Author's Note: This article draws on conceptual and historical arguments first developed in my earlier study, 'From Ethno-Nation to Multi-Ethnicity: The Fabricated Myth and Illusion of "Ethnic" and "Ethnicity" in Modern Iran' (Suren-Pahlav, 1998). Where substantive passages or lines of argument are adapted from that source, appropriate citations are provided. This note is intended to acknowledge that intellectual debt explicitly.

ABSTRACT

This article constitutes a direct rejoinder to a recent publication by Daniel Brett [1], the self-styled chairman of the British Ahwazi Friendship Society (BAFS), a little-known organisation reportedly linked to Arab separatist networks implicated in armed operations inside Iran [2].

 

Brett’s intervention, though widely circulated among separatist networks, introduces nothing conceptually new. Its underlying premises reproduce narratives long cultivated by separatist organisations and their foreign sponsors, frequently channelled through intermediaries such as Brett himself, a British national. These narratives intersect with those advanced by Iranian leftist factions, the Islamic Republic’s reformists, the MKO, US intelligence and policy circles, Israeli security apparatuses including Mossad, pro-Israeli lobbying groups across the West, European policy think tanks, and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Central to this discourse is the portrayal of Iran as a ‘multi-ethnic’ or, at times, even a ‘multi-national’ polity, a claim Brett uncritically reproduces [3].

 

Within this framing, federalism is presented as a benign solution to presumed structural tensions. Yet the advocacy of federalism here does not arise from Iran’s internal constitutional debates but from a deliberately constructed narrative, ideologically curated and politically weaponised. The question, then, is why these disparate actors which have invested considerable resources in destabilising Iran, converge so insistently on federalism as the preferred model: Federalism is a coded term, a political shorthand for the balkanisation of Iran.

 

The article interrogates this proposition, demonstrating that what is presented as a framework for autonomy functions instead as a vehicle for balkanisation: a constitutional façade designed to legitimise partition under the language of reform. Drawing on comparative federalist models, Iran’s legal history, and the strategic mobilisation of identity politics, the analysis shows that these proposals are less an organic response to domestic demands than instruments serving separatist agendas and their external sponsors. Federalism, in this context, operates less as a mechanism of accommodation than as a geopolitical tool aimed at dismantling a historically cohesive state.

 

In turn, the article challenges the assumption that Iran is a federation-in-waiting or a mosaic of latent ethnic sovereignties. It argues that Iran constitutes a historically integrated ‘ethno-nation’, where internal diversity has not translated into corporate ethnic pluralism. The notion of territorially defined ‘ethnic homelands’ within Iran is revealed as a political fiction, one sustained by external powers seeking to reconfigure West Asia through incremental territorial fragmentation (Suren-Pahlav, 1998).

 

 

1. INTRODUCTION

Federalism is often presented as a neutral framework for accommodating diversity, yet it functions within a federal structure where each constituent unit has historically possessed its own distinct history, ethnicity, ancestry, and origin. Such units unite under a federal umbrella for reasons of security, economic interest, or political expediency, yet each retains its own body of laws and regulatory authority. When the bonds of common interest weaken, or the costs of union outweigh its benefits, constituent units have often sought to withdraw from the arrangement and assert their own independence.

 

History shows that no ancient, cohesive and deeply rooted nation has ever regarded federalism as a solution. In societies such as Iran, which have possessed a continuous historical integrity, whenever division or inequality has arisen, the remedy has not been to fragment national sovereignty but rather to resolve it through dialogue, internal reform and the guarantee of equal rights for citizens. Yet wherever federalism has been imposed upon historically unified countries without a strong underlying foundation, the result has involved fragmentation and collapse. The examples are clear: Iraq, Ethiopia, Yugoslavia. None of these countries were historically cohesive nations; they were created following the disintegration and partition of empires, as in the case of Iraq and Syria, which emerged from the Ottoman realm under British and French control. In these cases, federalism has not functioned as the beginning of unity but rather as an instrument of division and estrangement. As experience shows, federalism in such contexts has often played the role of a ‘legal platform’ upon which separatist movements have relied to pursue independence. Although federalism appears to present a ‘legal framework’, in practice it becomes a ‘concealed project of partition’.

 

Iran, however, stands apart. Together with China, it is one of the two oldest civilisations in the world that have endured continuously as unified states. Iran possesses one of the most ancient and uninterrupted systems of governance in existence; the roots of its statehood reach back to the Achaemenid dynasty in the sixth century BCE, enduring central authority and shared civilisational identity (Frye, R. (1975)). Iran was neither the product of loosely connected principalities nor an artificial construction imposed by European colonial powers. At the time when Iran, around 5,000 BCE, was laying the foundations of its ancient civilisation, Europeans were still emerging from the Neolithic period.

 

Therefore, the introduction of federalism in this context would manufacture divisions that have no historical precedent, creating artificial sovereignties where none have previously existed.

 

 

2. FEDERALISM: ITS DEFINITION, TYPES AND HISTORY

Federalism, as both a concept and constitutional arrangement, is usually framed in normative political theory as a compromise between unity and diversity. It assumes the existence of territorially distinct entities that possess historic or cultural legitimacy and are therefore entitled to institutionalised autonomy within a shared political framework (Watts, R. L. (1999)).

 

The historical record, however, demonstrates a consistent pattern: federalism arises not in the context of long-unified, homogeneous nations, but in polities assembled from fragmented territories or divergent communities (Wheare K.C. (1963); Elazar D. (1987); Watts R. l. (1999)). Where introduced into such plural settings, federalism often provides the constitutional infrastructure for secession, either through the legal recognition of subnational sovereignty or the cultivation of parallel political identities (Stepan, A. (1999)).

 

Iran stands in marked contrast to these cases. Unlike the United States, Switzerland, or Germany, it did not emerge from the voluntary union of semi-sovereign units. Nor does it mirror the Belgian or Indian experience, where federalism was adopted to accommodate entrenched linguistic or religious heterogeneity. Instead, Iran represents one of the rare civilisational states with an unbroken record of centralised political authority stretching back over two and a half millennia (Frye, R. (1975)). Even when fractured by conquest or dynastic conflict, the idea of Iran as a continuous political and cultural unit endured. This history complicates the applicability of federal models: there are no constituent sovereignties to reconcile, no historic principalities with claims to federal autonomy, and no precedent for disaggregated statehood.

