Iran’s transition and the South Azerbaijani question

Tabriz in northern Iran is a center for the Azerbaijani minority in the country. Photo: Shutterstock

All eyes are on Iran and its future. Yet too often, those eyes are colourblind, unable (or unwilling) to see Iran’s internal plurality. Misreading that plurality raises the risk of strategic miscalculation. External actors may believe they are steering Iran toward stability, only to accelerate fragmentation and prolonged conflict. One major source of distortion is the tendency to view Iran through the hegemonic lens of a Shiite-Persian political imagination. This is especially prevalent in parts of the diaspora where “Iran” is treated as culturally uniform and politically legible through a single centre. In reality, approximately fifty per cent of Iran’s population is non-Persian. Among these communities, South Azerbaijanis, indigenous to Iran’s north-west, constitute the country’s largest national minority and one of its most geopolitically consequential constituencies.

For decades, scholarship and field reporting on South Azerbaijanis has pointed to an identity formation shaped not merely by cultural difference, but by political experience. Many South Azerbaijanis describe their identity as Azerbaijani and Turkic. They often frame their community’s historical memory and aspirations in ways that diverge from central narratives of Iranian nationhood that are closer to cross-border kinship with the Republic of Azerbaijan and Türkiye. Linguistic rights, historical recognition, and political self-rule are not peripheral demands; they sit at the centre of how many South Azerbaijanis imagine a post-Islamic Republic order.

This outlook reflects a deeper disagreement over national narratives where there is no unified “Iranian” experience. For instance, many South Azerbaijanis foreground a historical memory rooted in Azerbaijani-Turkic language, history, heritage, culture, and lived experience with centralizing state power. This divide has only deepened through 20th-century turning points such as the separation of Azerbaijan across the Aras river amid Qajar decline and imperial rivalry; the north’s incorporation into the Soviet Union and eventual independence; and the brief 1945-46 Azerbaijani National Government in Iran, which was dismantled by central forces in a crackdown remembered for mass killings.

Because their relationship with the state has been different, many South Azerbaijanis’ political demands for a post-Islamic Republic order are different as well. From the Pahlavi era onward, a Persianized nation-building project entrenched an assimilationist hierarchy that demeaned non-Persian identities. The Islamic Republic ended up largely preserving that architecture even as it recast it in religious terms. Where some in the centralized Iranian political imagination recall the Pahlavi period as order or modernization, South Azerbaijan often remembers violence and erasure. Under that dictatorial name, they see the tortures of Savak and smell the books burned in the city centre of Tabriz.

Across both regimes, this has produced an institutional hierarchy of race and belonging, reproduced through education and state media and enforced through policy such as toponymic changes, selective historiography, and historical revisions where Azerbaijani-Turkic heritage is inferior. The stigma is reinforced socially and culturally. Azerbaijanis are routinely racialized as “stupid”, “violent”, “uneducated” and “backward”. State-linked narratives have gone even further, depicting Azerbaijanis as cockroaches and children’s cartoons portraying them as subhuman.

These experiences have helped consolidate a distinct political identity, one in which demands for self-determination are continuous, not episodic. From the efforts of Mohammad Khiabani to Ja’far Pishevari to establish a local government, the aspiration for self-rule has persisted in different forms and generations. It is visible today in the language of protest. In South Azerbaijani streets, slogans often diverge from those heard elsewhere in Iran, reflecting a political horizon that links democratization to self-government. The most common refrain that captures that linkage with blunt clarity is “Freedom, Justice, National Government” (Azadlıq, Ədalət, Milli Hökumət).

Critics sometimes wave away these concerns by pointing to the ethnic background of individual officials such as the Azerbaijani heritage of the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, or President Masoud Pezeshkian’s mixed background. But this confuses representation with power. Symbolic inclusion at the top does not dissolve systemic hierarchies embedded in institutions, law, the security forces, and national ideology. By that logic, the presence of a few women in official roles would prove gender equality, an argument no serious observer would accept.

South Azerbaijan’s geopolitical weight makes these questions strategically unavoidable. Economically, it sits on high value mineral belts, including major copper and gold deposits, and it is a core agricultural zone producing staples and high yield crops. Geographically, it functions as Iran’s main north-west gateway. The arteries that move goods and energy toward Türkiye, the Republic of Azerbaijan, and the South Caucasus run through this space, making its highways, rail links, border crossings, and customs nodes disproportionately important. In any scenario of regime change or state weakening, control over South Azerbaijan would translate into control over revenue streams, food security, and the transit routes that connect Iran to its most consequential northern and western neighbours, along with the security risks that inevitably travel those corridors.

A quick look at Masoud Pezeshkian’s campaign messaging shows how explicitly it leaned on South Azerbaijani grievances, promising Azerbaijani cultural and linguistic rights and action to prevent Lake Urmia’s drought, assuming one accepts the premise of genuinely free elections in Iran. Those commitments have not materialized and Pezeshkian has even been publicly ridiculed for speaking his mother tongue, which says a lot about how little space the system allows beyond controlled symbolism. His election is better read through the prism of external pressure than domestic reform. With Iran’s regional posture weakened, the “Axis of Resistance” strained, Assad gone, and Russia consumed by the war in Ukraine, Tehran faces a sharper need to manage relations with its most consequential neighbours, Türkiye and the Republic of Azerbaijan. Yet Iran often treats both as competitors, if not outright adversaries, and Azerbaijan’s recent victories and rising regional profile have plainly unsettled the Islamic Republic.

