Abstract Dust-winds across the southern Iran-Iraq borderlands in the past decade have played a crucial role in how the Iranian state invests in both maintaining its major oil sites, despite intensive sanctions, and organising cooperation with local farmers to block the transmission of dust across its sovereign territory. This paper extends the ethnographic exploration of economic sanctions to their environmental interventions, studying the everyday lives of people in Khuzestan province. Environmental historians have examined landscapes altered by military activities and sanctions, but an anthropological approach to the essential entanglement of meteorological upheaval and sanctions characterized by bad air is lacking. Drawing on critical theories of breathing, I trace the explosion of dust into Iranian geopolitics as a conundrum of how the power dynamics of sanctions and sovereignty intermingle with aerosols. Within the frame of state-sponsored projects, engineers, scientists, environmental activists, farmers, and traders cooperate and compete in atmospherically focused coalitions to stabilize soil and dust against their spread. As a voluminous entity that is dispersed across the bodies of breathers, these atmospherically focused coalitions give visibility to the sanctions and the gaps in the state’s sovereignty.
Sana Chavoshian (Tue,) studied this question.