue of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and how that caused a deep rift among the national liberation movements invited to Tehran as allies of the neighbouring state. We have a chapter and that's why Muhammad, I tell you, we have won by putting ideas out there about how the Islamic State tried to navigate, perhaps dodged the fact that the struggle in Palestine was headed by a secular Marxist group, the PLO and an Islamist group.
We have a chapter five seven books about how envoys of the Islamic Republic in 82 was obstacles in their outreach to the downtrodden masses of the Global South as the envoys of the particular vision of Third World Vision about the Islamic Republic. That's all formulated after the expulsion of the leftist forces, many of the leftist forces in the revolution.
My own contribution to the volume is a chapter I co-wrote with my dear colleague John Negroponte, who was based on some of the best Iran and an historian working on the Iranian left from the Kurdish national question. Our chapter explores this still understudied, despite this growing literature on the Iranian left generally, and a growing literature on Iranian Kurdistan specifically.
The returns one strand of the study topic of solidarity between on the one hand, the Iranian revolutionary anti-imperialist left representative of the study and performance of the Kurdish liberation struggle. And it raises the overall question what were the possibilities and limits to Third World this solidarity, the English and of how was so between Iranian revolutionary leftists and Kurds? To limit ourselves, we focus specifically on 79.
And in the chapter he spoke to a slogan I love this more than enough to write a whole book. You can just experiment with a couple of years, but without losing ourselves, we converted ourselves to only focus on 79 and the violent events across the community following the revolution of how these were interpreted and influenced by the following.
So drawing on Persian and Kurdish language party documents, publications or eyewitness accounts, as well as a series of oral history interviews we have carried out with participants through the following that the conundrum of the national question in Marxist theory, coupled with Persian centric and nation states that continues entrenched on the left, came into direct clash with the Third World, this idea of a solidarity with oppressed peoples.
In the case of Kurdistan in Iraq, this clash arguably contributed to the failure of leftist and secular alternative to the emerging Islamist dictatorship of the 14th. And I'll take you through our findings and arguments.
So first, there is a basic literature, I think, as a basic index in the sixth existing research group, which first of all on the Kurdish movement in Iran during and immediately after the seven, which is there some recent work out now by people like the other custodian, which I think is really important and powerful, but there's still a need for social research engagement with primary sources, including Kurdish.
And on the other hand, there's also a lack of research on the relationship between the Iraqi left and the questions of minorities or the national question as it was playing at that point. So we argue that one of the reasons for this is that there is a general tendency in Iranian studies to avoid these issues that are highly sensitive. This sensitivity is palpable over more participants in this history to the region.
So for some former activists or sympathisers for a new history, histories on the left of the left in Iran, as well as most of the academics within the research, tend to be focussed on Iran's geographical political centre, other people centric, Persian centric, Toronto centric. Because this first of have lived. The result is that the brief mentions of recursive politics.
For example, instead of textbooks or even in specialised books, often contained factual errors, sweeping assumptions and partial narratives. It also means that Kurdistan, the person issue, is rarely dealt with directly or comprehensively in the burgeoning temperature of the left. We have only good examples of how new books are being written about the of the young. But Kurdistan will still play a minor role in several seconds, as this was a slide from the original proposal.
I have to talk about the book in question because it means up to the second argument is that although the pre-revolutionary father, John was heavily urban centric, is presented as the quintessential American thriller, and I think he also steeped in sort of a mainstream Persian centric view of history, his analytical outlook and strategy there were nonetheless very important early voices in the organisation to the revolutionary potential of Iraq's peripheries.
While much of the family literature treated the city as the engine of revolution, which in itself is a theme I discuss in another and another chapter, the families also conducted surveys and had important discussions with publications about the agrarian question and telling you about rural life.
One could mention here. And it's a very broad range of genres, but there was a papers that on the activities of people that much as I mean good astronomy as well as numerous essays have been replaced by anonymous travellers. A lot of people went to went to the people as they would have said during the Russian Revolution, read to find out how ethnic minorities live in the periphery, rural masses.
And most important to this study, a lot of references to the minority question in particular, the Kurds in the field of engineering theoretical political discourse of the army. This includes works by the key theoretician is under the name sometimes also writing as software. He finally appears to be and appears to be that the work published on the name of software is probably according to the document, is actually his own design as well as works by Mohammed because of that.
