OSU Global

 

What is the history of development in Iran? How have Iran's natural resources, economy, and society been impacted by development projects? 

The Iranian & Persian Gulf Studies Program at Oklahoma State University is pleased to host a Symposium on Natural Resources and Development in Iran on February 25, 2025. Bringing together five historians and social scientists working at the cross-sections of development, environment, political economy, culture, and society in Iran, the symposium will examine how Iran's resources -- especially water, oil, and natural gas -- have been targets of national and international development projects from the mid-20th century to today, with far-reaching impacts. These research presentations are complemented by a short film screening and discussion with the director. Altogether, these sessions seek to advance our understanding of the intertwined histories of natural resources development and modernity in Iran. This symposium is free and open to the OSU community. Please see the schedule below and join us on February 25th!

 

 

Tuesday, February 25, 2025 
Location: Wes Watkins Center (WWC) 
Please note: this schedule is tentative and subject to change.

 

3:00pm Welcome Remarks 

 

3:10pm Session 1: Infrastructure Politics 

(WWC 108)

 

"Iran’s Living Pyramid: The Dez Dam Project and the Promise of Development"

Bita Mousavi (New York University)

 

Abstract: In 1956, Mohammad Reza Shah contracted the Development and Resources Corporation, founded by former TVA chairmen David E. Lilienthal and Gordon Clapp, to revitalize the oil-rich province of Khuzestan. Lilienthal and Clapp had proposed the Dez Dam Project, a $140-million program of dam construction, agricultural mechanization, and rural electrification. Despite their vision of the Dez Dam as a “heroic structure” devoted, unlike the pyramids of the pharaohs, to the living, the project’s results were at best mixed. Cash-poor farmers lacked funds for water and electricity charges, while industrial agribusinesses reduced local employment. While scholars have analyzed the project's shortcomings as evidence of development's “modular” replication or Iran's integration into global markets, I argue that the Dez Dam Project reveals a more fundamental contradiction: While development promised to tie Iran's oil wealth back to its land and water, building from the infrastructure of extraction the foundation of national self-sufficiency, the project's technical and financial arrangements reproduced the patterns of international dependency it aimed to overcome.

 

Bio: Bita Mousavi is a PhD Candidate in History & Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University with research interests in the history of development, theories of capital and empire, and Third World political thought. At NYU, she is writing a dissertation entitled "The Parasitic State: Nature, Wealth, and the Iranian Nation, 1900-1990," which argues that the management of Iran's mineral resources has structured state power. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the American Institute of Iranian Studies, and NYU Abu Dhabi's Global Dissertation Fellowship.

 

"Precarious Petroleum: Volatile Reservoirs, Varied Natural Gas Compositions, and Development in 1960s Iran"

Ciruce A. Movahedi-Lankarani (University of Southern California)

Abstract: As a source of energy and revenue, “oil” is understood as a major driver of the twentieth-century’s social, political, and cultural transformations. But such homogenizing abstractions of petroleum are belied by the compositional heterogeneity of its deposits and the unpredictable dynamism of its buried geographies. This talk traces the roots of the 1960s-era construction of the Shahpur Petrochemical Complex within petroleum impurities and the unexpected and uncontrolled subterranean movements of natural gas. It argues that centering notions of natural uncontrollability opens new avenues for studying the political productivity of uncertainty in the developmental history of Iran.

 

Bio: Ciruce Movahedi‐Lankarani is the Farhang Foundation Early Career Chair in Iranian Studies and Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California. Ciruce studies the connected histories of technology, development, and the environment in the construction of energy-intensive societies in the Middle East. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Science Research Council and can be found in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and Iranian Studies (forthcoming).

 

4:20pm Break 

 

4:40pm Session 2: Narratives & Representations of Development

(WWC 110) 

 

"Missionaries of Oil Modernity: Culture and Corporate Oil Publications in 20^th Century Iran"

Peyman Jafari (William & Mary)

 

Abstract: Oil production and consumption have shaped Iran’s modern development through economic, social, political, and cultural practices. While understudied, cultural practices have played a crucial role in creating a web of meanings, values and symbols that have sustained, and at times destabilized, oil production and consumption by connecting them to specific notions of development. Focusing on this cultural connection between oil and development, this paper looks at the discursive and visual strategies through which oil corporations in Iran created an imagined community of employees by defining them as missionaries of modernity.

