Control over the management of urban land use is one the local government powers with the greatest influence on the lives of residents (the other being the budget). Yet in Iran, despite political decentralization, the responsibility for land use rests with the central government and the relevant local branches of the relevant ministries. Chapter 7 reviews the history and legal framework of master planning as well as the economic pressures that led governments to ignore their municipalities’ master plans during the 1990s. The chapter describes how a controversial urban renewal project in the early 1990s led to calls for greater local participation in the development and design of plans by the new elected council. It then examines the effort to give the municipality a greater and indeed determinative role in city planning and land use management during the preparation of the third Tehran Master Plan 2003–2007. A success in the capital city would have created a precedent and model for many other cities. While national media brought the issue to public attention and local representatives had unprecedented involvement in city planning, ultimately the city council failed to achieved more than an informal role with formal responsibility remaining with the central government. The chapter concludes by highlighting the great difficulties and challenges of achieving greater local participation in complex and technical areas of local governance such as land use planning.

The reformist project of local democracy that found practical expression in the first elections of 1999 took place against the backdrop of what the scholar Merilee Grindle called the period of “decentralization revolution” that swept across many countries of the world starting in the 1980s. The decentralization reforms in Indonesia and China, the former embracing political decentralization and the latter rejecting local elections and focusing only on fiscal and administrative decentralization, are briefly discussed as a point of comparison with Iranian case. The reformists motivations to pursue democratization were primarily rooted in the conviction in the unfinished project of democratic and pluralistic republicanism of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution in Iran (Mashruteh). The chapter clarifies the theoretical definitions of democracy and authoritarianism, vital background for understanding the story of political decentralization in Iran. Particularly important is the concept of “civil society” which was the animating concept for the reformists’ advocacy of elected local government (shura) as an embryonic democratic civil society institution. However, the reformists’ strategy was flawed in two respects. They failed to adequately grasp the contradictions inherent in the dual nature of local government as simultaneously part of civil society but also a branch of the governmental bureaucracy. At a time when many worldwide hoped decentralization would promote democratization in places like China and Iran, the reformists also underestimated the ability of their velayi opponents to employ decentralization to their own ends.

Chapter 6 first examines contention over the scope of local political representation. Covering the six rounds of city council elections from the first in 1999 to the sixth in 2021, the chapter shows how candidates and parties have been prevented from participating in city council elections through formal and informal processes of disqualification. It also shows how central government supervision and national administrative law constrains the range of local legislation the city councils can pass. I also show that the intergovernmental system is highly regulated and that central government-appointed representatives have broad power over elected officials at the province, district, city, and village level. This chapter concludes by pointing to the mixed legacy of the local electoral and political system created in 1999. On the one hand, central government bureaucracy and national-level laws blocked municipal governments from passing local legislation on most issues or raise the revenue necessary for fulfilling their legal mandates. For example, the first Tehran City Council failed to pass a Tehran Municipal Charter enshrining greater democratic rights for local civil society and autonomy vis-á-vis central government. On the other hand, elected local government became institutionalized as a coherent but subordinate component of the Islamic state. Within these narrow limits, thousands of creative and dedicated municipal councilors and employees did their best to represent their local constituencies and manage their cities.

This chapter argues that rather than a unilinear extension of the market project from England to France, the Anglo-French contestation, and the concomitant processes of uneven and combined development during the early modern period sharpened and restructured existing sociohistorical differences, ultimately leading to the formulation of a qualitatively different regime of property and modernization in France. Jacobinism was neither absolutism nor capitalism, but combined and bypassed both based on a new form of sociality and political economy. It produced novel social, economic and geopolitical dynamics that gave modernity a radically multilinear texture.

This chapter will depart from these interpretations of the Turkish Revolution through the theoretical and historical pointers discussed in previous chapters. It will argue that the original Kemalist experiment with modernity (1923–45) cannot be understood as a form of (state) capitalism, but rather as a historically specific Jacobinism.

Having documented the uneven and combined developmental trajectories of Britain and France, in this chapter I will begin to explore the significance of Jacobinism for our understanding of the rise of multiple modernities outside Western Europe. To this end, I seek to identify the precise nature and concrete outcome of the "combined" character of Ottoman modernization. It shows that the late Ottoman Empire can neither be understood as a "patrimonial state" nor can it be conceptualized as a "peripheral capitalism." Instead, the end result of the Ottoman experiment with modernity was a historically specific Jacobinism that combined and bypassed capitalism (and socialism) based on an alternative form of property and sociality.

This chapter makes an introduction to the key themes of the book and provides a book plan.

This chapter attempts to build a transdisciplinary methodology to historicize modernity. The need for transdisciplinarity stems from the idea that disciplinary divisions and categories (such as the political, the economic, the social and the international) are the products of modernity, and hence cannot be used to study modernity’s history, which would otherwise impose the structure of modern (capitalist) society onto a differently constituted past. I use a twofold methodological critique to problematize these disciplinary divisions and the attendant tendency to transhistorize the sociospatial parameters of the modern present: the critique of “methodological presentism” and "methodological internalism.

Chapter 6 discusses the origin and protracted development of capitalism in Turkey in the post-World War II period. I show how capitalist social relations began to penetrate the social fabric, and how the initial Kemalist project has been reinvented by different actors to contest and produce capitalism. In addition, the period after the 1950s witnessed the rise of a new capitalist class in provincial Anatolian towns. Pace the conventional interpretation, commercial groups of Anatolian towns organized in and through the Islamic National View Movement (NVM), neither supported an "artisan" or "statist" capitalism, nor was it simply an Islamic critique of the developing market society. Instead, the movement envisioned a novel political space as the foundation of a new capitalist industrialization strategy unencumbered by the spirit of earlier Republican policies. Although the NVM was unable to take control of the state from the 1970s to the 1990s, its conservative capitalist heritage was appropriated by the Justice and Development Party, which has led to an unprecedented consolidation and deepening of capitalist social relations in Turkey since the beginning of the new millennium.

The final chapter summarizes the argument of the book and considers its implications for International Relations and historical sociology.