Living on the edge : the Iran-Iraq frontier, 1881-1981

Abstract

In the late nineteenth-century, burgeoning nation-states began to surveil their inhabitants and incorporated them into the national community as citizens, teachers, soldiers, and civil servants. Enforcing laws in frontiers, however, often proved difficult in the Middle East, as armed tribes exploited their proximity to borders in order to avoid taxes, military conscription, and the pressure to settle. By examining Iranian and Iraqi sources from the nineteenth- to twentieth-century, “Living on the Edge” argues that the inability of officials in the Arabistan-Basra frontier to eliminate smuggling networks, curb migration, and promote national loyalty eventually led to the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88). Tehran’s attempt to restrict movement at its southwestern frontier caused locals in Arabistan to regularly interact with civil servants, who often voiced their doubts about their ability to monitor movement and trade. Many local officials, in fact, participated in smuggling networks, argued against surveilling the border, and questioned the national loyalties of border dwellers and immigrants. I reveal that, although state agents were sent to Arabistan to represent Tehran’s interests, border dwellers often evaded laws or assimilated civil servants into local ways of life. Thus, “Living on the Edge” offers the dialectic between border dwellers, local officials, and the central government, whose conflicting interests complicated the nation-building project in the Iran-Iraq frontier. I argue that because Tehran and Baghdad failed to eliminate pre-national modes of life in their southern frontier over the course of the twentieth-century, Iraqi nationalists began to doubt the loyalties of border dwellers, who often traded in the black market and migrated when it suited them. Significantly, the Iran-Iraq War offered historically peripheral communities, which had operated in the spheres of influence of two nations, the opportunity to express their state loyalties. This dissertation thus emphasizes the ability of marginalized groups inhabiting the Iran-Iraq frontier to develop a transnational socioeconomic environment that influenced the local application of national policies