The Republic of Azerbaijan has been rising politically and economically, positioning itself as one of the region’s more influential actors. Its victory in the Second Karabakh War; deepening ties with Türkiye and Israel; growing engagement with Armenia through peace and economic arrangements; and the expansion of its relationship with the United States, often in ways that reduce reliance on Russia; make Baku’s trajectory difficult for Tehran to ignore and, in many respects, strategically threatening. President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly emphasized the bonds linking Azerbaijanis across borders, arguing in public speeches that there are more than 50 million Azerbaijanis worldwide and that, regardless of where they live, a strong Azerbaijani state stands behind them because “we share the same history, language, and culture.” Given that roughly ten million Azerbaijanis live in the Republic of Azerbaijan, this framing is clearly also meant to include the 30 to 35 million Azerbaijanis in Iran.

One moment that vividly captured the emotional and political resonance of Azerbaijan’s division was Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s public recital of an Azerbaijani poem lamenting the separation along the Aras river: “They separated the Aras Rriver and filled it with rocks and rods. I will not be separated from you. They have separated us forcibly.” The lines carried weight on both sides of the Aras, but they resonated especially among South Azerbaijanis in Iran, for whom the poem echoes a lived sense of enforced separation. It also evoked the memory of 1989, when Azerbaijanis gathered along the Aras and began tearing down border barriers, an act inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the belief that, as Germany’s division could end, so too could that of Azerbaijan.

This bond is reciprocated. South Azerbaijanis inside Iran and across the diaspora have long been among the Republic’s most active and loyal supporters, and the Second Karabakh War made that visibility impossible to ignore. Protests erupted in South Azerbaijani cities in open support of Azerbaijani soldiers. This placed South Azerbaijanis in direct confrontation with the Islamic Republic’s posture, widely perceived as leaning toward Armenia. Many demonstrators were arrested and tortured, yet the mobilization persisted. Even trucks transporting supplies through South Azerbaijan en route to Armenia were attacked. South Azerbaijanis mourned with the Republic of Azerbaijan when soldiers were lost and celebrated when victories came. In Urmia and Tabriz, people handed out sweets to mark the Republic’s success, fully aware that doing so could trigger arrest, as it did.

This solidarity is not new. For years, Tractor S.C. (TiraxturSazi) football matches have served as a recurring arena of protest, where crowds chant slogans demanding political and cultural rights. Long before the Second Karabakh War, stadiums also displayed posters and slogans commemorating the Khojaly massacre. Beyond the stands, Azerbaijani flags have been waved in South Azerbaijani cities, alongside placards that capture the core sentiment, “We are not supporters of Azerbaijan. We are Azerbaijani ourselves.”

This brings us to the core policy implication today. If the Islamic Republic falls, South Azerbaijan will not be a passive spectator. There is certainly diversity within the movement where some advocate independence, others reunification with the Republic of Azerbaijan, and still others federalism within Iran. But a common baseline runs through these currents – the rejection of a return to centralized governance. Any transition plan, whether promoted by external powers, diaspora organizations or domestic elites, that assumes a simple swap of rulers at the centre while preserving the same state architecture, will face serious legitimacy issues in the north-west.

For Türkiye and the Republic of Azerbaijan, South Azerbaijan’s trajectory would carry immediate strategic consequences. Conversations in Türkiye about the need for a buffer zone already signal how quickly Ankara could view the north-west as a frontline of border security. In that context, the prospect or even perception of a Turkish and Azerbaijani troop presence in South Azerbaijan carries significance for all sides. Ankara and Baku could act as a stabilizing lever against spillover and provide safety for many South Azerbaijanis who often regard both states as “brothers”. Yet the logic here is not only kinship but a hard-nosed calculus of mutually beneficial partnership shaped by geography and security.

Türkiye’s interest is closely tied to the region’s armed landscape. Ethnic tensions and militia dynamics have been cultivated and exploited by the Islamic Republic as a tool to fragment mobilization and, when necessary, to pressure South Azerbaijan through proxies. This poses a direct risk to South Azerbaijanis, who have largely pursued democratic, civic forms of protest and political demand making. At the same time, other armed groups in the broader borderlands have contributed to cycles of militarization and the emergence of extremist threats and terrorist militias.

The spillover risk is shared because such groups can threaten Turkish territory as well as South Azerbaijani cities. The Republic of Azerbaijan, for its part, also has a clear interest in deterrence against militant actors, both to protect regional corridors and to respond to the expectation, repeatedly stated by President Ilham Aliyev, that Azerbaijan bears responsibility toward Azerbaijanis beyond its borders.

The greatest danger in thinking about Iran’s future is simplification. Iran’s next chapter will not be written solely in Tehran, nor can it be managed through a single, central script. If outside actors, and diaspora powerbrokers, continue to treat Iran’s non-Persian minorities as an afterthought, they will reproduce the same centralizing logic that has fuelled grievance and instability for a century, only under a new banner. South Azerbaijan makes the stakes unmistakable with its demography, resources, and transit corridors to Türkiye and the South Caucasus, making it a strategic hinge in any transition. Its distinct historical memory and political vocabulary of self-rule cannot be folded back into another round of centralized nation-building.

Any post-Islamic Republic roadmap that speaks in broad slogans about democracy but postpones constitutional questions of language rights and political self-government will not produce unity. Instead, it will produce backlash and competition along Iran’s most sensitive frontiers. If stability is the objective, then plurality cannot be a complication to manage later. Ignore Iran’s plurality and you will not prevent fragmentation – you will accelerate it.

Turkan Bozkurt is a Canada-based researcher and human rights advocate. She is the co-founder and deputy director of the IPEK Center. Her area of research is the Middle East with a focus on minority and gender issues. Through comparative approaches to rights and governance, she examines how legal and political frameworks shape the protection of minority rights and accountability for state violence. She is also currently a research fellow at the Topchubashov Center.

Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan-Iran relations, Azerbaijani, Iran