 

In this context, federalism in Iran cannot be understood as a neutral administrative innovation. Rather, it functions as an externally promoted framework with the potential to destabilise one of the few historically continuous states in the Middle East. By institutionalising divisions where none were organically rooted, federal structures would not consolidate unity but manufacture the conditions for disintegration. The ‘federalist trap’ in the Iranian case is therefore less a tool of domestic reform than a possible gateway to deliberate balkanisation, raising questions not only for Iranian state survival but for the wider geopolitics of West Asia.

 

To understand why federalism has repeatedly functioned as both an instrument of unification and a channel of disintegration, it is necessary to examine its definition, its principal types, and the history of its development.

 

2.1 Definition of Federalism

Federalism is a constitutional arrangement in which sovereignty is divided between a central authority and a set of constituent units, each of which is granted a legally protected sphere of autonomy. It is distinct from simple administrative decentralisation because the authority of these units is not delegated by the centre but is entrenched in a constitutional order that the central government cannot unilaterally revoke (Elazar, D. (1987)). Federalism thus embodies a dual principle: the recognition of distinct political communities and the maintenance of an overarching framework that binds them together.

 

The purpose of federalism has historically been to reconcile fragmentation with the imperative of statehood. Where political communities differ in language, religion, ethnicity, or historical trajectory, federalism offers a mechanism to bring them into a common polity without erasing their autonomy. The model rests on the assumption that such diversity, if left unmanaged, may generate instability or secessionist conflict. By providing institutional guarantees of self-rule within the larger state, federalism aspires to turn potential centrifugal forces into a sustainable balance between unity and diversity (Watts, R. L. (1999)). In this sense, it has often been described as a pact, a negotiated compromise between previously independent or semi-sovereign entities that choose to preserve aspects of their particularity while pooling sovereignty in areas of shared concern, such as defence, foreign policy, or economic regulation.

 

The unifying function of federalism is therefore central to its design. It aims to transform fragmented territories into a viable state without demanding full assimilation. The American federation in the late eighteenth century, the Swiss Confederation’s evolution into a federal state in the nineteenth century, and the unification of Germany under a federal constitution all illustrate this dynamic: disparate polities were drawn into a single state precisely through the promise of retained autonomy (Stepan, A. (1999)). Federalism, in theory, provides reassurance to constituent groups that joining a common state will not mean the loss of their identity, traditions, or political rights.

 

At the same time, the purpose of federalism is not merely to respect diversity but to ensure that diversity does not prevent collective governance. It is a structure that allows for common decision-making in areas that require coordination while preventing domination by the centre. Its logic rests on the conviction that a centralised state may be too blunt to accommodate plurality, but fragmentation into wholly independent units would be too weak to sustain order, security, and prosperity. Federalism seeks to occupy the space between these poles, promising both self-rule and shared rule.

 

2.2 Types of Federalism

This is best understood as variations in the balance between central authority and constituent autonomy. Though all federations are defined by the constitutional division of sovereignty, their institutional design, historical origins, and political purposes differ substantially.

 

One common distinction is between coming-together and holding-together federalism (Stepan, A. (1999)). The first describes federations that originate through a voluntary pact among previously independent or semi-sovereign units, as in the case of the United States, Switzerland, or Germany. Here federalism is the means by which fragmented polities secure unity, primarily to gain collective strength in defence, commerce, or diplomacy, while safeguarding their particular autonomy. The second refers to unitary states that adopt federal arrangements in response to internal pressures, usually ethnic, linguistic, or regional, in order to prevent secession or disintegration. India, Belgium, and Spain are the paradigmatic cases: federalism or quasi-federalism is introduced not to forge unity from fragmentation, but to retain unity in the face of centrifugal forces.

 

Another typology distinguishes between dual federalism and cooperative federalism. Dual federalism describes a clear, formal separation of competences between central and subnational governments, each operating in their own sphere of authority with minimal overlap, as historically associated with the United States in the nineteenth century (Riker, W. (1964)). Cooperative federalism, by contrast, emphasises joint decision-making and shared competences, with central and subnational governments working together in overlapping policy areas. This model is most visible in European federations such as Germany, where the Länder play a constitutionally embedded role in federal law-making and administration.

 

A further distinction can be drawn between symmetric and asymmetric federalism. Symmetric federations grant constituent units identical powers and status, as in the case of the United States or Australia. Asymmetric federations, however, provide different levels of autonomy to different units, often to accommodate regions with strong historical, cultural, or linguistic identities. Canada’s special provisions for Quebec and India’s variable arrangements for particular states illustrate this pattern (Watts, R. L. (1999)).

 

These classifications are analytical tools rather than rigid categories. In practice, federations often combine elements of each, and their character may shift over time. What is constant is the underlying principle: federalism is adopted to manage diversity by balancing unity and autonomy, whether by joining fragmented entities into a single polity or by preventing a unitary state from fragmenting further.

 

2.3 Historical Development of Federalism

The history of federalism is inseparable from the political problem it was designed to address: how to forge a viable state out of disparate units while avoiding both disintegration and over-centralisation. Its earliest antecedents are often traced to the ancient Greek leagues, such as the Achaean and Aetolian confederacies, in which city-states pooled resources for defence and diplomacy while retaining a degree of internal sovereignty (Hansen, M. (1991)). These arrangements were not federal in the modern constitutional sense, but they illustrate the persistent dilemma of balancing unity with autonomy across political communities. A comparable model appeared in the Roman Republic’s system of alliances, where conquered cities were integrated into a framework that preserved limited local autonomy while binding them to Rome’s military and political authority.

 

The modern conception of federalism, however, arose in early modern Europe as part of the attempt to overcome fragmentation without resorting to absolute monarchy. The Swiss Confederation, initially a loose alliance of cantons from the late medieval period, gradually developed into a more integrated federal state after the 1848 constitution, marking one of the first enduring experiments in federalism in the contemporary sense (Kincaid, J. (1999)). The German Bund of the nineteenth century, although unstable, similarly represented an effort to link distinct polities into a common political order, eventually paving the way for German federal unification in 1871.

