A study of transnational identity, migration, and state loyalties told through the social and political history of Iran’s Khuzestan province.

In 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘athist forces invaded Khuzestan, one of the oldest and richest provinces in Iran, triggering the Iran-Iraq War. Shaherzad Ahmadi’s Bordering on War examines the social history of Khuzestan and sheds light on how border dwellers, provincial leaders, and migrants in the region shaped Iran and Iraq's history before, during, and after the war.

Drawing from a rich collection of Persian- and Arabic-language archival sources—rarely used by western scholars due to restrictions in Iran—Ahmadi’s research focuses on Arab Iranians and argues that Iranian border dwellers and migrants formed local, non-national loyalties, thereby eschewing bureaucratic pressures to confine loyalties to a single nation-state. The transnational character and ethnically diverse composition of Khuzestan, and especially the oil-rich towns in the southwestern border, led many, including Iraq’s Ba‘ath Party, to question the national belonging of Arab Iranians. Bordering on War contributes to a wider discussion about the ability of individuals and communities to exert agency through migration, trade, education, and other activities.

Shaherzad Ahmadi is an associate professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction. Khuzestan, a Borderland--Writing a Connected History
• 1. Leveraging Loyalty in the Borderland
• 2. Luring and Repelling Iranians: Abd al-Karim Qasim, 1958–1963
• 3. An Ambiguous Borderland Milieu: The Impact of the Arif Years, 1963–1968
• 4. Arab Iranians and Arabized Iranians: The Baath Party, 1968–1975
• 5. Nationality and Loyalty: The Baath and Iraqis of Iranian Descent
• 6. A National Narrative of Revolution: Subsuming the Local, 1978–1979
• 7. Khorramshahr and Abadan, May–July 1979
• 8. The Iran–Iraq War: A Denouement
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index