Translating West Asia

Polygovernance pluralizes mediation. Once there is no privileged currency, institution, identity, or sovereign center through which every relation must pass, mediation becomes unavoidable in a new sense. When difference is not simply converted into equivalence, it must be translated. The translator therefore comes to the fore, not as someone who adapts differences to a common language, but as a link between things that are allowed to remain different. Translation does not require either side to disappear into the other; and indeed, something always escapes it. This remainder is not a failure but a safeguard against totalization. The relation between the individual and the collective changes accordingly. The individual is no longer polarized against the collective, nor is the collective modeled after the rugged individual. Both are crossings of multiple relations, belonging at once to places, languages, communities, economies, ecologies, and histories that never entirely coincide in a universal formula. Deleuze and Guattari give this refusal of totalization the suggestive formula “n−1”, in which multiplicity persists by perpetually subtracting the One that would presume to complete it; that is, the principle of totalization must be continuously withdrawn from the relation. Additionally, Deleuze’s plane of immanence is not a supreme entity that differentiates itself from multiplicity but precisely what prevents the plane from becoming transcendent, in a similar way that philosophy cannot be understood conceptually alone. In an entirely different register, the apotropaic structure of la ilaha illalah—there is no god but God—begins with a clearing away of false absolutes. In this operational parallel, each entity wards off the tendency of a finite relation to enthrone itself as the exclusive one. Currency, state, nation, market, collective, or individual may mediate relations, but none is entitled to become their universal measure. What remains is not the chaos of competing centers, but a field of negotiated relations in which unity can occur without forfeiting the multiplicity from which it arises, allowing the translator to emerge as the heuristic alternative to the universal equivalent and ushering a political ecology in which translation proliferates because equivalence has lost its monopoly over mediation.

West Asia went from being a producer of worlds to a strategic object within somebody else’s world-system. The modern period represents an unusually long interruption in which political power in the region has been organized within systems whose decisive centers lie elsewhere. Tracing the historical progression back to antiquity, the Sumerian city-states were conquered and unified by the Akkadian Empire around 2334 BCE, often regarded as the first territorial empire recorded in history, thereby making Mesopotamia a large-scale political organization that radiated outwards. The Achaemenid Empire of modern-day Iran, beginning with Cyrus around 550 BCE, was arguably the most comprehensive imperial formation of its age, and the subsequent Parthian and Sasanian orders that followed constituted a powerful West Asian counterweight to Rome and Byzantium. While the early Islamic polity originated in Arabia, the Abbasid revolution of 750 made Baghdad an unparalleled political and intellectual center. The Ottoman Empire that emerged in Anatolia and Safavid Iran (1501-1736) were engaged in rivalry for over two hundred years, until Europe’s increasing power and dominance by 1750 triggered a gradual reversal. With the economy of the Indian Ocean under its control, industrialization altered the balance of production, and European finance entered the Ottoman economy. The latter’s fiscal sovereignty was severely compromised, while Iran underwent a comparable process through concessions that involved Russian/British rivalry. After the First World War and the destruction of the Ottoman order, European administration converted the geography of West Asia into bounded territorial objects legible to its state system. And at the end of the Second World War, power shifted to the United States, controlling the region through an American-centered imperial infrastructure. Iran, after 1979, is a clear case of a West Asian state consistently resisting incorporation into a US political order. In May 2026, the US Department of the Treasury stated that Iranian oil sales are “primarily settled in Chinese Yuan”, and described an elaborate “network of exchange houses, front companies, and foreign accounts that convert the Renminbi proceeds into currencies usable elsewhere”. Iran and Russia’s 2025 strategic partnership explicitly calls for an independent payments infrastructure, direct interbank cooperation, and bilateral settlement in national currencies” (Tasnim News). And as of August 2026, Iran’s central bank governor says Tehran intends to join the BRICS New Development Bank and further expand national currency settlements (Reuters). Iran is thus partially escaping the dollar as a means of payment without escaping the dollar-centered world as the dominant measure and architecture of economic value. A barrel of Iranian oil can be sold for Yuan and still participate in a global petroleum economy whose capital reserves and exchange relationships interlock within a dollar-centered system. Additionally, the continuing effectiveness of American sanctions demonstrates that Iran's monetary circumvention has not yet become economic autonomy. US authorities are still able to target the foreign exchange houses, banks, shipping networks, and intermediaries Iran requires to turn its exports into usable purchasing power (US Department of the Treasury). Ali Alizadeh, a commentator on West Asian affairs and host of the YouTube channel Jadal, allegorizes that Iran “repels US Empire by day, but smuggles it back economically at night”. Thus, the ingenuity by which Iran escapes exclusion testifies, alas, to the continuing authority of the system that punishes it. The planetary regime of equivalence that Félix Guattari called Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) is the end logic of what Marx understood so well about money’s capacity to become the universal equivalent of radically heterogeneous things, made commensurable by a single abstract measure. China clearly offers a geopolitical alternative to American unipolarity but can remain perfectly compatible with the same logic of extraction, productivity, accumulation, and economic growth. Likewise, much state socialism attempts to abolish or subordinate private capital while retaining its universalizing grammar of quantification, resource extraction, and historical progress. The problem is not the diversity and difference that capitalism thrives upon but their fungibility in a scheme that presents maximum differentiation on the surface but increasing equivalence underneath.