 

The most influential model was that of the United States. Emerging from the failure of the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. Constitution of 1787 institutionalised federalism as a compromise between the sovereignty of the thirteen former colonies and the need for a stronger central government. This design, which entrenched the dual authority of federal and state governments, provided the archetype for later federations and anchored the very vocabulary of federalism in modern political theory (Riker, W. (1964)).

 

From the nineteenth century onwards, federalism became increasingly associated with state-building in culturally or territorially fragmented societies. Canada (1867) and Australia (1901) adopted federal constitutions to unite colonies while respecting regional autonomy. In the twentieth century, federalism was deployed as a tool for managing diversity in newly independent states such as India, Nigeria, and Malaysia, where it served as a mechanism for containing ethnic, linguistic, and religious pluralism within a single polity (Watts, R. L. (1999)). Yet in many of these cases, federal institutions also became the pathways for eventual disintegration, as seen in the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia.

 

Thus, the history of federalism reveals both its integrative and its disintegrative potential. It has been repeatedly chosen to bring together units with divergent histories, languages, and traditions under a single framework, but its very design, the constitutional recognition of subnational sovereignties, has often provided the legal and institutional scaffolding for secession when political cohesion weakens. Federalism’s history, therefore, is one of ambivalence: a structure born out of fragmentation that can generate unity in the short term, but which may also contain the seeds of future division.

 

Federalism, by its very definition, was not conceived for nations with a continuous and unified history; it emerged as a framework to consolidate fragmented communities within a common state, yet by constitutionally entrenching their autonomy, it has repeatedly provided the conditions for eventual dissolution.

 

Having established federalism’s historical emergence as a response to fragmentation and its repeated tendency to entrench division rather than mitigate it, attention now turns to the Iranian case, not as a textbook federation-in-waiting, but as a polity where federalist prescriptions rest on a manufactured reading of its demographic and historical character. In Iran, the discourse of federalism does not emerge from pluralistic demands below, but from a top-down reconstruction of identity, one that projects imagined ethnic sovereignties onto a civilisational state long defined by cultural cohesion. It is this re-description, the invention of a ‘multi-ethnic Iran’, that sets the stage for understanding federalism not as reform but as a balaknisation device.

 

 

3. INVENTING A ‘MULTI-ETHNIC IRAN’: FROM FALSIFICATION TO BALKANISATION

Recasting Iran as a ‘multi-ethnic nation’ does not merely misdescribe social reality; it engineers an institutional demand-curve for territorial federalism mapped onto alleged ethnic homelands. Ethno-federal design conflates administrative convenience with putative nationhood. Once boundaries, assemblies, and constitutional competences are assigned to identity-defined territories, routine centre–periphery bargaining acquires the language and logic of sovereignty. Federal units become platforms for what Roeder terms ‘segmented statehood’, sub-state polities with their own bureaucracies, security forces, and legitimising myths, capable of converting policy disputes into jurisdictional crises and, in moments of weakness at the centre, bids for exit (Roeder, P. G., 2007). This dynamic is amplified by ethnic outbidding and boundary-making: political entrepreneurs gain from tightening categorical lines, policing membership, and narrating historical grievances, thereby raising the political price of compromise (Horowitz, 1985; Brubaker, 2004; Wimmer, 2013). Far from neutral architecture, ethno-federalism is a technology of differentiation that can hard-wire escalation incentives into the constitution. [4]

 

Comparative trajectories warn against casual transplantation. The late Soviet Union’s ethno-territorial regimes provided cadres, fiscal bases, and legal scripts for exit when central authority ebbed; ‘self-determination’ clauses and regime an institutions became levers for disintegration (Bunce, V., 1999; Suny, R. G., 1993). Ethiopia’s ethnicity-based federation has oscillated between recognition and coercion, illustrating how constitutionalising identity can spur disputes over borders, representation, and security, with recurrent centre–region brinkmanship (Aalen, 2002; Markakis, 2011). Where federal units overlap with ethnic categories, decentralisation may either pacify or mobilise; outcomes hinge on party systems, fiscal rules, and the presence of ‘kin-states’ across borders (Brancati, D., 2006; Hale, H. E. 2004). By contrast, Switzerland and Canada are historical composites whose federal bargains rest on layered institutions, cross-regional party linkages, and long-accreted trust, conditions not replicated by importing labels alone (Keating, M. 2001). The Yugoslav lesson is starker: regime-level nation-building plus economic shocks and nationalist competition produced a sequential unravelling once federal cohesion faltered (Snyder, J. 2000).[5]

 

In Iran, an identity-territorial blueprint would collide with three structural realities. First, the social base is an ethno-nation with deep cultural–historical continuity (Suren-Pahlav, 1998); linguistic variation does not map onto separate nations. Constitutionalising ‘homelands’ would therefore manufacture rather than reflect political communities (Yarshater, E. 1993; Katouzian, H. 2009). Second, the rentier political economy magnifies territorial stakes. Hydrocarbon and transit revenues invite sub-state claims to ‘ownership’ and earmarking once constitutionalised at the regional level; fiscal federalism, absent stringent equalisation and central counter-cyclical capacity, risks hardening distributive conflicts into territorial ones (Mahdavy, H. 1970; Treisman, D., 2007). Third, Iran’s neighbourhood supplies external patrons and narratives for identity-based claims. From the Soviet renaming of Arran as ‘Azerbaijan’ to Cold War efforts to detach Iranian Azerbaijan, great-power and regional politics have repeatedly instrumentalised ‘nationalities’ in Iran’s north-west and south-west, creating an enabling environment for irredentist scripting if sub-state polities are identity-branded (Swietochowski, T.  1985; Hasanli, J. 2006; Cornell, 2001). In such a setting, ethno-federal institutions are not inert; they are magnets for geopolitical leverage.[6]

 

Proponents often cite India’s linguistic states as a benign precedent. The analogy is misleading. India’s union endures through a nationalising party system at key junctures, a strong election commission, an integrated civil service, and centripetal electoral incentives that cross-cut linguistic blocs; linguistic reorganisation was embedded within a larger constitutional order that guarded market unity and judicial supremacy (Adeney, K., 2007; Weingast, B. R 1995). Iran presently lacks a competitive party system and the independent mediating bodies that make territorial autonomy compatible with state cohesion. Translating linguistic administration into ethnic sovereignty in this context would entrench veto players without the counterweights that stabilise federations.[7]

 

 

4. THE FEDERALIST TRAP AS A MECHANISM OF BALKANISATION

In a polity such as Iran, with deep civilisational continuity and a historically integrated identity, the federalist proposition cannot be treated as a neutral administrative reform. Rather, it should be understood as an imported architecture of differentiation, one that artificially maps territorial authority onto purported ethnic cleavages. By translating linguistic or regional variation into institutionalised autonomy, federalism in this context operates not as an inclusive framework of governance but as a structural inducement to disintegration.