And it is an idea also known as both time and again, numerous texts launched or published in different by the organs. In his works, the families develop a conceptual language with which to discuss the question of minorities in a completely novel way for pushing the audience.
I think this is very important. Finally, in contrast to the singular, how in the name of the organisation is very quickly understood and develop an understanding of ethnic minorities of how to call in the plural official peoples. Sometimes they also slip straight, straight from Kabul to read that whole combinations.
This was again a novel, as noted in the Persian context of the killings, too, and then in this heritage and the Soviet inspired heritage in many ways, even when they didn't call them a lot of nations, it was implicit in the teaching analogy that the minorities were the best nations. Iran was a similar country, a multinational country, a country consisting of many national nationalities, relations where one dominant people subjected the smaller ones to the Taliban and national oppression.
Hence, as a revolutionary Marxist organisation, the fact that you have to recognise that had to attain a set of religious, the right to self-determination for peoples such as the Kurds, on the same level, that they would recognise that way for other oppressed nations such as the Palestinians.
All of this was of course, the specifically Marxist-Leninist framework, everything from the actions of nation states to the state driven cultural homogenisation campaigns on the reservation and the resulting politicisation of minorities could be space in terms of the contradictions arising from different modes of production and the relation between capital terrorism and how these contradictions lead to class struggle.
Therefore, the oppression of minorities was theorised as the time was a double oppression of the both capital, responding to this oppression of both foreign and local regimes to the ruling classes so we could not even kerb the case of Kurdistan, provided the faculty armed with an important example of what they believed to be a great potential for revolutionary change embedded in ethnic diversity. First in the Kurdistan was presented in pamphlets and books as truly popular.
And this is the. Is the struggle popular? Unlike the Persian? Speaking for the cities, the Kurdish movement already held mass popular support, according to the families. And they didn't need a mobilising event. In fact, due to the Kurds cross-border nature, the movement even enjoys outside of Iran an important transnational factor that could potentially help drain the Iranian state. Although the possibilities of foreign repressive resources.
Secondly, the Kurdish struggle as it confronted the rulers not just with Iran, but simultaneous with those of Iraq and Turkey, and Iran was therefore automatically assume imperialist. And this is a quote from this. Since the ruling elites of all three had in common that they were imperialist, dependent regimes. So the Kurdish movement was in nature, anti-imperialist in this revolution.
And it's interesting because this framing turned the old best argument argument against movements such as the Kurdish as being Bush was in the nationalism on his head and in alliances by the EU on Iran's ethnic minorities with the third world is understanding where national liberation struggle and top is tied directly together with the anti-imperialist trend.
In other words, if others would move about to support struggles such as the Kurdish, a photo pamphlet argued that a broad united front should push back against and I any kind of bourgeois petty bourgeois narrow mindedness in regards to the national question and put an end to this fratricide by accepting the right to autonomy for the Kurdish people for more authority, which is another key phrase.
So these statements, as much as they appear, outlining what was arguably the first leftist propaganda supporting minority struggles, were at the same time time counterbalanced by two facts. Firstly, while they identify culture, language, history and a shared sense of belonging as key traits of the oppressed minorities, they rarely, if ever, specified what the right to self-determination should entail in terms of territorial realities.
Indeed, all discussions of minority self-determination came with a clear red line goal against separatism, a phenomenon that the Far East deemed to be limited to reactionaries and dependent bourgeoisie elements within the minorities, pursuing purely selfish financial gains from providing future breakaway countries with Western imperialist powers.
As we shall see later, this limitation imposed on the discourse of self self-determination should be a source of constant ambiguity and hesitance among not just the far right, but also other leftist groups. During the revolution of all time discussing minorities in pre-revolutionary republic, which it was clear was about identifying tactics and strategies to mobilise minorities to face the possibility.
Hence, the following ideologues called on cannibals to travel to minority regions, as I said earlier. As a rule, Iran generally has studied local conditions in detail. But the result of all this accumulated recent work was that the Fatherland was probably the only of the big radical left organisations following the downfall of Bashar to clearly elevate the issue to a national question.
However, it was actually only after the revolution, and importantly with the grassroots initiatives of local Kurdish party supporters and not just a specific photo strategy of the central campus, but regions such as Kurdistan in practical, tangible attention so quickly. The background of Kurdistan of the Revolution were all often told in the literature of the Kurds that was was fired during the uprisings of 78. That's not completely true. There were numerous demonstrations and protests.
