From Peripheries to Tehran: Iran’s New Geography of Protest

Iran is once again in the midst of nationwide unrest. Protests that erupted in late 2025—initially driven by an acute economic crisis rapidly spreading across the entire country—are ongoing. Whether this latest wave culminates in revolutionary rupture, regime adaptation, or a familiar cycle of repression and exhaustion remains uncertain. What is already clear, however, is that the structural forces animating the unrest extend far beyond the present.

At the heart of Iran’s protests lies a set of sharp and enduring regional disparities that have long shaped patterns of development, political control, and social mobilization. These center–periphery divides have repeatedly rendered Iran’s border provinces more vulnerable to deprivation, marginalization, and protest, while allowing the political and economic core to absorb shocks with greater resilience. Today, those divides are under unprecedented strain, as economic hardship is no longer confined to the margins but increasingly shared across the country.

Economic Protest Across the Center–Periphery Divide

For decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has grappled with a persistent center–periphery divide that structures its political economy, social stability, and internal security. Despite episodic development plans and rhetorical commitments to balanced growth, sharp regional disparities remain among the country’s most entrenched domestic challenges. These inequalities interact with ethnic repression, sectarianism, environmental pressures, the exhaustion of resources on defense and proxy networks, and governance failures, producing a volatile mix that has driven protest movements and repeated cycles of repression in peripheral regions.

Under President Masoud Pezeshkian, this long-standing problem has taken on renewed urgency. His administration advanced a strategy known as “provincial diplomacy,” which seeks to leverage Iran’s provinces as semi-autonomous actors in foreign economic engagement, cross-border trade, and regional cooperation. Ostensibly framed as a development-oriented decentralization initiative, provincial diplomacy also functions as a ploy for regime survival: an effort to contain unrest in marginalized regions, co-opt ethnic and sectarian minorities, and compensate for the constraints imposed by sanctions and post-war pressures.

Yet while provincial diplomacy represents a tactical shift, it remains bounded by structural limitations rooted in Iran’s highly centralized political system, security-first governance culture, and constitutional constraints. It is, in effect, a controlled experiment in decentralization that may alleviate some symptoms of regional inequality but cannot resolve the structural causes.

A Geography of Deprivation

Iran’s poorest provinces form a broad arc along its western, southern, and southeastern borders. Consistently cited among the most deprived are Sistan-Baluchestan—often ranked as the poorest overall—alongside provinces such as Kerman, Lorestan, and Kurdistan. These provinces exhibit disproportionately high unemployment, low household incomes, limited access to basic services, and alarming rates of malnutrition, with Sistan-Baluchestan standing out as the most severely affected.

A 2021–2022 study by Iran’s Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare confirmed stark inter-provincial disparities, with Tehran, Alborz, and Semnan ranking among the least deprived, while border provinces with significant ethnic minority populations fare far worse. These findings reflect a longer-standing concentration of capital, political authority, and high-value services in Tehran, while peripheral regions remain structurally underdeveloped. Geographic remoteness, security externalities, and sanctions exposure have reinforced these inequalities.

Recent data suggest that these disparities have persisted, and in some cases, intensified. According to the Poverty & Equity Brief issued by the World Bank last October, economic contraction coupled with rising prices was set to plunge 2.5 million additional Iranians into poverty in 2025, with rural poverty reaching a staggering 52 percent. Even resource-rich provinces like Khuzestan suffer from high unemployment, environmental degradation, and persistent rural poverty.

Some scholars argue that inequality in Iran’s borderlands is driven primarily by geographic distance from the political center, reflecting skewed resource allocation and the domination of local administrative posts by outsiders. Yet this explanation is incomplete. For Sunni minorities, especially the Baluch and Kurds, economic marginalization intersects with confessional discrimination and a historically securitized relationship with the state, fostering alienation, identity consolidation, and periodic confrontation.

Sistan-Baluchestan exemplifies this dynamic. Residents face chronic poverty, weak infrastructure, limited access to clean water, health care, and education, compounded by geographic isolation and harsh climate conditions. Poverty has fueled reliance on fuel and drug smuggling, reinforcing insecurity and criminalization. Development initiatives have repeatedly fallen short due to sanctions, mismanagement, and insufficient investment. The state’s alternating tactics of co-opting and sidelining local leaders underscore a pattern of oscillation between inclusion and coercion rather than structural reform.