 

Where ethno-federalism has been implemented in similar contexts, characterised by an absence of constituent sovereignties and a history of centralised cohesion, it has not resolved political diversity but instead generated it. This is because federalism, when tethered to identity-based territorial units, reifies distinctions that may previously have held only limited political salience. The conversion of local identities into constitutionally sanctioned sovereignties creates a dual polity in which sub-state units acquire not only administrative competence but the symbolic and institutional apparatus of proto-statehood.

 

This process follows a familiar sequence. First, federal units, once delineated along ethno-linguistic lines, begin to act as loci of autonomous political identity. Second, their institutional separation, codified in law, embedded in fiscal arrangements, and sustained through political patronage, transforms centre–periphery dynamics into negotiations between putative equals rather than branches of a shared state. Third, in times of national crisis or political transition, these units may become the platforms from which secessionist bids are launched. The framework itself encourages such trajectories by constitutionally endorsing internal sovereignty while eroding the integrative bonds that sustain national unity. As Roeder notes, federalism of this type engenders ‘segmented statehood’: sub-national polities equipped with the bureaucratic, security, and discursive tools necessary to convert disputes into jurisdictional ruptures (Roeder, P. G., 2007). This incentive structure is compounded by ethnic outbidding, whereby political actors derive advantage from sharpening communal boundaries and narrating historical grievances (Horowitz, 1985; Brubaker, 2004; Wimmer, 2013).

 

When transposed onto Iran, a polity with no precedent of constituent ethnic sovereignties, such a model introduces precisely the instability it purports to mitigate. It manufactures political subjects defined by difference, assigns them territorial jurisdiction, and thereby frames intra-national pluralism as a contest between rival identities rather than a variation within a civilisational whole. The state, in this schema, is no longer a shared space for political negotiation but a balance of sub-state power centres, each with its own claim to legitimacy and resources.

 

It is this potential, to disaggregate a continuous ethno-nation into competitive identity-based polities, that has rendered federalism attractive to foreign powers seeking to weaken Iran. Since the 1979 Revolution, federalism has not emerged as an endogenous political programme grounded in domestic consensus but as a vocabulary advanced by actors with strategic interests in Iranian fragmentation. The initial discourse entered Iranian political life through Marxist parties such as the Tudeh, which adapted Soviet frameworks of ‘nationalities’ to the Iranian setting. Over time, however, the language of federalism became detached from its ideological roots and rearticulated in the service of geopolitical agendas.

 

In the United States, federalist narratives have been consistently linked to efforts at destabilising the Iranian state. A U.S. Air Force–sponsored RAND study identified ethnic pluralism within Iran as a ‘vulnerability’ and proposed the exploitation of internal divisions as a policy instrument (Crane, K., et al. (2008)). Journalistic investigations confirmed that, following 2007, the U.S. government funded covert actions to support minority separatist movements and stage operations designed to exacerbate ethnic cleavages (Hersh S. M. (2006)). These actions were not ad hoc but integrated into a broader strategic framework which treated Iran’s internal diversity as a field of contestation.

 

Israeli policy likewise embraced fragmentation as a doctrine. The Yinon Plan (1982), a strategic memorandum circulated among Israeli defence circles, proposed the division of regional adversaries, including Iran, along ethno-sectarian lines, with federalism functioning as a legitimising structure for eventual partition (Yinon (1982)). Under this schema, the ‘multi-ethnic’ character of Iran was not merely observed but strategically constructed, allowing foreign actors to project constitutional models that would facilitate internal dissolution.

 

One of the cables released by WikiLeaks documents a confidential meeting in August 2007 between Meir Dagan, then head of Mossad, and Nicholas Burns, the United States Deputy Secretary of State. In the exchange, Dagan is recorded as outlining a strategy designed to exploit existing social and political fractures within Iran by amplifying ethnic divisions. The groups identified in the cable under the rubric of ‘Iranian ethnicities’ included Kurds, Persian speakers, Azerbaijanis, and Baluch (The Guardian, 2010; Van Wilgenburg, 2010).

 

This strategic framing resurfaced publicly two years later when Jane Harman, a Jewish member of the United States Congress, reiterated a comparable argument during a round-table meeting convened by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on 3 May 2009. In her intervention, Harman is reported to have endorsed the idea of fragmenting Iran along ethnic and linguistic lines, effectively echoing elements of Dagan’s earlier position.

This logic extended to Iran’s immediate neighbourhood. Saudi Arabia and several Persian Gulf states offered financial and material support to Ahwazi Arab separatists, many of whom operated under the guise of federalist demands and in coordination with the British Ahwazi Friendship Society (BAFS). Here, the language of minority rights masked an agenda of territorial revisionism. Turkey and the Republic of Azerbaijan, while more circumspect, nonetheless deployed pan-Turkic narratives to promote separatist sentiment among Iranian Azaris, encouraging the perception of shared nationhood across borders and, by extension, the legitimacy of regional autonomy. Israel, too, engaged in this strategy, viewing the cultivation of federalist discourse in Iran’s north-west as a potential wedge against Iranian state consolidation.

 

The convergence of these external actors around federalist language demonstrates its strategic utility: by redefining Iran as a composite of ethnic fragments rather than a historically continuous ethno-nation, they prepare the legal and conceptual ground for balkanisation. Federalism in such hands becomes less a theory of accommodation than a weapon of partition.