It could be argued that one of them actually was a key event in Kurdistan to help strengthen the revolution's momentum at a time when the overall protest movement was otherwise dormant, which is also interesting to discuss about what we see in political architecture that so on 7th of June 1978, the course of use of as a Kurdish opposition leader and also political prisoner was returned to the barrio.
And this occasioned a huge rally with impassioned revolutionary speeches and was by the Kurdish religious political leadership. Is that being saying? All that said, it is true that the revolution picked up pace much later in Kurdistan than anywhere else in the cities. And the reason I think was simply the securitisation of groups that after 53 and specifically after the armed uprising of 68, which is an important political charter of all, more or less in chapter development history,
there was very little room for political mobilisation of those. What is fresh memory for the Kurdish population? And part of the answer to the question of what I focussed on was a big cultural revolution. And on top of that, I also believe and this comes out of our interviews that first were arguably be hesitant about political developments in the sense of they said we wouldn't know if those developments would be in their favour.
However, when the fate of the arm dips into the sea in Kurdistan, they could be turned into a force to reckon with. In fact, in 79 to 80, the father has been very involved in the game and through the eighties a very important and somewhat understated role, the Kurdistan.
And this was despite a number of logistical obstacles and also fierce competition from other political groups, the AKP or PDK, the Democratic Party running for the approval, of course, a new record with their new organisation built on earlier a liberal activist social almost detached. It was a socialist organisation, the forces of the masters by Barzani or the two of them after which was a political force that quickly turned pro for any.
Also we see the forces of our own religious leadership is a theme of the city that I just mentioned and also other non left, if not outright right wing Islamist groups like the Maltese government and then several smaller leftist groups with a smaller following. But above all, a burgeoning scene for Germany's local councils that sprang into action, or people were abandoned by the Kurdish cities.
But after the downfall of the Shah and became a very interesting topic for someone to work more on and in this sprawling environment, the father is by all accounts a very significant followings, perhaps specifically among the urban and educated parents, to some extent also feels that case. Why was that so? So that's what we need to take into account the transformation of the traditional Kurdish political parties. So the movement was under change under also knew the KPI to return to the left.
But even this was too little, too late for a new generation of of the rival Kurds for example, those studying to in several countries. They weren't standing in traffic to be tested of the approach of Formula two or to the father Young, who were both staunchly leftist and embrace the Kurdish demand for autonomy of the body. And this combination stood in sharp contrast to the party which rejected those aspirations.
So the revolution, that's what our first activity. By the spring of 79, there was an explosion of political and logical social and cultural activism. It was in this environment.
The First Family Branch was established in Kurdistan while in the early days of the revolution there were some landmark events, the eight point declaration in Luxembourg presenting it five represented by an almost competing united front of Kurdish forces to the interim interim government of Kosovo in the 1994 February 79. But after that, events quickly took a violent turn around.
Those clashes between various Kurdish factions led to in some events that led to a swift and violent response from the communist regime. These events and the the dawning realisation that the new regime was not going to live up to its promises of protecting minority rights.
I mean, the last was so brutal that the Kurdish prospect, the referendum of the Islamic Republic on the 30th 31st of March, despite several attempts of reconciliation, of ceasefires, numerous clashes and all out war, there is a lot of back and forth over Kurdistan. In the coming months. There was the battle over the radio and TV, several hundred thousand people bloody clashes in that. But also in April, the Battle of Babylon.
In July, the Battle of Power in August, and then Khomeini's declaration of jihad against the Kurds in August, which led to renewed battles throughout the region and again, another flare up in October. Suffice it to say here that we try to analyse the fate of these items and their involvement in each of these historical events.
I think is enough here to say that these events and the to the forum involve actors with deep historical roots and significance of the demand for autonomy did not make it an easy situation for the families.
But there was something else apart from apart from sort of the changing realities on the ground, there was also a generally uneasy relationship or a theoretical, ideological and strategic level between the father who stated aim of liberating minorities of nations and the continued privileging of Iran's territorial integrity. This uneasy, uneasy relationship or tension, miraculous events.
