This chapter explores and develops the relationship between two key concepts that have been central to Gary Jacobsohn’s work over the past decade or so: constitutional identity and constitutional revolution. In particular, it addresses the issues of (1) how and to what extent constitutional revolutions impact constitutional identity, (2) whether they do so in a single or uniform way, and (3) the implications of the broadening of the concept of constitutional revolution in the recent book for the possibility of the “substitution of one constitutional identity for another.” With respect to the latter, the chapter identifies a certain resistance in the new book to the idea of a new constitutional identity but argues both that its thesis is perfectly consistent with this possibility and that the idea provides the best way to understand certain constitutional revolutions.

This essay explores different relationships between constitutional identity and constitutional politics. One purpose is descriptive. The first five sections briefly discuss the five relationships between constitutional identity and constitutional politics. Constitutional politics may be an instrumental means for achieving a particular constitutional identity; the means designed to achieve a particular constitutional identity; constitutive of constitutional identity; the constitutionally prescribed means for achieving a constitutional identity; or the constitutionally prescribed means for achieving any constitutional identity. The more fundamental goal is to undermine the “apple of gold” metaphor as a device for thinking about constitutional regimes. Constitutional politics in most constitutional regimes is as constitutive of constitutional identity as the substantive principles announced in such documents as the Declaration of Independence.

As the century turned, Iran experienced political turmoil and America became a part of the drama of Iranian constitutionalism. After the assassination of Nasser al-Din Shah, the country moved toward constitutional government under his son, Mozaffar al-Din Shah. The constitutional revolution and civil war ushered in important political change in inaugurating Iran’s parliament, but instability followed. American missionaries and sympathizers, such as the martyred Howard Baskerville, fought for Iran’s freedom and to restore constitutional rule. During the period of the Second Majles, Iran hired American advisers to revamp its finances but was met with Russian interference. As war loomed, Iran found itself in a precarious position and its territory threatened by outside powers.

Chapter 3 examines Armenian deportees and locusts in the Jazira between 1908 and 1918. It places the Armenian genocide within the longer history of efforts to control the Jazira, as the district created for the settlement of nomads in 1871 transformed into the final destination for many of the empire’s Armenian citizens. The chapter exposes the complicated ways the violence affected and was affected by the environment. One German locust expert even suggested that the deportations of the genocide coupled with war mobilization to make the locust invasions worse because so much land was left fallow. But the environment also managed to help some escape, whether children who survived by working as shepherds for pastoralists or the Armenian who, while concealing his identity, worked as the locust-control officer of the Jazira. In a mark of the enduring challenge of the Jazira and its provincial division, Ottoman officials discussed how to draw better borders in the region throughout, from the lead-up to deportations in 1915 all the way to the end of the war in 1918.

Regarding this Lefebvrian framework, the political struggles of the 1940s and the early 1950s in Tehran pose significant questions that this chapter seeks to examine. After decades of spatial abstraction and the (re)production and development of the city through abstract spaces, how did the people of Tehran transform state spaces into a political arena to contest the hegemony of the state? What was the relationship between spaces of daily life produced in the Reza Shah era and the new spaces of protest in Tehran? Why did people choose the new streets and squares of the city for protesting against the monarchy? Why did they not take bast in the mosques of the old city as they did in the constitutional era? To analyze this spatial shift, this chapter scrutinizes political groups and forces of this era and their political gatherings, protests, demonstrations, and parades in public spaces of Tehran. This examination suggests a dynamic political scene that cannot be dichotomized into the conventional binary opposition of people against the state, as was examined during the constitutional era.

By utilizing the notions of the communal sphere and segmented urban society developed in Chapter 1, this chapter investigates the relationship between society and the state as mediated through the spatiality of the city. It studies Iranians’ political practices in public spaces that contested the state during the 1905–6 Constitutional Revolution. It seeks to better understand the troubled relationship between society and the state and its geographical manifestations. As a result of this troubled relationship, Iranian society managed to delimitate the absolutist monarchy and bind it to certain political and social norms. Two theoretical concepts stand out in this context: the public sphere and the political public space. This chapter deals with the relationship between these two concepts in a different geography, beyond the dominance of Western European and North American narratives. Drawing in part on Jürgen Habermas’s discussion in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, here I understand the public sphere as a medium between society and the state that enables the former to exert influence on the latter. Political public spaces provide unique platforms for people’s collective political activities, and do so in ways that intersect with other aspects of urban life.

Chapter 1 provides a brief review of Iranian women’s entry into journalism and the legacy of their incipient journals. Iranian women’s print media emerged in the early twentieth century at approximately the same time that perceptions about the nature and function of the print media, anti-imperialist nationalism and notions about "the modern woman," were consolidated. This chapter lays essential ground for the discussion of the connections between the print media, women and the state in the ensuing decades. It also provides a vital foundation from which to assess the continuity and discontinuity of different trends in women’s periodicals over time.