I'm very excited to be here to answer your questions on Iran, energy history, and the history of development while I talk about my new book, Accelerant: Energy Infrastructures and the Natural World in Making Modern Iran, now out from Stanford University Press. I'm Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani, Farhang Foundation Early Career Chair in Iranian Studies and Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California. For more info about me and links to my other publications, see my faculty webpage.
For background, I'm a specialist in the history of modern Iran, with a primary focus on the intersection of technology, the environment, and development in the country’s recent past. In broad terms, I am interested in how even highly industrialized societies are entangled with nature, and I see energy infrastructures as crucial sites for understanding how human ambitions and natural limits have been negotiated. By focusing on Iran and the Global South, I aim to shed light on how modern energy- and resource-intensive ways of life were built and how they proliferated around the world.
In Accelerant, I focus on natural gas in twentieth-century Iran, tracing its transformation from a waste product into a vital resource underpinning a self-consciously modernizing society. I study natural gas as a crucial enabler of industrializing development, a potent symbol within a highly charged politics of anticolonial modernization, and a promised but failed technofix to the growing challenge of air pollution in the country’s cities. With gas now accounting for some seventy percent of Iran’s total energy use, in Accelerant I argue that modern Iranian society has been fundamentally ordered around consumption of the fossil fuel.
Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating thereafter, gas changed how Iranians heated their homes, fueled their vehicles, and cooked their food. Iranian leaders saw the resource as the key to building an independent and prosperous nation, a futuristic energy source for a future world power, and they promised a future of cheap and intensive energy consumption for all Iranians. At the same time, factories and power plants began to use the new fuel too, a policy decision driven by an official pursuit of rapid economic growth that was paired with deepening anxieties about the environmental violence that industrialization had begun to inflict. But despite their rhetorical exhortations of widespread gas use, in the uneven spread of piped gas across the country a great many Iranians saw their value as national subjects seemingly reflected in their energy infrastructure, and it was a sight that displeased many in their unequal positions.
As I thus argue, natural gas utilization and the developmentalism that drove its embrace were substantially similar under both the prerevolutionary Pahlavi monarchy and postrevolutionary Islamic Republic, and I highlight how Iranians’ differing encounters with gas energy were an important catalyst for the sociopolitical tensions of a rapidly changing society. I moreover employ postwar Iranian developmentalism and its co-constitution with gas infrastructure as a lens to uncover the choices, aspirations, and natural realities from which fossil fuel dependency has arisen, arguing that anticolonial resource nationalism was a key, but largely overlooked, driver of increased resource use in the Global South and thus anthropogenic environmental change around the world.
So, AMA! I'll be here all day, answering questions until about 5:00pm PDT.
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