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is a statement civil rights activist Audre Lorde delivered at a New York feminist conference in 1979. It is a realization that reverberates at home and abroad, spelling out that a politics of liberation cannot merely reverse who occupies the dominant position while preserving the architecture through which domination operates. Even defeating colonial domination does not by itself guarantee that subsequent political structures will not reproduce centralization, extraction, anthropocentrism, or homogenization. As she exits the Master’s house, Jane Jacobs steps into the street. Her great antagonist is the planner who treats the city abstractly, in the master plan, zoning map, superblock, or traffic model meant to rationalize so-called disorder. As she ambles along the sidewalk, a sophisticated organization of shopkeepers, children moving between adults, strangers observing one another, different businesses generating activity at different hours, old and new buildings supporting different rents and activities, play out on intersecting streets that are continuously engaged in fostering encounters. Jacobs relentlessly opposed the Modernist attempts at applying universal principles for the good of the city. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) is a bible of vernacular wealth that extols the virtues of distributed knowledge. She also understood economic diversity on a larger scale when she argued that cities can generate new forms of production through Import Replacement, a method of reverse engineering that counters extractive measures. One can almost imagine how, instead of specialization, such an economics of heterogeneity can make the physical diversity of objects translate into fiscal difference. While Jane Jacobs encountered plurality on the sidewalk and showed how heterogeneous relations generate vitality from below, Elinor Ostrom found polycentric Governance in the commons, demonstrating how plurality can acquire durable institutions without surrendering to a single governing center. From developmental economics to ecological preservation, her work challenges the assumption that order requires homogenization. In her 2009 Nobel Prize lecture, titled Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems, she demonstrates how complexity is not chaos, nor does it require centralized simplification. Her antagonist was the institutional panacea, and there is an echo of Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic in her research on forests, fisheries, irrigation systems, and grazing lands. The inveterate conservationist’s aversion to reducing land to property and commodity is echoed decades later by Ostrom’s insistence on institutional arrangements that prevent humans from destroying the ecological system upon which they depend. Refuting both privatization and centralized administration, with the simple insight that coordination does not require homogenization, Polycentric Governance describes an arrangement in which many autonomous decision-making centers govern a shared system, while remaining connected through cooperation, negotiation, monitoring, and conflict resolution. Just as Jacobs’s city does not work according to a correct urban plan but because of innumerable autonomous actors producing patterns through their encounters. Ostrom brings empirical force to the argument as her search begins from situations in which multiple actors must govern a common resource together, without the assumption that the universal solution must either be a centralized state or a private market. If heterogeneity produces vitality for Jacobs, it can govern itself for Ostrom, and while the consummate urbanist conveys the sensory dimension of polycentricity, the pioneering economist devises systems for meaningful participation, enforceable rules, and mechanisms through which participants can affect the arrangements that govern them. The master’s tool cannot dismantle the master’s house because it is of the same architecture that defines mastery; but Jacobs reveals ordered patterns that arise without a master plan, while Ostrom, with Leopold in the background to remind us the land is not strictly human, demonstrates that multiple centers can govern shared worlds without collapsing into chaos.