 

According to Lyndon LaRouche, this external strategy originated with the so-called Bernard Lewis Plan, a Cold War blueprint allegedly devised in the early 1970s to fracture Middle Eastern states along ethno-religious lines (LaRouche, L. (1992)). In its purported sequence, the plan begins with the installation of Islamist governments to displace secular nationalisms, proceeds to intensify sectarian and ethnic divisions, and culminates in redrawing regional borders to create a set of smaller, weaker client states. This conception informed the ‘Arc of Crisis’ doctrine associated with Zbigniew Brzezinski in the late 1970s and, later, the intellectual foundation of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which openly advocated regime change and U.S. hegemony across the region.

 

​

 

Yet, currently two key domestic actors have also converged on the federalist narrative, not as an expression of political principle, but as a tactical expedient.

 

The first is the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation (MKO), a terrorist group whose notoriety in Iran surpasses even that of the Islamic regime. Widely reviled across political and generational lines for its wartime alliance with Saddam Hussein during the Iran–Iraq conflict. The MKO has, in recent years, attempted to rebrand itself through selective alignment with separatist groups both inside and outside Iran. In doing so, it has adopted federalist language as a means of coalition-building, partnering with outfits such as the BAFS and extending overtures to militant factions in Iran’s border provinces. Far from reflecting ideological consistency, this turn to federalism marks yet another opportunistic manoeuvre aimed at rehabilitating a deeply discredited movement by latching onto whatever fissures may serve its strategic relevance.

 

The second actor is a faction of the so-called reformist current within the Islamic regime itself, individuals and networks who, under the cover of exile and opposition, continue to operate as extensions of the regime’s internal containment strategy. Some have migrated westwards under the guise of dissidents, only to serve as ‘controlled opposition’ figures, engaged in narrative management rather than system change. Others have formed ostensibly independent political groups whose purpose is not to challenge the Islamic regime per se, but to forestall its collapse by offering a cosmetic alternative. Within this camp, federalism has become a favoured rhetorical instrument, not to empower peripheries or democratise governance, but to dilute genuine opposition by reorienting debate around managed fragmentation rather than regime removal.

 

Therefore, geopolitical deployment of federalist discourse, by state and non-state actors seeking to fracture Iran’s territorial and political integrity, depends on a prior ideological move: the reframing of Iran itself as a composite of ethnic nations. This move is not descriptive, but constitutive, it invents the very diversity it claims to manage. To assess this manoeuvre, one must return to first principles: the nature of Iranian national identity, and whether the pluralist lens applied in other contexts can be meaningfully extended to a state whose unity is civilisational, not contractual.

 

 

5. IRAN AS AN ETHNO-NATION MISREPRESENTED AS MULTI-ETHNIC

The Iranian case confounds conventional models of federal accommodation, not because it lacks internal variation, but because its foundational identity is rooted not in the civic contractualism of modern Western statehood but in an enduring ethno-historical continuity. While the civic model defines a nation through shared political institutions, voluntary citizenship, and legal equality, a model applied in states such as France or the United States (Anderson, B. 1983; Smith, A. D. 1986), Iran’s identity is not reducible to institutional affiliation. It is instead grounded in a shared ancestry, cultural matrix, civilisational memory, and historical cohesion extending across millennia. Iran, therefore, represents not a civic nation in the Western mould but an ethno-nation, a historically continuous cultural community whose statehood has expressed, rather than created, its national consciousness (Suren-Pahlav, 1998; Yarshater, E. 1993; Katouzian, H. 2009).

 

From antiquity to the modern period, the Iranians have retained a coherent sense of belonging anchored in the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European world. This belonging has been articulated not merely through language or religion, but through a civilisational logic in which shared historical experience, mythic consciousness, and cultural production have functioned as the primary bonds of community. The result is a polity that does not require the contractual pluralism of civic nationalism because it already possesses a deep, historically embedded sense of self.

 

Nevertheless, the language of civic nationalism, with its emphasis on voluntary association and multicultural coexistence, has frequently been projected onto Iran by foreign and domestic actors alike. Within this framework, Iran is reclassified not as an ethno-nation but as a composite of coexisting ethnic groups, thereby inviting the application of federal or consociational models designed for structurally plural societies. This discursive manoeuvre has proven politically potent: it reframes regional and linguistic diversity as ethnic fragmentation and casts federalism as a necessary response to putative internal pluralism. In doing so, it not only misdescribes the historical character of the Iranian nation but also normalises the very conditions that would justify its dismemberment.

 

The assertion that Iran is a ‘multi-ethnic state’ is thus not rooted in sociological or anthropological fact. It is a rhetorical construction which gains traction only by applying an inapposite civic model of nationhood. By this model’s logic, the presence of multiple languages or regional cultures signals the existence of distinct ethnic nations within a single polity, a proposition which in the Iranian case lacks both historical and genetic support. The European civic conception presupposes plurality of descent, decentralised historical trajectories, and voluntary national cohesion. Applied to Iran, it generates a misleading portrait of a state assembled from heterogeneous communities, rather than recognised as an ethno-national continuum shaped by civilisational integrity.

 

The consequences of this mischaracterisation are not limited to abstraction. They serve strategic ends. Historically, the language of ‘multi-ethnicity’ has been introduced and propagated to erode Iranian cohesion and legitimise projects of internal fragmentation. The Soviet Union was the first major power to deploy this conceptual framework for geopolitical purposes. In the early twentieth century, Soviet policy deliberately renamed the region north of the Aras River, historically known as Arran, as ‘Azerbaijan’. This act was not a reflection of indigenous nomenclature but a geopolitical intervention, designed to fabricate a link between Soviet territory and Iranian Azerbaijan. By erasing the original toponym and imposing a name that evoked cross-border kinship, the Soviet regime manufactured the semblance of a transnational ethnic identity that could later be instrumentalised for irredentist purposes (Swietochowski, T. 1985; Cornell, 2001).

 

This initial Soviet project established the template for future interventions. Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the regime in Tehran adopted a similar discursive strategy for internal control. Under the rubric of ‘ethnic recognition’, the Islamic regime deployed a policy of managed fragmentation, inflating regional and linguistic differences in order to divide potential opposition and maintain its grip on power. This form of internal differentiation was not a genuine pluralist innovation but a tactic of authoritarian governance, mirroring the colonial technique of divide and rule. Ethnic distinctions, previously absorbed into Iran’s broader civilisational identity, were re-articulated as categorical boundaries and fed into the administrative logic of state management (Katouzian, H. 2009).

