"Islamic Yuppies"? State Rescaling, Citizenship, and Public Opinion Formation in Tehran, Iran

Abstract

The contemporary political map of Tehran, Iran, is marked by a central state conflict between the institutionalized theocratic system and a newly emerging liberal-democratic system. While this conflict has received worldwide media attention, the underlying processes of state rescaling and their effects on the formation of citizenship have not. Using the concept of state rescaling, I argue that the Iranian state is increasingly, though contentiously, constituted at transnational and local levels; this occurs through matters such as the debates over opening political, economic, and cultural borders, and the decentralization of political processes through local town and city council elections. The city of Tehran plays a crucial role as the seat of national government, an increasingly autonomous local state onto its own, and Iran's window on transnational processes. I seek to explore the kinds of political identities that can be created under such turbulent processes of Iranian neo-liberal democratization and state rescaling. While conjectural at this point, it is possible to examine particular social constructions of new forms of Iranian citizenship to address how state transformations will potentially change citizenship into the future. In particular, I examine the social construction of "the Islamic yuppie" and public opinion polls as arguments advocating a new kind of an urban, cosmopolitan citizen who can move fluidly through multiple spaces and scales. These constructions, contextualized within current processes of Iranian state restructuring and rescaling, underscore the need to think through citizenship in general, and Iranian citizenship in particular, as a multiscalar process.