Investigating the Composition of Social Forces and the Evolution of Ethnic Identity Discourses in Balochistan, Iran

The main purpose of this research is first to provide a sort of forces and social groups’ categorization in the Balochistan community and, in the following, discourses that can be deduced from the activities of these groups. The present research is fundamentally, within the framework of a kind of historical-genealogical methodology. Findings show that especially in the last century and among social groups in political and social discourses of Balochistan, the most influential ones included: 1) Commanders, khans and the traditional aristocracy; 2) Ethnic nationalist and national elites; 3) clerics, Molavies and religious activists; 4) intellectuals and modernist civil activists. It seems that each of these groups act in a special thinking context and space; this issue is discussed in the present article, following the presentation of four discourses: 1) Self-centered and ethnocentric discourses; 2) nationalist discourses; 3) socio-political religious-oriented discourses; 4) Reformative socio-political discourses.