Abstract
This essay extends themes in Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) by introducing Iran as a mediating element in Cold War worldmaking. It recovers the story of Pahlavi Iran's diplomatic efforts during the Sixth Special of the United Nation General Assembly, which resulted in the declaration of the New International Economic Order. Getachew's book provides a framework to interpret these diplomatic efforts with greater precision. The same framework explains the Islamic Republic's internationalist policies in the 1980s. Worldmaking after Empire is less equipped, however, to explain the popular revolution separating different modes of Iranian statecraft between the 1970s and 1980s. This observation reveals the limits of the book's methodological approach—namely, its overemphasis on elites and its overinvestment in exactitude. These limits invite a revised approach to writing histories of anticolonial worldmaking. An alternate approach focuses on statecraft (exactitude) and popular politics (inexactitude) at once, echoing the simultaneous affi rmation of nation building and worldmaking in Getachew's theory of decolonization.
