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Greater Iran, Iranshahr, Iranzamin Greater Iran, Iranshahr, Iranzamin
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The Caucasus The Caucasus
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Central/South Asia (Greater Khorasan) Central/South Asia (Greater Khorasan)
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Iranzamin and Eurasian Regional Order Iranzamin and Eurasian Regional Order
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Nine Greater Iran (Iranzamin) and Iran’s Imperial Imagination
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Published:April 2022
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Abstract
Belief in the existence of a Greater Iran (Iranshahr or Iranzamin), which includes not only Mesopotamia but also the Caucasus and much of Central and South Asia, is often linked to nostalgia for the pre-Islamic age, and is used as a justification for Iran’s claims to regional-power status. Only in the mid-nineteenth century, with the expansion of Russian and British power into the center of Eurasia, were Iranian claims decisively terminated. The erosion of Iranian influence in these regions in the century and a half following the end of the Safavid dynasty shifted Iran’s center of gravity from central Eurasia toward the Persian Gulf and the Levant, which remain the focal point for the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy today. Many Iranian intellectuals nevertheless consider the territories on the Eurasian mainland comprising Iran’s old empires part of Tehran’s natural sphere of influence. Perhaps most important, the loss of Iran’s imperial hinterlands feeds the Islamic Republic’s narrative of victimization. The 1979 Islamic Revolution, with its combination of millenarianism, grievance, and appeals to thousands of years of Iranian greatness, is thus difficult to imagine absent the trauma accompanying Iran’s loss of empire.
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