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Presentation short abstract

Signs, banners, slogans, and chants from protests in south-western Iran reveal how local communities engage in subaltern environmental struggle by redirecting state-sanctioned revolutionary, constitutional, and religious discourses against water diversion policies and “water mafia” officials.

Presentation long abstract

Over the past 15 years, the protection of Iran’s endangered ecosystems has been increasingly invoked by different political actors to support opposing interests. State institutions use it to justify their policies and accrue legitimacy, while communities in marginalised regions invoke it to oppose extractive projects. One clear example is the diversion of water from Khuzestan and Chaharmahal Bakhtiari towards Esfahan: officials present this as providing relief for the chronically dry Zayandeh Rud river, while source regions' populations resist it, lamenting the scarcity already caused by dams and threatened by further diversion. To investigate the interaction between official and subaltern discourses around the environment in Iran, this paper examines this ecological distribution conflict, asking how participants in water-related protests in south-western Iran between 2013 and 2021 articulated their grievances.

Analysing over 300 slogans, chants, banners, and statements, I show that local communities frame environmental issues as a struggle for life and existence, bound up with unemployment, privatisation, and the marginalisation of local identities. Rather than developing an anti-government framing, protesters single out a "water mafia" within state institutions as responsible for water scarcity, while appealing to other authorities for redress. They further mobilise legal, religious, and revolutionary narratives, presenting themselves as the true defenders of the constitution, religious morality, and the revolution, and casting the officials responsible for water diversion as betraying these very principles. In doing so, I argue, they develop a narrative of subaltern environmentalism that exploits contradictions within state-sanctioned discourse to advance ecological and social claims.