In the battleground of what has been called the Middle East for too long, and not since the regional awareness Antoun Saadeh brought to bear, has there been a capacity for treating the Levant as an organic habitat. Its protagonists have since been condemned to perish in the lethal heat of Kanafani’s “Men in the Sun”; or metaphor aside, its cultural and religious figures have been eradicated by the Zionist contingent of the otherwise internalized colonial apparatus. The founder of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party considered sectarianism a condition to overcome, since he vehemently opposed the Sykes-Picot Agreement and its Franco-British imposition of artificial borders on a continuous land. Fragmentation not only turns people against each other but also tragically alienates them from their own habitat. The integrity of the commons includes the environment’s predominantly non-human inhabitants, making a rupture with this radical other nothing but the forfeiting of one’s own sustaining ground. Well before the new Yankees could advance grand ideas, some indigenous peoples of North America knew that there may be as many currencies as the next comer, but that land would not let any become the universal measure. It is this disposition that private property displaced, and it is the latter, transplanted to the other side of the globe, that makes Aldo Leopold’s principles unlikely to settle between the Tigris and the Euphrates. In this corner of the world, a colonial settler can become a land conservationist because colonialism has embedded itself in urban infrastructure as much as in behavioral acculturation. The repeated betrayals of the population by its governing officials emphasize the dire insufficiencies of the colored polygon nation-states that make up the region’s political map. But the regional awareness Iran has manifested through its solidarity with Ansar Allah and Hezbollah ushers in a paradigm-changing political engagement that alters the very structure of sovereignty in its relation to colonialism. It is no longer enough to adopt the nation-state model inherited from the colonial structure, in the guise of Egypt and Jordan, the docile and (mal)adjusted prototypes flanking the Zionist settlement. What has the semblance of an organized national object is, in effect, the fragmentation of indigenous continuities that have been reassembled into a homogeneous whole. Fragmentation deprives heterogeneous objects of their relations. Syria, for example, was dangerously heterogeneous and had to be broken into discontinuous segments to be better absorbed by a single-purposed registry. Its internal multiplicity could not be levelled easily and had to suffer further dislocation before being bundled into a puppet state like Iraq and Libya. Sectarianism is a disease affecting the collective that makes the possibility of national unification desirable, but isn’t keeping its power structure intact essentially a colonial trap? Antoun Saadeh had an overt theory of a geographically constituted Syrian nation extending beyond the borders imposed after World War I. Gamal Abdel Nasser developed an explicitly Arab and later Afro-Asian political horizon. Mossadegh’s principle, however, was a “negative equilibrium” that sought to free Iran from concessions to both the British and the Soviet Union, thereby safeguarding the integrity of its constitutional sovereignty. Yet his anti-colonial logic of dual independence traveled remarkably well beyond Persia and became regional almost by contagion. In Antoun Saadeh’s regional continuity, the imposed border is inadequate to the continuity of habitat and society. For Nasser, the rivalry between great powers can itself become room for maneuver rather than requiring submission to either one. And for Mossadegh, independence requires preventing an external power from acquiring privileged control over the country’s resources. It is telling that, even before Nasser came to power, and five years before the nationalization of Suez, Mossadegh visited Egypt and received tremendous support in the region for his anti-colonial stance. The insistence that no external power should acquire the privilege of determining Iran’s political and material relations bolsters a sense of indigenous autonomy, and a renewed opportunity to avoid replacing one universal mediator with another. The distant echo of bygone empires carries a truth obscured by their archaism, a structural wholeness that, oddly enough, retains more heterogeneity than what their collapse ultimately bequeathed the region. And it becomes simultaneously evident that the appropriate approach is not one of invention but anagnorisis, a recognition in which what was present all along suddenly becomes intelligible in a different way. Such as an unfettered pragmatism concerning Iran’s management of currency as it stands at the cusp of a regional paradigm change. Ensconced between three political hegemons, it is uniquely positioned to trade with each of them independently, thereby refuting the primacy of a universalizing and colonizing currency. For instance, Iran’s open-ended relations with China and Russia have the capacity to refute the hegemony of the dollar and the US Empire’s exclusive hold on the market that seeks to arbitrate all trade. Maneuvering between competing powers or refusing concessions that would allow any single one to dominate, rather than suspending Iran in a double bind with a currency that cannot set it free, places it at the helm of a mission that reverberates with regional anti-colonial resonance. It is possible to maintain multiple trades and economies, dealing with the dollar, the yuan, the ruble, but also the rial, dinar, dirham, bilateral clearing, currency swaps, regional units of account, mutual credit, barter where appropriate, local currencies where applicable, and certain transactions that are not monetized at all. Once entrenched, the polygovernance of West Asia has the redoubtable potential to foster diversity while operating as a preventive measure against universalization.

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