The Impact of Pahlavi's Despotic Semi-Modern State Structure on the Rise of the Environmental Crisis in Iran

The concept of "environmental protection" is a modern concept which, according to its origin, has a specific epistemic and intellectual foundations that represent it as a social problem derived from social movements. A concept that, while paying attention to the rights of marginal groups, embraces a variety of intellectual and political ideas. This concept is derived from democratic processes. But in Iran, due to the existence of a despotic semi-modern state, the course of development was selective, arbitrarily and caricatured. This article with an overview on the context of the formation of the concept of environmental protection in the West, shows that the despotic semi-modern structure of the Pahlavi government on one hand, led to the priority of industrial and agricultural production on environmental protection and on the other hand, prevented people from attending to environmental protection. These factors, along with the imbalance in various sectors of development, caused the emergence of environmental issues, including air pollution, as a case study of this research.