Un-civil society: The politics of the 'informal people

Choice Reviews Online, 1998

To my mother and father xiv PREFACE often dreamed-dreams of bright lights and bus rides, morning-fresh bread, walking along the streets in the busy evenings, not to mention the Indian movies that our village school farrash's son, who was from Tehran, used to relate to the village boys with commendable patience and in perfect Persian. In Tehran we first settled in a lower-class neighborhood close to Ghazvin Street in south Tehran where the neighbors consisted mostly of rural migrants like ourselves. The area was surrounded by slums and the growing squatter areas that were filled with many colorful little shops and chanting street vendors, and in which I, like so many of my friends, learned to spend a good part of the daytime in the streets. Our one-story house was located in a narrow alleyway in the middle of which ran the sewage duct, a jouy. The house had a toilet, a small kitchen, and five separate rooms, two of which were rented to two separate families (a migrant worker and a pasban, a member of the lowstatus street police). Later we moved into a new house in the same vicinity but with more rooms; our migrant relatives, on the other hand, remained in the nearby slums of Javadieh and Mehrabad, to which we would pay regular visits. Our long-term trips, however, were to the village with which we maintained strong ties-ties we still retain even to this day. My first experience of schooling in the city was with an Islamic institution. It taught the regular curriculum but placed special emphasis on extracurricular activities including daily collective prayers, Quran reciting, and Islamic entertainment. The teachers were mostly committed young Islamists, including clergymen. Indeed, at some point my grandfather, himself being a rural mulla, expressed delight at the possibility of seeing me one day a Qum-educated akhund. I later realized that my school represented an instance of Islamist civil activism during the late 19605, a reaction to the secular education and the growing foreign schools that the children of the elites attended. A few years later, in 1970, we moved to Cheezar, the remnant of an old urban village in the northern part of Tehran, where my father worked in a driving school. In the years that we resided in the first neighborhood, in South Tehran, a great deal happened. I became a true young Muslim, learning to recite Quran in public events, taking part in the local hey'ats and mosques, visiting the shrines of Qum, Mashad, and our local imamzadehs, and being perhaps the only serious listener to my grandfather's religious hikayat-a grandfather who in this new

Current Opinion in Psychology, 2020

We review research applying relative deprivation theory to comprehend social, economic, and political phenomena relating to social change. We highlight areas illuminated by relative deprivation and limitations of this contemporary research. Next, we outline four theoretical elaborations of relative deprivation theory to advance understanding of complex socio-economic and political processes of underlying rallies, riots, and revolutions. We end by suggesting methodological approaches and research agendas to understand psychological processes of social change.

Geography and Environmental Planning, 2013

The informality of possession and lack of security in residence are among the characteristics attributed to the informal settlements, as well as, they are a key to other problems‟ solutions. This essay investigates some of the typical cases of Iran‟s informal settlements, and this intends to find out the possession conditions, as well as, the conditions necessary for the recognition of the informal settlements. The researchers‟ question is, “whether the possession and formality problems are observed in all or majority of the study settlements?” The aim is the understanding of the important basic

DiverseAsia , 2018

In the final days of 2017, a wave of protests erupted in Iran, bringing to surface a host of economic, social, and political resentments. Despite the profusion of slogans and demands, the initial trigger is widely believed to have been economic. This article aims to contextualize Iran’s protests by examining the changing dynamics between the state and the poor in the four decades since the country’s 1979 revolution. A case is made that while in the first decade after the revolution the poor became the primary social base of the post-revolutionary state, the (neo-liberal) shift in economic policies since the early 1990s has cultivated new dynamics in which the lower economic strata are increasingly disenchanted with and disenfranchised from the state.

Central Asian Survey, 2001

Usually marginalized are known people living in cities, but due to the set of factors they have been unable to absorb in the system of economy, society, and as a citizen of the facilities and municipal services benefit. However, today's the margins are known as the part of the city which have common tissue with the cities, the margins have often infertile Culture and remain crime-prone areas, and become problematic. Where, according to sociologists, cultural and regional poverty and crime is the main feature of this culture and the crime is born from this culture, not only is a threat to social security of the people of this region, but also the Social security of city's residents threatens. Social Security, is a multi-dimensions issue which studying that in marginalized areas needs of studying in various fields of social science and behavioral research, For this purpose, this subject have been tried in this sweeping of these areas is discussed wholly.

Current Opinion in Psychology, 2020

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Journal of Urban Management, 2022

Due partly to neoliberal policies-especially in developing countries-and as a result of globalization, urban informality has become an indisputable part of urbanization since the 1970s. As a developing country, Iran has also dealt with the onset of this type of urbanism since the 1920s. The majority of global studies recognize the status of informal settlements and explain relevant approaches and actions. However, less emphasis is placed on informal reproduction factors; This study critically examines the factors that culminate in the reproduction of informality in Iran, namely the ominous triangle of power (government), the state economy, and knowledge-based on instrumental rationality (Technocracy) and its social, physical and environmental effects. This study seeks to evaluate the influential factors of urban informality in Iran with a critical and comprehensive view of the social, economic, political, physical dimensions and avoids an unidimensional tunnel vision. Findings show that the government policies and the economic sector monopoly play significant roles in the reproduction of poverty and informal settings in Iran. Furthermore, managerial and technical tools will act as government tools, the output of which manifests in its physical, social, and environmental factors.

Sociology of Development, 2022

The scholarship about the consequences of social revolutions contends that social revolutions boost state capacity and strengthen the state’s developmental projects. Social justice and addressing the needs of ordinary citizens also were central themes in the discourse of the Iranian revolution and the Islamic Republic that emerged as the post-revolutionary regime with the fall of the monarchy in Iran. In this essay, I assess the performance of the post-revolutionary state in Iran according to different development indicators. Specifically, I compare the record of the post-revolutionary regime with the pre-revolutionary regime. My examination of various indicators relating to health, education, poverty, income inequality, and housing presents more of a mixed result than the overall improvement that previous scholarship anticipated and that the post-revolutionary regime had promised. Furthermore, the evidence points to declines in some important areas of development and welfare provision. Based on this analysis, I propose directions for future research about the developmental outcome of revolutions.