MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL ✭ VOLUME 73, NO. 2, SUMMER 2019 HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.3751/73.2.15 © Middle East Institute. This article is for personal research only and may not be copied or distributed in any form without the permission of The Middle East Journal. The Politics of Development and Security in Iran’s Border Provinces Eric Lob and Nader Habibi This article examines the politics of development and security in Iran’s border provinces from the 1979 revolution to the present day. We argue that there has been a narrowing division of labor between the government bureaucracy and se- curity services regarding development and counterinsurgency in the border prov- inces. Since 2013, this outcome has created both cooperation and competition between the president and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in their eforts to improve development and security in these provinces. On June 7, 2017, the Islamic Republic of Iran sufered a terrorist attack by the Is- lamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) on two iconic symbols: the country’s parliament and the mausoleum of the revolution’s leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. This at- tack was signifcant for two reasons. First, it was the frst major and high-profle ter- rorist attack inside Tehran since 1981. Second, soon after the attack, it was discovered that the suspects were Iranian citizens from Tehran and the country’s western border provinces of Kermanshah, Kurdistan, and West Azerbaijan. 1 The fact that ISIS had al- legedly infltrated Iran’s borders and recruited its Kurdish and Azeri citizens provoked an intense debate in the government and media about the poor socioeconomic condi- tions of the ethnic regions and other border provinces. Politicians and pundits blamed the rampant poverty of these regions for the willingness of some of their residents to join violent extremist groups, leading one newspaper to publish a front-page article with the headline “Development against terrorism.” 2 The relatively higher rates of poverty and underdevelopment in Iran’s provinces bordering Iraq and Turkey in the west and Pakistan and Afghanistan in the east should not have come as a surprise, given that various government planning and development organizations had been documenting this trend for quite some time. Since its establish- ment in 1979, the Islamic Republic has proclaimed improving development and eradi- Eric Lob is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida Inter- national University. His research focuses on the politics of reconstruction and development in the Middle East and beyond. Lob is currently completing a book for Cambridge University Press entitled Iran’s Recon- struction Jihad: Rural Development and Regime Consolidation after 1979. His articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Iranian Studies, Middle East Critique, and others. Nader Habibi is the Henry J. Leir Professor of Practice in the Economics of the Middle East at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. His recent research projects include analyses of the ex- cess supply of college graduates in Middle Eastern countries, the impact of sanctions on the Iranian economy, and the economic efects of the Arab Spring. Habibi also serves as the director of Islamic and Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Links to his publications are available at https://naderhabibi.blogspot.com/. The authors thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and feedback on this article. 1. “Iran Says Arrested 48 Daesh Wahhabi Terrorists,” PressTV, June 9, 2017, www.presstv.com/ Detail/2017/06/09/524722/Iran-Intelligence-Ministry-Daesh-Wahhabi-terrorists-statement. 2. “ وريسمه عليه ترتوسع” [“Development against terrorism”], Ebtekar Newspaper, June 13, 2017, http://ebtekarnews.com/?newsid=78885.