It is perhaps no exaggeration to suggest that the crafting and re-crafting of national identity through actions of authorities and/or political mobilization and struggle has been a national preoccupation in modern Iranian history. This is not to imply that Iranians and their political leaders, going through the global process of modernity, have been any more or less creative than others in the world in re-inventing their “national” selves. However, a case can be made that in the past century Iranians have been afforded, or have produced, more opportunities to re-create themselves in a bombastic and dualistic fashion, energetically vacillating between extremes of contentious Islamism and secularism, pre-Islamic and Islamic imagination, and avid anti-imperialism and absorption in global trends.

This study aims to address concerns over Iranian territorial integrity with respect to ethnic identity by examining three interrelated points of:

• Center and periphery in Iran.

• Territorial attachment and the political borders.

• Ethnic identity and social mobility.

This paper is largely based on my field works in Iran from 1994 to 2004 and combines qualitative and quantitative methods. I conducted my first qualitative survey (open-ended interviews with a sample of a hundred mothers) in Tehran, Isfahan and their poor suburbs from 1994 to 2000. The quantitative survey, which is a result of the collaboration between Monde Iranien (CNRS), the French Research Institute in Iran and the Statistical Center of Iran was conducted in 2002 with a sample of 6,960 urban and rural households in all twenty-eight provinces. The sample was composed of 30,714 individuals, including 7,633 women 15 years and older married at least once, and 6,154 single youth, 15–29 years old, who lived with their parents: 3,437 boys and 2,717 girls.

Since 1979, Iran has witnessed important socio-economic and institutional changes and has been affected by significant economic and political upheavals. These years have witnessed a succession of oil booms and busts, external war, trade sanctions and of course, more recently, heightened internal strife within the state. After 25 years, however, Iran's political outlook seems opaque to most observers and the economic record is equally lacklustre with many Iranians experiencing a considerable retrogression in their living standards by regional and international standards.