For Land and Culture offers the first comprehensive account of a long forgotten and neglected grassroots movement. In the wake of Iran’s 1979 revolution, Turkmen peasants collectively occupied their ancestral lands, which had been seized through colonial modernization, land registry and land reform under the Pahlavi monarchy. The book chronicles this movement using theoretical and historical engagement with the modern councils and offers a detailed account of the “land question” in Iran’s colonial modernization. The book describes the systematic dispossession of Turkmen communities from some of the most fertile areas in Iran. Vahabzadeh shows how Turkmen land occupation in 1979 led to a sophisticated council system that offered a practical politics of semi-autonomous, democratic self-governance in the face of hostile militias and other forces of the nascent authoritarian Islamic Republic. With social justice as one of its unshakable pillars, the Turkmen council movement took back land as commons and abolished capitalist private ownership of land, providing an alternative to top-down politics until it was defeated by the state through a combination of military terror and assimilation. Although short lived, the radically democratic movement connected with global struggles of Indigenous Peoples and autonomous movements that had broken away from patriarchal state forms and capitalist domination.

Peyman Vahabzadeh is a professor of sociology at the University of Victoria. He is the author of several books, including The Art of Defiance: Dissident Culture and Militant Resistance in 1970s Iran; Violence and Nonviolence: Conceptual Excursions into Phantom Opposites; and A Rebel’s Journey: Mostafa Sho‘aiyan and Revolutionary Theory in Iran. He is also editor of Iran’s Struggles for Social Justice: Economics, Agency, Justice, Activism and co-editor, with Samir Gandesha, of Crossing Borders: Essays in Honour of Ian Angus. He has published nine books of poetry, fiction, literary criticism and memoir in Persian and his works have appeared in English, Persian, German, Kurdish, French and Spanish.

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“Revolutions are not just about the change of regimes and state institutions. They are also expressed at the base of society– in schools, farms, factories, and families. This original study highlights one of the most neglected aspects of the 1979 Iranian revolution—the peasant council movement of Turkmen Sahra. By underlining its struggles for land and cultural revival, Vahabzadeh brings the Iranian experience into a productive conversation with the current indigenous movements around the globe.”

Asef Bayat, bastian professor of global and transnational studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

“An engaging yet scholarly counter-history of the Turkmen council movement – the remarkable experiment in radical democracy repressed and vilified by Iran’s Islamic regime, and largely ignored by left scholars. Vahabzadeh meticulously probes the struggle for land, culture, autonomy and the commons, placing it in a transnational context and exploring it’s profound lessons for those interested in collectively creating change from below.”

William K. Carroll, professor of sociology, University of Victoria

“Echo of a fascinating decade that connects with autonomy projects in today’s world. Vahabzadeh shows us how belonging to the land and the dignity of the community have always played a fundamental role in the emancipation of people and how the most honest experiments in democratic practice are always formed from below.”

Moises Garduño García, professor, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

“In this work on the Turkmen Council Movement of 1979 in Iran, Peyman Vahabzadeh offers a unique phenomenological approach, inspired by Hannah Arendt’s writings on council democracy and radical mobilization by workers, into an otherwise unexplored world-historical movement of a marginalized people within Iranian modernity. Vahabzadeh’s careful analysis of the Turkmen movement in Iran and their fight for land and cultural sovereignty, and his introduction of the concept ancestorality, offers an important and timely dialogue with other grassroots, participatory, decolonizing, anti-imperialist, and justice-seeking indigenous global movements of our time.”

Daniel Ahadi, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University