The Racial Policies of De-development in the Middle East: A Comparative Study of Palestine and Rojhelat (Eastern Kurdistan)

This paper examines the relationship of sovereignty with development and national identity in the violently hierarchized multinational, multireligious, and multilingual Iran. Drawing on the scholarship on Palestine studies and particularly Sara Roy’s theory of “de-development,” in this paper, we study how the sovereign ethnonation in Iran instrumentalizes and distorts development to subjugate the minoritized Kurdish nation. Along with contextualizing de-development theory within the broader discipline of developmental studies and elucidating the operatives of de-development, we compare the politicoeconomic circumstances of Rojhelat (eastern Kurdistan/Iran) with that of Palestine to underline the key similarities and differences between these two cases. Our research will illustrate the shortcomings of developmental studies in explaining the ethnoracial and religious undercurrents of economic disparity and reveal the noneconomic objectives of economic exploitation in the Middle East.