YouTube represented in the discourse by the due to solidarity or nation wide, added as an objective to a struggle external to and yet subsuming and over moving the Kurdish struggle at particular times in history. It indicates that the self-study piece of the puzzle is actually more than a piece of the puzzle. It's the sum of all the puzzles in in this chaotic situation.
As the situation developed in Kurdistan, we see how Salazar is going to take over the discourse as a way to postpone the discussion of how to reach the goal of the global struggle, the Kurdish demand for Kurdish autonomy. So the tension between the national and the local, which was mentioned, is also described as national challenges, possibly be explained by a legacy of Marxist-Leninist ideology. The class centrism and privileging of anti-imperialist orthodoxy demands.
Or it can also be explained, at least partly by a lingering Iranian nationalist Persian centrism. A resistance to the idea of giving non-Christian minorities the same power through the right to self-determination has also delivered to the Persian speaking population. This not only comes to shoulder to fight it, this discourse juxtaposes local and study.
It also shows when they reduce demands for self-determination to cultural issues, only sanctify Iran's territorial integrity as a sort of red line that cannot be crossed over. They underestimated the potentials of Kurdistan as a poverty stronghold. The tension also becomes particularly evident. We see that the Third World is discourse, the same ideological imaginaries that shape our vocabulary.
On the national question about oppressed nations in the plural and nowhere in situations situation, national liberation becomes undermined by another national liberation struggle. It might even be argued that the Third World is only the particular politics that Iran becomes witness to nation states centric view that forces its proponents to tactically turn a blind eye to internal supporters or return to the currents of.
Possible explanation for why the central organs of the Pentagon eventually abandoned, abandoned Kurdistan was brought to this partially undemocratic nature of the leadership following the Marxist-Leninist Stalinist organisational phases of democratic centralism. So we argued that the founding condition was so class centric in its policy and strategy and so committed to the idea of a mass democratic revolution led by the working classes that they tended to make.
The issue of the national question down the list of priorities was not always the same could be said about women's liberation. But this is a discussion worth having as anti-imperialism gradually came to overshadow the class question for the leftist forces during 79. The development was started right after from the early months of the revolution, but peaked following the US embassy takeover in November.
The national question simply dropped even further down the list and when the national question at the same time emerged as the most important question for Kurds, the fighters were unprepared. So while this often mentioned anti-imperialist, consensus was certainly an important factor, that was not the decisive factor behind the choice to abandon Kurdistan as an issue.
Even when rejecting the Khomeini line that Kurdistan was being exploited by the US and Israel, the photo used still had other forms with accepting support in the photo. This post should be located in a very rigid understanding of how a mass popular democratic revolution led by a working class, would establish socialism in this rigid prescription. The Kurds demand for anything more than partial autonomy came to be seen as a distraction or even a deliberate distortion of the struggle.
Hence, even though the Fatherland was engaged on a crucial battlefront in Kurdistan against the Islamic Republic, in the end, the leading characters now split into manufactures are doing the same killings without deciding to abandon the Kurdish problem of the Kurdish issue altogether, and leaving only splinter groups or smaller groups and individual fighters.
This was despite the fact that the population had perhaps correctly predicted that if the struggling Kurdistan failed, it would pave the way for the Islamic Republic's eradication of all other revolutionary forces in the name of the decline of the country and its fascist dictatorship. This obviously also happening to our economy. So if you spend around the 5,000,000,001st line, the locals against the Islamic Republic, the reason was that you would defy the leadership to find a solution.
And that's one thing you expect to. They solve the Kurdistan issue and also the Turkish political support issue as potentially dragging a whole family of resources into an unwinnable war that would derail the socialist revolution. The nail in the coffin was the September 1980 Iraqi invasion of Iraq. Okay, don't to conclude this post. So the Iranian Revolutionary War is left in 75 divided by one.
Could also include other groups who faced a serious challenge when it came to marginalised people, especially when their plight was treated in terms of a national question and the right to self-determination.
This place, the public, is in a conundrum, not solved in a situation of post-revolution turmoil, neither with available ideological prescription, all through popular mobilisation, demonstrating how to balance, on the one hand, anti-imperialist struggle, inevitably pitting an existing nation state against Western powers with, on the other hand, small and non-dominant nations and the struggle for the right to self-determination and the aftermath.
