The Rise of Nationalism among Iranian Azerbaijanis: A Step toward Iran´s Disintegration?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTIONThe Islamic Republic of Iran is a country of multiple nationalities. Ethnic Persians account for approximately half of the total population. The remainder of the population consists of members of various ethnic groups of Turkic, Iranian, and Semitic origin, generally concentrated in a particular area.1 The exact number of these individual minorities and even of the Persian majority is unknown, since population censuses in Iran do not determine nationalities, but rather religious affiliation alone.Nonetheless, Azerbaijanis are by far the most populous ethnic minority in Iran. Various estimates place them between 12 and 22 million within the territory of the Islamic Republic, accounting for as much as one quarter of Iran's population. The large majority of the Azerbaijani population inhabits Iran's northwestern provinces, which border with Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iraq. These include Western Azerbaijan (where a considerable part of the population consists of Kurds); Eastern Azerbaijan; Ardabil and Zanjan (together with Persians); to some extent also Gilan (together with Gilaki and Persians); and Hamadan and Qazvin (in both cases together with Persians). According to some estimates, a quarter to a third of the population of Tehran consists of immigrants of Azerbaijani origin and their first- or second-generation descendants.2In view of their large numbers and corresponding representation among the members of the Iranian elite as well as their territorial concentration, the loyalty of Iran's Azerbaijanis is of key importance for sustaining the regime and for maintaining the Islamic Republic's territorial integrity. The growing nationalistic and, in extreme cases, even separatist tendencies within the Azerbaijani minority are therefore being evaluated by Iran's government with growing frequency as a security threat to which attention must be devoted. This article then deals primarily with the growing national self-consciousness among the members of the Azerbaijani minority within Iran's territory. The purpose of this study is to outline and evaluate the security risks for Iran's internal affairs and for the stability of the entire Caspian region. As little has been written on the topic as of yet, this article focuses on the broader context, presenting readers with an introduction on the ethnic, religious, and politico-historical factors influencing the current situation in the region. It then moves to the status of the ethnocultural emancipation movement of Iranian Azerbaijanis and its influence on Iran's state security. Last, it deals with the international context of Azerbaijani nationalism in Iran, focusing primarily on the security dimension. Also presented are the positions of the United States, Azerbaijan, Israel, Turkey, and Russia and their relations with the Azerbaijani minority and with Iran itself.Ethnic and Religious Identity Among Iran's AzerbaijanisThe Azerbaijani minority's perceptions of the central government in Teheran and of Persians as the dominant ethnic group in Iran are directly related to their own historical experience of coexistence with the Persians. Linguistic and religious affiliations and their evolution within the Iranian context play a particularly important role here. The Azerbaijanis of Iran speak a Turkic dialect that is part of the Oghuz language group. Apart from a rather large number of lexical borrowings from Persian and Arabic, it is identical to the language of the so-called Northern (Soviet or Caucasian) Azerbaijanis.3 It is also very close to the language spoken in Turkey. The two languages (Azerbaijani and Anatolian Turkish) are mutually comprehensible. The language is commonly spoken among Azerbaijanis inhabiting northwestern Iran, though instruction in Azerbaijani Turkish is de facto banned at all levels in the country-in contradiction to Iran's constitution. The ban is in effect in all levels of school and applies not only to instruction in the Turkish language, but also to teaching that language as a subject. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".