The Historical Architecture of De-development: Ethnonational Governance and the Production of Devastation in Rojhelat

This article traces how de-development became the state-imposed constitutive condition of Rojhelat (Eastern/Iranian Kurdistan) under Persian-Shi’a imperial rule. Surveying a historical–political trajectory from the sixteenth century to the present, we argue that Iran’s development apparatus has long been entwined with ethnoracial desires and practices. It has served as an arm of Persian-Shi’a statecraft, a mechanism for concentrating investment, infrastructure, and welfare at the center while systematically foreclosing their possibility at the periphery. The ethnoreligious and linguistic difference of Rojhelat placed it, from the Safavid period onward, outside the boundaries of the state’s political imagination, and development policies, under both Pahlavi state and the Islamic Republic, translated that exclusion into material devastation. Beginning with the first five-year plan in 1948, successive governments channeled resources outward, promoted extractive agriculture over industry, and subordinated economic life to security imperatives. As a result, a recognizable architecture of de-development emerged, pivoted on the extraction of raw materials, minimal reinvestment, heavy securitization, and exploitative labor as intended outcomes. Kurdish communities in Rojhelat are held in suspension: recognized by the law yet deprived of its protections, their land exploitable and their lives expendable. This study contextualizes and historicizes the de-development of Rojhelat as a state-designed practice of devastation.