I think this is relatively well documented and covered, even though more scholarship is required. So the continued wars like State of Kurdistan combined with the Iran-Iraq war, the splits, AKP inequality and KDP core, the Civil War, the exile of numerous Kurdish activists in Iraqi camps or asylum in Europe. The near-total amelioration of the functioning of the militant left in Iran.
Following was followed by the prison massacres of the late eighties, the reconstruction of political opposition groups in exile, and finally the rise of a new Kurdish movement in the late 1990s. So where does that leave us in terms of the relevance of studies like this for our present conditions? Okay. So studies like this, I think, and also my earlier work at this point, first of all, the minorities in Iran are part of a broader critique of the Iranian studies.
A wave of studies over the last 20 years, I guess, has systematically questioned the Persians centric outlook in history, writing that often involves the silencing or marginalisation of minorities and their histories and their role in what we. Industry at the forefront of this pursuit. We've redefined, among others, colleagues such as Professor Commonwealth team for reason and wrote a short piece for people with a major theories. This critique in relation to broader questions of power.
My team calls for nothing less than decolonising Iran, among other things, by and I quote challenging the epistemic colonialism of the enduring trends within Iran in nationalism and nationalist historiography. Specifically, my team proposes that we treat the case of Iran's minorities in terms of interests opposing colonialism and others like black humour.
Colonialism understood in contrast to this Eurocentric definition as foreign domination, but with foreignness referring to the historically or and historically changing or politically reconstructed relations with cultural reality and with domination of specifically Manhattan money over the problems of capital. So it's a very specific kind of taking from the usage of the term colonialism material.
Things that enter into subaltern colonialism as follows both postcolonial states ideological reconstruction of stateless peoples within their territory as ethnic minorities, which are also logically securitised and whose subjects of political, cultural destruction, assimilation or subordination, as well as economic exploitation, resource extraction and environmental degradation.
It may very well be that what is needed is a deconstruction of colonialism as a concept, as part of an explanatory framework in order to counterbalance not only the ratio of so called minoritized peoples, but also to enable us to even discuss demands for recognition and autonomy. It may very well be that the term modernism above uses of American power was divorced from its historical context and expanded used in cases such as Iran.
I hope this is something we can discuss together in a forum like this. I will, however, interject with some little bit of critique of the critique. As mentioned, it also mentions elsewhere and as I have discussed at great length and my first quote and also in a recent article written together with Professor Kevin Harris, there is an inherently inherent pitfall of this centralisation to discussions about ethnicity, to riots in power in Iran.
Since ethnic minorities have again become more vocal and allow and have been allowed a little bit of voice in post-revolutionary Iran. It has also forced the majority to consider themselves as Persians. So there is a paradoxical result of the growing attention to ethnicity that also can turn into a centralisation of the majority of Persians in the Persian language that all put that in force even should be considered necessary.
And this is something that has sparked huge discussions and sociological. And is this Persian speaking Shiite centre reciting Iran does not identify as follows. Does that mean he or she is in fact hiding his or her true identity as. Majority, oblivious to the fact that this part of the U.S. is part of the dominant majority. Or should there be room for not identifying distinctions for all children and possibly not to identify this course?
These are enormously important and very difficult discussions that have been obvious because I'm convinced that usually it demands much more historical research into the question when and how to first become synonymous with what is in fact an approximation of a majority. But in reality, at least in reality, a critique of Iranian studies is very often a shorthand for dominant political and intellectual elements.
And similarly, as we may have noticed, I didn't in this lecture, I don't consistently use Minoritized instead of minority. I know sympathetic to my colleagues to want to do that.
I just think that it's best to remind that a similar aversion to using the term minorities is also to be followed in the mainstream nationalist, Persian centric historiography in social sciences document building that these peoples of their cultures and identities are nothing more than local and in fact, subcultural expressions of one of the same thing.
Yet on the erroneous, the nationalist line dictates that minority is in fact a Western invention injected into places like Iran is of course, cultural Balkanisation that even promotes separatism and threats to impose territorial integrity. So all that being said, I do think that there are several things we as historians of Iran can do to make our research more true, to pursue not just our own specific research.
Not just for a specific research from mainstream history and social science in general. So first of all, we obviously need more histories of Iran and Britain from the viewpoint of peripheral realised areas. Yes, I used to. I used version diplomatic phone use to indicate the exit process through somewhere and someone uses commercial use of something else.
