Ethnicity has been one of the most contested concepts in Iranian social sciences and has attracted extensive scholarly attention in sociology, political science, history, and cultural studies over the past two decades. However, most existing studies have focused on explaining the causes, consequences, and dimensions of ethnic identities, while paying limited attention to how “ethnicity” itself has become an object of knowledge, explanation, and intervention. The study employs a qualitative critical review method and analyzes 52 Persian-language academic articles published between 2001 and 2025. The analysis is organized around three interrelated dimensions: the problematization of ethnicity, the governmental rationalities and technologies embedded in the literature, and the ways in which studies engage with the historicity of the ethnic question. The findings indicate that the dominant literature predominantly frames ethnicity as an issue of national integration, development, security, or cultural identity. Furthermore, much of this literature operates within state-centered and nation-centered rationalities and, through techniques such as identity measurement, population classification, and policy-oriented analysis, renders ethnicity a knowable and governable object. The study also finds that, despite frequent references to historical data, many works remain presentist in orientation and pay limited attention to the historical conditions that made ethnicity thinkable as a distinct social and political category.