 

In parallel, external actors hostile to Iran continued to reinforce the same narrative. The misrepresentation of Iran as a mult i-ethnic federation-in-waiting became a staple of Western policy discourse, particularly within the frameworks of regime-change advocacy. By framing Iran as a composite of minority nations, federalist discourse supplied the justificatory grammar for potential territorial reconstitution. This reframing served a double function: it weakened the legitimacy of Iranian central authority and created an intellectual architecture within which secessionist claims could be naturalised and even encouraged (Fuller, 1993). What is elided in these accounts is the underlying unity of the Iranian nation. The various languages spoken within Iran, Kurdish, Baluchi, Azari, and others, do not correspond to discrete ethnic nations. Rather, they reflect regional and historical contingencies: linguistic differentiation arising from geographic isolation, administrative incorporation, or episodes of foreign rule. A prime example is the case of Azari Turks, whose language derives from Turkification during Mongol and Timurid periods, but whose genetic, cultural, and historical identity remains firmly Indo-Iranian (Tapper, 1994). Contemporary genetic research further confirms this point: population variation across Iranian provinces exists within a shared Indo-Iranian genetic and cultural framework, rather than indicating a mosaic of separate ethnic stocks (Haber et al., 2012).

 

As formulated in international human rights law, the principle of shared descent and origin likewise precludes defining Iran as a multi-ethnic state. UN Human Rights Committee, General Comment No. 23 (1994) on Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, defines minorities as communities marked by ethnic, religious, or linguistic traits, yet always ‘anchored in ancestry or origin’ (United Nations Human Rights Committee, 1994). A Zoroastrian is thus no less Iranian than a Muslim Iranian; in the same way, a Kurdish speaker is no less Iranian than a Persian or a Baluch speakers, since descent and origin constitute the shared basis of belonging. In the United Kingdom, a parallel understanding applies. The recognition of an ‘ethnic group’ in law rests upon descent, origin, and the preservation of a collective identity (Equality Act, 2010; Mandla v Dowell-Lee, 1983).

 

On this basis, Iran diverges categorically from genuinely multi-ethnic states such as Switzerland, Belgium, or Canada, where separate national communities have been brought together under federal compacts. In those cases, constitutional federalism reflects pre-existing ethnic duality or plurality. By contrast, Iran exemplifies the ethno-nation, a civilisational community internally diverse yet nationally continuous. Its linguistic and regional variations exist within, not against, a shared cultural and ancestral matrix (Keating, M. 2001).

The conceptual shift from recognising Iran as an ethno-nation to portraying it as a multi-ethnic state is therefore not simply mistaken; it is politically motivated. It transforms geographic and linguistic diversity into a constitutional problem, and in doing so, authorises external and internal actors to promote structural reforms, namely, federalisation, whose real effect is to create the very fragmentation they purport to resolve. The misrepresentation is thus not merely descriptive error; it is a discursive weapon deployed to weaken and divide a civilisational polity whose internal cohesion has long resisted such manipulation (Swietochowski, T. 1985; Cornell, 2001; Fuller, 1993).

 

The misrepresentation of Iran as a composite of ethnic nations is not only analytically flawed but also historically unsustainable. Before the external imposition of ‘nationalities’ discourse and the internalisation of identity pluralism as a constitutional concern, Iran had already articulated and institutionalised its political community as an ethno-nation rooted in civilisational continuity. Its national cohesion was not the product of negotiated coexistence among disparate groups, but the political expression of a long-standing cultural unity. To grasp the depth of this continuity, it is necessary to examine the formative legal architecture of the Iranian nation-state, specifically, the 1905–07 Constitutional Revolution. This episode, far from illustrating an incipient federal logic or ethnic pluralism, codified a unitary conception of national belonging that decisively rejected corporate ethnic categorisation.

 

 

6. THE HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS OF IRANIAN POLITICAL UNITY

Despite recent efforts to reframe Iran through the lens of multicultural pluralism, the country’s political foundations reveal a markedly different logic. Far from being assembled from coexisting ethnic nations, Iran’s constitutional and political tradition has consistently articulated unity as the expression of a civilisational ethno-nation. The formative texts and movements of modern Iran reflect not the civic contractualism familiar to Western statehood, but a shared ancestry, mytho-historical consciousness, and cultural cohesion extending across centuries. Nowhere is this more evident than in the constitutional moment of the early twentieth century, which provides compelling evidence that political modernity in Iran was inscribed in a national idiom, not as an accommodation among ethnic collectivities, but as the reaffirmation of a historically continuous political identity.

 

6.1 The 1905 Iranian Constitutional Revolution And The Absence Of Ethnic Categories

The strongest demonstration that ‘multi-ethnic Iran’ is a modern political invention aligned with fragmentation agendas lies in the Constitutional Revolution and its outcome, the 1906 Constitution, whose lexicon contains no category of ‘ethnicity’ and speaks only of ‘the Iranian nation’ and ‘the people of Iran’.

 

Constitutionalist mobilisation drew leaders and columns from every quarter of Iran within a single national frame. From Azerbaijan, Sattār Khān and Bāqer Khān led the Tabriz resistance in concert with the deputy and theorist Ḥasan Taqizādeh. From the Caspian north, Moḥammad-Valī Khān Khalatbari Tonekāboni (Sepahdār-e Aʿẓam) mustered forces from Gilān and Māzandarān toward Tehran. From the Zagros, the Bakhtiyārī columns under Sardār Asʿad (ʿAlī-Qolī Khān) advanced via Isfahan and helped seize the capital, with further leadership from Najaf-Qolī Khān Samsām-al-Salṭaneh. In Khorasan, Moḥammad-Taqī Bahār supported the constitutional cause through organisation and polemic in Khorasan. In Fars, Mīrzā Jahāngīr Khān-e Shīrāzī gave the movement its cutting press through Sūr-e Esrāfīl until his execution after the 1908 coup. In Kermanshah formed an anjoman and produced activists such as Abolqāsem Lahūtī, while some Kurdish tribal formations aligned variably across the constitutional–royalist divide, underscoring participation that was political rather than ‘ethnic’ in idiom.