There is actually arguably still a tendency to relegate histories of the peripheral regions of Iran and regions cutting into Iran and elsewhere outside of Iran these days. This is despite the growing number of critical studies. But the problem is more than just Persian centric. If you really want to peripheral allies to centre and centre the periphery. You need a more extensive definition of Iranian studies.
The argument, of course, relates to for discussion about the relationship between various studies, the history of the studies, relationship of various studies, to say the history of social sciences in a broader sense, and the question of methodological nationalism, which is of course part of something like the idea that these studies were discontinued. So there might be a need for some kind of disciplining and disciplining in the concrete case of this research project.
Me and my colleague, we have to ask ourselves exactly where should we publish this? I mean, the one thing is the work we've done from a political perspective, 90 there for the rest of it, where does it go? Is this the history of Iran in light of the Kurdish view of Iranian history in this particular stage? Kurdish studies don't think so. Maybe there's a middle Eastern studies. Perhaps the reason is, of course, that the Kurdish issue is transnational in more than one sense.
But by insisting on its relevance to Iranian history and the Iranians, that is, we also need to think about new geographies of Iranian history. Again, I don't have the answer to this, but I recognise the challenge to come in. Methodological nationalism will not be solved in the field of also useless. Specifically about peripheries and minorities. We need as a field to have a sustained discussion about the difficulties and complexity of doing this research.
Some of that discussion is whether cultural in nature who, for example, has access to a field such as Kurdistan. It has long been recognised but perhaps not sufficiently debated the myriad problems of being a scholar based in the West, trying to build work and archival work in Iran. Many of us have, for different reasons, become fieldworkers without a field of historians without a trace.
Another issue is language competencies. In an ideal world, many of us should be trained fluent in more than one language in the world. I, for one, am not. I realise how much that limits my research, especially when I work with British scholars.
There is a persistent, unspoken myth in the Iranian studies that the peripherals fields of Iran do not have archives or that they do not have substantial sources to study the most human role, as demonstrated in wonderful work by colleagues such as others, by Naval Academy, Hanson-Young and so on.
It would be a very important achievement if this same attention the Kurdish studies receiving now would also apply to, say, countries whose research on Azerbaijan consider this fact in our field is often in many ways limited by a focus on Persian sources as well.
Conclusions. I really strongly believe in collaboration as global and comparative historians have not used the kind of multi perspective work we do to break out of Eurocentric models demands collaboration between scholars fluent in different languages and with access to different archives. A similar argument could be made for our view, which, for instance, in collaboration with scholars news like Iran.
I hope I'm not alone in thinking that this division between running studies outside and inside Iran is not only antiquated but also detrimental to our field. We need to bridge the divide. We need to engage in a much more comprehensive and systematic fashion and learn from colleagues, of course, inside Iran and systematically make sure that they know our work and is available inside. I know all the difficulties, and I hope that we as a people can be much better at collaborating.
If you read inside Iran, despite and with a discussion of all the dangers and dilemmas involved with the constant securitisation of all kinds of research inside Iran, and with sanctions and institutional self sanctioning, hindering so many initiatives from the outside, the need to have a broad discussion about the ethics and security issues entailed by collaboration.
So to conclude, I believe we have to some extent the river of allies, the centre and centre, the peripheral allies specifically when it comes to minorities. We have to have these difficult discussions about, for example, the benefits of applying colonialism to our analysis. This is no simple task at a time when even mainstream experts and some scholars are willing to perpetuate the idea of a separate assistance threat emanating from their motives.
As we return briefly to my opening remarks about making history, rather, if there is a new movement of, let's call it, intersectional clarity in Iran taking shape these days, then what can we do other from that brief, intense moment of some kind of intersectional clarity instead of a more formal, such as the five, in order to transform Third World ism is a strange phenomenon. It is at once finished and done. It's a chapter in the history of places like Iran and indeed somewhere around 1979.
At the same time, it seems like the world this is happening even really given it is not yet fully involved. There the pretensions inherent in the early and in many ways unsuccessful attempts to formulate a intersectional analysis of solutions for Iran, but seemed to have once again found new life in this new process and of course, a new face, but with echoes of the past that are too important. We thank you for listening. Thank you.