 

Bio: Dr. Peyman Jafari is Assistant Professor in History and International Relations at William & Mary. He is a historian whose work focuses on the intersections of energy, labor, and the environment in global capitalism, with a regional focus on Iran and the Middle East. His current book project examines the social history of oil during the highpoint of modernization in Iran in the 1970s, the 1979 revolution, and the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. His next project, “Oil Frontiers in the British and Dutch Empires: Land, Labor, and Environment in the Making of an Imperial Oil Regime, 1890-1940,” is supported by a grant from the Dutch Scientific Council.

 

Pouring Water on Troubled Oil: Dylan Thomas’s Journey through Iran (2023, 26 min) 

Director: Nariman Massoumi (University of Bristol)

 

Synopsis: In 1951, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company set out to produce a Technicolour publicity film promoting its activities in Iran. They hired the renowned Welsh poet Dylan Thomas to write the film script, a little known aspect of his life. Combining colonial archival photographs with Thomas's lyrical account (performed in voiceover by actor Michael Sheen), this documentary film follows the poet's journey through the country, capturing his haunting vision of oil and modernity, as a political upheaval for oil nationalisation unfolds.

 

Bio: Nariman Massoumi is a filmmaker and Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at University of Bristol (UK), with a background in documentary television at the BBC. His film practice and research centres on life histories of colonialism, diaspora and the British-Iranian encounter using ethnographic and archive-based methods. His films include the BBC documentary Health Before the Health Service (2011) on pre-NHS healthcare in Britain, autobiographical films Baba 1989 (2016) and How Do You See Me? (2017) and Dear Home Office (2021), a collaborative film with refugees and asylum seekers scrutinising the UK asylum system.

 

6:15pm Break

 

6:30pm Session 3: Ecology & Society

(WWC 108)

“The Making of Toxic Ecologies: Legacies of Warfare and Authoritarian Modernization in Southern Iran & Iraq”

Dr. Kaveh Ehsani (DePaul University)

 

Abstract: Ecological crises cannot be understood within the bounded context of national territories and jurisdictions. Since the turn of the 20^th Century, the northern borders of the Persian Gulf have been subject to environmental toxicity and ecological transformations caused by the violence of nation-state building, protracted armed conflicts, ecologically damaging projects of modernization and development, involuntary displacements of populations, and unchecked commercial exploitation of land, air, labor, and water. The outcome has been social-environmental polycrises of recurring and intensifying cycles of drought-floods, and increasing air, water, and soil toxicity. The mounting precarity of economic and social life has been sparking social protests in southern Iran and Iraq. This paper will offer a comparative and historical approach focusing on the experiences and agency of local and subaltern populations in Khuzestan and Basra regions confronting the transformative ecological impact of warfare and large scale development projects- oil extraction, multipurpose dams, large agribusinesses, and unregulated industrial pollution.

 

Bio: Kaveh Ehsani is associate professor of International Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. His books include Social History of Oil in Iran (in Persian, 2019); Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil Industry” (2018, co-edited). Recent published articles include “Persian Gulf in Contemporary History” (in Persian); “Abadan: Rise & demise of an oil metropolis” (co-authored); “Moral economy of Iranian protests” (co-authored); “Pipeline politics in Iran”; “War and resentment: the legacies of the Iran-Iraq War”; “Oil, state, and society in Iran in the aftermath of WWI”; “Radical democracy and public space”; “Politics of property and privatization of the commons in Iran”. He has worked as a development planner at the World Bank, UNDP, FEMA, Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Policy Studies, and in Iran on postwar reconstruction, water resources planning, rural development, and urban governance. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP); and a contributing editor of the journals Goftogu (Dialogue, based in Tehran), Middle East Report, and Iranian Studies.

 

7:15pm Closing Remarks