 

This nationwide coalition then wrote its victory into law. The Fundamental Law and the Supplementary Fundamental Laws articulate a unitary ‘mellat-e Īrān’ and ‘mardom-e Īrān’, organise representation by provinces and socio-functional estates, and require proceedings in Persian; nowhere do they enumerate ‘Ethnics’ (‘aqwām’) or establish ethnic corporate status (Iran Data Portal, 1906; Iran Data Portal, 1907). The lexical and institutional record therefore corroborates the historical practice: a constitutional revolution made by Iranians across regions, not by self-constituted ‘ethnic nations’, and a basic law that codified that national frame.

 

6.2 Constitutional Lexicon: The Articulation of Iranian Unity

The constitutional settlement of 1906–07 articulates political community in the unitary idiom of ‘the Iranian Nation’ (‘mellat-e Īrān)’ and ‘the People of Iran’ (‘mardom-e Īrān’), not as a federation of ‘Ethnics’ (‘aqwām’). The Fundamental Law declares the National Assembly ‘the representative of the whole Iranian nation’, while the Supplementary Fundamental Laws and the Electoral Law speak of ‘the people of Iran’ and organise representation by province and socio-functional estates, not by putative ethnic categories (Iran Data Portal, 1906; Iran Data Portal, 1907). Proceedings were conducted in Persian and deputies were required to be Iranian subjects. The legal vocabulary of the settlement, mellat for the nation, ahālī for inhabitants, īl/ṭāyefa for tribes in administrative usage, points to a single civic body with internal diversity rather than a set of co-equal ethnic collectivities.[8]

 

This textual economy tracks the political sociology of the revolution itself. Constitutional mobilisation drew in urban notables, guilds, provincial anjomans, tribal contingents, and intellectual networks from Tehran to Tabriz and Isfahan. Participation carried local colour yet converged on a common national frame. Neither the debates of the first Parliament (Majles) nor the operative clauses of the settlement codified rights or seats by ‘Ethnic’ (‘qawm’); the architecture of representation aggregated Iranians across regions and estates under a single nation or mellat (Afary, J. 1996; Bayat, M. 1991). In short, when revolutionary actors from different parts of the country institutionalised their victory, they wrote the constitution in national, not ethnic, terms.[9]

 

The later insertion of an ‘ethnicities’ discourse into Iranian politics is therefore best read as a twentieth-century graft, not a constitutional inheritance. North of the Aras, the Musavat-led Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR) in 1918 adopted the name ‘Azerbaijan’ for territories historically known as Arrān/Albania; the Bolsheviks retained and consolidated that nomenclature within the Azerbaijan SSR from 1920 (Swietochowski, T.  1985; Altstadt, 1992). Between 1945 and 1946, with Red Army cover, Soviet policy sponsored the ‘Azerbaijan People’s Government’ in Tabriz, supplying institutions, media, and a vocabulary of ‘nationality’ designed to territorialise identity inside Iran (Hasanli, J. 2006; Atabaki, 2000). From that juncture, ‘nationalities’ talk entered Iranian political contention as an external script layered onto a constitutional order that had never recognised ‘ethnic’ corporate status.[10]

 

The evidentiary contrast is stark. The 1906–07 texts name a single nation and people; they neither enumerate ‘Ethnics’ (‘aqwām’) nor devolve authority along ethnic lines. Subsequent projects that framed Iran as ‘multi-ethnic’ did so through geopolitical intervention and Cold War statecraft, not by recovering a latent constitutional principle. As proof of interference, the constitutional lexicon is unambiguous: before the Soviet era, Iran’s public law imagined and instituted a unitary national community.[11]

 

One central reason why the Iranian left, separatist movements and their foreign patrons persistently attack the 1906 Constitution is that it enshrines a unitary Iranian nation and leaves no constitutional space for ethnically defined corporate status or territorial federalism, the premise on which balkanisation projects depend.

 

 

7. PRESCRIBING FEDERALISM FOR IRAN: A BLUEPRINT FOR BALKANISATION

The misrepresentation of Iran as a multi-ethnic state has not remained a matter of discourse alone; it has translated into a persistent political project advanced under the guise of federalism. Federalism, in contexts such as Switzerland, Canada, or Belgium, is a legitimate institutional response to genuine multi-ethnicity and cultural pluralism. It provides a constitutional mechanism through which distinct national groups coexist within a single political entity while preserving their autonomy (Keating, M. 2001). Transposed onto Iran, however, federalism functions less as a solution to diversity than as a strategic lever to fragment a historically unified ethno-nation.

 

The federalist prescription for Iran rests on the faulty premise that its linguistic groups constitute separate ethnic nations, each entitled to autonomous state-like structures. Once this false premise is normalised, the call for federalism appears logical and even progressive. Yet in practice, federalisation in the Iranian context would institutionalise divisions that have no basis in historical or sociological reality. It would transform linguistic and regional differences—products of geography and historical circumstance—into political boundaries, thereby creating artificial fault lines.

 

The risk is not theoretical. History shows that federal arrangements imposed upon states mischaracterised as multi-ethnic frequently serve as precursors to disintegration. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the violent fragmentation of Yugoslavia illustrate how federal structures, when layered upon artificially constructed ethnic identities, provide the constitutional scaffolding for secessionist projects once political conditions permit (Cornell, 2001; Brubaker, 1996). To advocate federalism for Iran is therefore is a formula of balkanisation: first redefine a unified ethno-nation as a composite of ‘ethnic minorities’, then enshrine those imagined divisions in law, and finally allow centrifugal pressures to tear the polity apart.

 

Within Iran, this trap is exacerbated by the authoritarian policies of the Islamic regime. The regime’s systematic use of divide-and-rule strategies has already weakened national cohesion by promoting narratives of ethnic fragmentation. A federalist framework would not correct this imbalance but entrench it, giving the regime or external actors a ready-made architecture for manipulation. What is presented as empowerment of Iran’s supposed ‘ethnic groups’ would in reality function as a roadmap to fragmentation.

 

The federalist trap, then, is not an abstract constitutional debate but a concrete geopolitical design. It represents the translation of a politically manufactured discourse of multi-ethnicity into institutional form, with consequences that would place Iran on the path of Yugoslavia rather than Switzerland. For a historically continuous ethno-nation such as Iran, federalism is less a mechanism of accommodation than a gateway to dismemberment.