Thank you very much. I think there's an enormous number of issues raised by this paper and and some of them are very contentious. Yes. So I'll begin by throwing a couple of comments at you for your reaction. You talked about this tension, which continue to exist in terms of viewing minorities and Kurds, in particular as an oppressed nationality. I think you used the words ambiguity and hesitation on the part of the Fed, Diane.
And I wondered to what extent that that kind of tension has been really resolved, because it seems to me that the Federation solution was to kind of kick it into the long grass and hope that events would resolve this issue.
It is very difficult to resolve on the theoretical issue, on the theoretical level, precisely because, as you described, the ideas about national self-determination are derived from a very clear tradition which began with Marx and continued with Lenin about the conditions under which separatist movements should be supported. But that tradition grew up in relation to different circumstances, because for Marx, the question of self-determination applied to Ireland.
For Lenin, it applied particularly to Poland and Finland. These are distinct national entities, and the offer to them of autonomy or separation does not represent any threat to the oppressing nation. When you come to look at the Middle East, you have a much more complicated question because these are primarily foregrounding ethnicity. Marx and Lenin did not depend on ethnicity. They depended on pre-existing, theoretically recognised sovereign territories.
Now, when you come to look at the situation, we saw it in the case of Iraq, this gives rise to all sorts of problems on the practical level. And it's one thing to talk about these things from a theoretical point of view. And Cameron Martin's work is very interesting, but I'm not sure how much it helps us resolve that kind of continuing tension. The other thing I'd like to ask you is the institutions of the state.
It's quite interesting. I think that when you look at the Middle East now, you see a series of state collapses. The interesting thing about the Iranian case was the state survived and it was taken over essentially. So Khomeini was able to put together the army very quickly. The army had it showed a lot of signs of strain in the 1978, 79, but it was there ready to use. And he did use it. And I wonder if you can tell us anything about what the Army is doing now in Iran.
And the police, because of the disintegration of the coercive arms of the state, is one of the first signs of a real revolutionary movement. And I'm wondering if that is happening. And then my third point, really the other interesting thing and perhaps quite unique thing about 1979 is that these political forces worked themselves out in the Iranian context, partly because America was still so weak after the failure of the defeat in Vietnam. The Soviet Union simply wanted to calm things down.
So the Iranian arena was left for Iranian forces to fight it out among themselves, and they did so from anyone. What I'm wondering now is to what extent you think the situation in Iran is being distorted by the regional and global conditions that Iran is facing? I mean, we know, for example, that the Israelis were working with the Iraqi Kurds from the 1960s. Is there that kind of thing happening or not? So those are some of the questions to ask the questions about Iran today.
And I would do my best to. Okay, the first the first one about solving that's going to be obviously you write and then realise that the family of the children drawing on whether it's the question of the earth, the nature of the revolution, or whether it's the question of national right, the right to self-determination of national minorities, that the drawing of a revolution that isn't relevant to Iraq. This is actually a very important finding, I think. I mean.
We should also lower our institutions to the federally funded ritual, because most most of them have a very, very limited lifespan. Before, we had time to actually sit down and think about conditions in London where they lived and killed, killed, executed in prisons. And much of the work is actually quite interesting as well.
But it did they did manage to develop a quite sophisticated answer to this question of the the tension between the universalist ideas of what an ideal structure should be and the local conditions in Iran. So works like that is one of the arguments on making.
In the other case that I didn't really talk about today is that instead of seeing this this this fetish in sort of Western scholarship of the world is about mapping out how the different things just influenced each other and how the ideas travelled. Well, I realised reading of the question. I originally assumed that it was a trickle down effect that revolutionaries in Iran would read Cuba and Mao's literature and be inspired by that and didn't make the strategic decisions.
But it turns out that they already knew, even before I was told the father. After the revolution in Iran. You start with guerrilla uprising in the countryside, even though the first attack was in the countryside. But there was a very clear decision from the beginning that there was no deviation or discussion, but they saw it as a broken revolution that you happen to you.
So to me, that shows that the family are really aware of the limits of the applicability of existing Marxist-Leninist Stalinist literature on minorities, for example. And they would say that that the situation is not comparable to discuss some of these different ideas inherited from from Lenin, for example, and how the people are not afraid to intervene in the situation. But it's such a it's a hugely complex and very, very difficult discussion.
And it's quite clear that sort of the social theory of ethnic minorities among the families was only beginning to take shape when the revolution happened. I think. And a lot of it was done sort of as they went along, they had to improvise as well.