Protest, Periphery, and Regime Anxiety

In recent years, Iran’s ethnic periphery has become an increasingly important source of protest. Beginning with the 2017 demonstrations over food prices, followed by the 2019 fuel protests, the 2021 “uprising of the thirsty,” and the 2022–2023 Woman, Life, Freedom protests following Mahsa Jina Amini’s death, the epicenter of unrest has progressively shifted away from Persian-majority metropolitan areas toward border regions populated by Kurds, Baluch, and Arabs. Repressive measures in the aftermath of the protests disproportionately affected ethnic minority groups. Kurds—roughly 10 percent of Iran’s population—arguably remain the most politically organized minority, drawing on a long tradition of ethno-national activism and militantism. More recently, Baluch and Arab communities have also exhibited heightened mobilization, with shared experiences of repression fostering inter-ethnic solidarity. These developments have sharpened regime anxieties. Historically, Tehran framed ethnic activism as a national security threat. Under Pezeshkian, reformists recognize the political costs of perpetual securitization. For the first time in the Islamic Republic’s history, the government appointed Sunni Kurdish and Baluch governors, as well as a Sunni Kurdish vice president.

Crucially, unrest has not been confined to the periphery. It has coincided with a parallel resurgence of economic mobilization in Tehran, where merchants shuttered shops over the rial’s collapse amid soaring inflation and stagnant incomes. From Tehran, protests spread nationwide, prompting an internet blackout as shop closures and strikes reached all 31 provinces.

Unlike earlier cycles of protests, this round was driven less by sociopolitical demands than by material collapse: inflation, currency depreciation, and steady erosion of livelihoods. For the leadership, this convergence of economic unrest in the core with chronic deprivation in border provinces underscores that development policy has become a central instrument of regime survival.

Provincial Diplomacy: Strategy, Decentralization, and Limits

Provincial diplomacy has emerged as a central feature of Pezeshkian’s response to Iran’s deepening economic and political crisis. Introduced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the strategy aims to operationalize foreign policy through provinces, enabling them to engage directly with neighboring countries, subnational actors, and international organizations within the framework of national policy.

16 of Iran’s 31 provinces share borders with neighboring states, many of which have deep cultural, historical, and religious ties. Proponents, as well as Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, argue this approach could stimulate trade, reduce smuggling, and integrate border regions into regional economies. Pezeshkian has echoed this logic in practice, authorizing governors in South Khorasan to engage with Afghanistan and promoting Ardabil as a trade hub with Azerbaijan. Across these initiatives, Pezeshkian frames border provinces as engines of resilience, asserting: “A country like Iran, with 16 neighbors, cannot be easily sanctioned.”

Thus, the recent emphasis on provincial diplomacy reflects not only concern over the economic fragility of Iran’s border regions but also the regime’s dependence on those regions as buffers against sanctions pressure. In this sense, the periphery has become economically indispensable to the center, even as it remains politically and socially marginalized—a contradiction that helps explain why frontier regions feature so prominently in waves of protest.

This external-facing strategy is paired with a tightly managed decentralization drive. Governors are urged to act as “the president of their province,” cutting red tape and solving local problems. Decentralization is reinforced by political appointments. Most governors-general are reformist or independent, including Sunni Arab and Kurdish governors, while active-duty IRGC commanders have been notably sidelined.

Yet provincial diplomacy faces formidable structural and geopolitical limits. Sanctions constrain investment, financing, and technology transfer, restricting the capacity to expand trade infrastructure or modernize logistics. Efforts to deepen cross-border economic engagement with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, and Iraq’s Kurdistan Region constantly encounter persistent headwinds.

The Limits of the Provincial Turn

Regardless of how the current protest cycle unfolds, regional inequality will remain a defining challenge for any Iranian government. Yet the scale, persistence, and nationwide spread of the present unrest sharply limit the relevance of incremental development strategies as tools of political stabilization. What distinguishes this moment is the convergence of sustained mobilization in Tehran with chronic deprivation and repression in the periphery, eroding the regime’s long-standing ability to manage dissent spatially.

Though framed as a pragmatic response to sanctions and underdevelopment, provincial diplomacy has proven less a stabilizing strategy than a stopgap hedge against mounting instability. As internet shutdowns, mass arrests, and lethal force become routine, the promise of managed decentralization carries little weight, particularly in regions already shaped by ethnic marginalization. With Tehran now a sustained site of mobilization, the current unrest collapses the center–periphery divide as an arena of containment.

Development policy in Iran has fused with regime survival, yet tightly controlled decentralization remains hemmed in by centralized budgeting, security oversight, corruption, sanctions, and regional headwinds. Repression does not support these measures; it corrodes them. Without deeper reforms in governance and state–society relations, provincial diplomacy cannot resolve Iran’s center–periphery divide and instead reflects the narrowing of options available to a system increasingly reliant on coercion.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Gulf International Forum.