 

Advocates of civic federalism may argue that decentralisation enhances democratic representation, safeguards minority rights, and promotes local accountability. In pluralistic societies with entrenched civic traditions and robust mediating institutions, such claims retain merit. Yet in Iran, where diversity is cultural rather than national, and where central statehood is not an imposition but a historical inheritance, civic federalism becomes a misfit model. It projects the institutional vocabulary of Western multiculturalism onto a polity whose coherence derives not from negotiated coexistence but from civilisational continuity. Without a genuinely pluralist party system, independent judiciary, or integrated civic architecture, civic federalism would not empower local communities but empower fragmentation. It would convert peripheral administrative differences into sovereign boundaries, and elevate linguistic regionalism into constitutional rupture. Rather than deepening democracy, it would lay the groundwork for disintegration.

 

Federalism, properly understood, is not a tool to unify that which has always been whole. It is a mechanism devised to bring together previously separate political entities, a framework by which disjointed parts form a federated whole for mutual interest, as in the American, Indian or Swiss cases. It is a model of political assembly, not of disassembly. To apply it in reverse, to take an organically unified, historically continuous country and fracture it into parts under the illusion of reconsolidation, is an absurdity. It is akin to the logic of Dr Frankenstein: assembling a creature from dismembered parts and calling it life. But the resulting body does not breathe unity; it carries within it the memory of separation and the threat of collapse. No one kills a man, cuts him into pieces, and then insists that by reattaching the limbs, they have created a better man. A dead man, however carefully reconstructed, remains a corpse. His parts may serve new bodies through transplant, but the unity he once embodied is irrevocably gone. This, in effect, is the federalist proposition for Iran: not renewal, but post-mortem redistribution.

 

 

Footnotes

[1] According to Wayne Madsen, formerly of the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and Naval Counterintelligence (ONI), alleged in a January 2007 disclosure that Daniel Brett was acting on behalf of British intelligence. He is said to have been involved in a series of operations in Iran’s Khuzestan Province, including bombings, the incitement of ethnic discord, and the orchestration of civil unrest — actions purportedly undertaken with the support of the British government in collaboration with the Pentagon. Madsen further alleged that the 2005 Khuzestan bombings, which resulted in the deaths of numerous civilians, were executed by British special forces and intelligence operatives, in coordination with the Ahwazi Arab People's Democratic Front (AADPF), based in London, and the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (MKO). See: Wayne Madsen Report (2007) ‘SPECIAL REPORT, British intelligence and anti-Iran terrorists’, 29 March. [Online]. Available at: https://www.waynemadsenreport.com/http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com (Accessed: 9 June 2013).

[2] Brett, D., (2013) Federalism: the Only Solution for Iran's Minorities. the British Ahwazi Friendship Society (BAFS) [Online] Available at: https://www.alahwaz.info/en/?p=4956 (Accessed: 07 June 2013).

[3] Brett’s portrayal of Iran as a ‘multi-ethnic’, and at times even a ‘multi-nation’, depending on his shifting mood, in need of territorial federalism is not merely inaccurate. One of the reasons he is aptly regarded as a straw-man in these debates is his lack of even elementary knowledge of Iran. While prescribing federalism as though it were a technical remedy, he oscillates between describing Arabic-speaking Iranians as an ‘ethnic group’ and, at other times, as a ‘nation’. He goes further to claim that Iran’s so-called Arab population is concentrated in oil and gas–rich Khuzestan, numbering between 4.5 and 10 million, a claim that is uninformed to the point of absurdity, given that the entire population of Khuzestan is approximately 3.5 million, at least half of whom are Bakhtiaris.

[4] On ‘segmented statehood’ and the escalation incentives embedded in ethno-federal units, see Roeder, P. G. (2007); on boundary-making and ethnic entrepreneurship, see Brubaker (2004) and Wimmer (2013).

[5] On secession-enabling effects of Soviet ethno-territorial design, see Bunce, V. (1999) and Suny, R. G. (1993); on Ethiopia’s federation, Aalen (2002) and Markakis (2011); on decentralisation and ethnic party mobilisation, Brancati, D. (2006) and Hale, H. E. (2004); on consociational and federal bargains in established polities, Keating (2001); on Yugoslavia’s breakdown, Snyder, J. (2000).

[6] On Iran’s civilisational continuity and internal diversity, see Yarshater (1993) and Katouzian (2009); on rentier political economy and territorial claims, Mahdavy, H. (1970); on external instrumentalisation, Swietochowski (1985), Hasanli, J. (2006), and Cornell (2001).

On India’s federal endurance and party-system effects, see Adeney, K. (2007) and Weingast, B. R (1995).

[7] On administrative versus identity-based decentralisation, see Rodden (2004) and Falleti (2005); on centripetal electoral design, see Reilly (2012); for a synthesis warning against ethno-federal locks, see Roeder, P. G. (2007) and Treisman, D. (2007).

[8] Fundamental Law (30 December 1906), Art. 2 (‘wakālat-e majles … tamām-e mellat-e Īrān’); Supplementary Fundamental Laws (7 October 1907) and Electoral Law (9 September 1906) terminology (mardom-e Īrān, ahālī-ye mamlekat-e Īrān), English and Persian texts via Iran Data Portal. On lexical usage of mellat, qawm, īl/ṭāyefa, see Dehkhodā and contemporary administrative practice. (Iran Data Portal, 1906; Iran Data Portal, 1907; Dehkhodā, n.d.)

[9] On the social coalitions of the Constitutional Revolution and the institutional design of the first Majles, see Afary, J. (1996) and Bayat, M. (1991).

[10] On the ADR’s 1918 adoption of ‘Azerbaijan’ for Arrān/Albania and the Soviet consolidation of that nomenclature, see Swietochowski (1985) and Altstadt (1992). On Soviet sponsorship of the 1945–46 Azerbaijan People’s Government in Tabriz and the deployment of ‘nationality’ frames, see Hasanli, J. (2006) and Atabaki (2000).

[11] For a synthetic account linking Iran’s constitutional idiom to later external instrumentalisation of identity, see Katouzian (2009) and Cornell (2001).

 

 

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