I think, you know, I'm interested in this semantic slip where they begin to talk about how poor people's realising that there are more and more people in Iran and the tension between the idea that long run also has to be unified as one people against imperialism, that that tension, I think is very clear in the literature and it's used to resolve by the families and is not solved today at all.
If you go to any demonstration in the Iranian diaspora, at least I will see huge discussions about whether the eastern Kurdistan flag should be placed at these protests or not. I know for sure that that's something we hear about in Denmark. A lot of the time the Kurdish opposition is hijacking of the Iranian movement. It is the U.S. in that very limited context.
But it's a it was a really interesting discussion around that big Berlin demonstration over spy holidays when you were there, invited representatives from those minorities to speak with very different opinions about that. We could debate this very heated. And I think also I'm biased when I say that there is like a sort of acceptance of the fact that ethnic minorities suffer a particular kind of discrimination,
because that's mostly a university phenomenon. I'm sure a lot of intellectuals and thinkers. But what what is interesting is prior to this uprising, the first time I really noticed something along the lines of what we're seeing today in terms of conservative solidarity was around the war crisis in Kosovo where a lot of the civilians like celebrities and people on. Important voices on Persian social media brought attention to what was just in a in a very systematic way and in a comprehensive way.
Well, before, you could sometimes think that those were two different countries to start, but the bridge to be built. So I hope that means that that's beginning of Iranians finding a solution to this question. But I also want to make sure that I think it's important to listen directly to the Kurdish organisations and activists when we see time and again that they're not separatist.
And this is also something we hear from the Kurdish organisations in this moment of time, so we're going to give it again. They also have to sort of pretend listening to defend themselves against accusations of racism and separatism, but it's like the idea of more study or self more hasn't been communicated to the Persian speaking centre that you can understand. It's not a threat to the territorial integrity of Iraq and that's the job of this group to carry the burden.
But it is quite clear that it has to be addressed because otherwise there will be more and more radicalisation and there will be separatism and there are separatist movements in the different regions is just on my impression and I think. But it's not my presence, the impression that is the majority of people who support such things as tuition fees. So I called the Army and military today.
Every time there's a new video on social media saying, you know, news from Bukom or Sakho's about this battalion has defected or this colonel has defected and is now on the side of the people who always turns out to be. So far. But of course, this is something that the experts all over the world are looking for life savings with detection. Apart from isolated videos, you know, former servicemen making a video at home saying, you know, I've retired whatever.
I declare my support for the peoples of. I assumed it was definitely not a trophy for anything. In Europe, it's always a mass defection, but to do that was a very important meeting in Kurdistan. It's not the army, right? It's the is the Revolutionary Guard is to be deployed. So really, the security forces, the police do most of the repression work to build the Basij in the centre. Over in the big urban centres you have tanks moving into the city.
So there's always this unequal distribution of threat of repression, whether or not foreign powers are distorting the situation in Iran. Well, in a sense, I think diaspora Iranians are playing a much bigger role this time around. And by historic media stations, many of them, obviously, this is their super financed by Saudi Arabia and Israel and pro monarchists, media stuff like that. They obviously do their best to influence the situation.
There's no doubt about that. Whether or not it has a real tangible effect on the ground is something that some. I do recover as the research. I honestly feel like I'm way too old to be at these things because none of us in my generation had imagined that there would be this political potential that we're seeing on the streets of Iran these days, that I deal with the kids where we sit and shop on this corner.
You know, whatever they do, they're not they're politicised, they're not involved in politics. But obviously we could just see from the the aesthetics of this movement that they have a very refined and advanced understanding of politics in the 21st century and also the tactics and tactics of mobilisation. This is the big discussion right now. What is the next step?
So the movement can continue with the strategy of just spreading out a thin layer of civil disobedience all over the country to resolve, train repressive forms. They have to also know is what I hear from discussions organise, hold more centralised protest in order to take the next step forward. If that's even possible in that situation, you have no idea. I'm just amazed by how brave people are and how radicalised they are in their demands.
Nobody is asking for reforms or reforms, reformism as far as they can hear. They're asking for regime change from within, which is, of course, opens up a whole range of questions about what will be possible. So okay. So I'd like to thank Russell for such an interesting and provocative account, and thank you to the audience for your attention. And we'll see what happens next. But thank you.