Iran is currently discussing cannabis and opium regulations, which could bring a legalisation of drug consumption through a state supervised system. The article engages with the question of cannabis by looking at the legal interpretation of religious authorities in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The choice of Iran is justified for several reasons: firstly, Iran has a long history of drug use and cannabis has been part of the country’s intoxicant traditions since times immemorial; secondly, the Iranian state is unique in that it combines religious exegesis with political machination through official channels; finally, among all Middle East and Islamic countries, Iran is at the avant-garde in experimenting in the field of drugs policy which makes an excellent case for the study of cannabis regulation. The article is the result of a direct engagement with Iran’s leading Shi’a authorities, the maraje’-e taqlid, ‘source of emulation’. The authors redacted a list of eight questions (estefta’at) about the status of cannabis in Iranian society. It questioned cannabis’ legality in Islam, its potential medical use, the feasibility of domestic production and other relevant aspects of its social-religious life. Based on the responses, the authors analysed the difference in opinions among the religious scholars and speculate on the possibility of policy reform. Given the dearth of scholarly work about illicit drugs in the Islamic world, about which many readers might not be familiar, the article opens with an overview of the place of cannabis in the history of Islamic societies. It discusses terminological ambiguities, references in religious texts and traditions, and the general interpretations within Muslim religious schools of thought. Then, it discusses the status of cannabis in contemporary Iran before tackling the responses provided by the religious scholars. Eventually, the paper puts forward reflections about the potential implications for future policy developments on cannabis.

This article analyses the ways in which the state 'treats' addiction among precarious drug (ab)users in Iran. While most Muslim-majority as well as some Western states have been reluctant to adopt harm reduction measures, the Islamic Republic of Iran has done so on a nationwide scale and through a sophisticated system of welfare intervention. Additionally, it has introduced devices of management of 'addiction' (the 'camps') that defy statist modes of punishment and private violence. What legal and ethical framework has this new situation engendered? And what does this new situation tell us about the governmentality of the state? Through a combination of historical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, the article analyses the paradigm of government of the Iranian state with regard to disorder as embodied by the lives of poor drug (ab)users.

On 27 June 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini declared, ‘drugs are prohibited” and their trafficking, consumption and “promotion” were against the rules of Islam and could not take place in the Islamic Republic. This ruling, although informal in nature, sanctioned a swift re-direction of Iran's previous approach to narcotic drugs, both in terms of production and consumption. As had happened in 1955, Iran seemed ready to go back to a policy of total prohibition and eradication of opiates, this time under the banner of Islam rather than that of the international drug control regime. Drugs and the politics surrounding them have been a crucial, yet neglected, aspect of the history of modern Iran that have changed the nature of the state bolstering its capacity of social intervention, while hindering its legitimacy, in the Pahlavi, as in the republican, era. By moving on “from the analysis of the state to a concern with the actualities of social subordination”, this article attempts to interpret how social subordination and state coercion were practiced and defied in the making of punishment and welfare in the social body of Iran.

The State secret is truly the secret of a temple: the profanes shall not move close to it. Carlo Levi, Paura della libert a [Fear of Freedom]. 1 In November 2011, the President of the European Union (EU), Manuel Barroso, quoted the following: 'Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises,' adding, 'This still holds true today. Although the truth is also that today we are probably facing the most serious crisis in the history of European integration'. 2 This statement falls along a long series of crisis announcements which surfaced more markedly in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2008. Scholars interested in contemporary politics, whether political scientists, sociologists or anthropologists, have dedicated plenty to understanding the ways 'crisis' works in this epoch. 3 Being natural disasters (earthquakes, droughts, floods), political turmoil (electoral impasse, electoral meddling), financial meltdowns (EU in 2008, 2013) or medical emergencies (HIV, bird flu (H5N1), mental illnesses), the category of crisis has come to occupy an eminent place in social science discussions and in matters of governance. Terrorism, starting from the events of September 2001 in the United States, was instrumental in the framing of governance as being challenged by impeding crisis, which situates states and their governments in emergencies. Between 2015 and 2017, the French government extended multiple times the 'state of emergency' (hinting at its use also amidst popular protests (such as the Gilets Jaunes in 2018), an event that has no precedent since the Second World War. Indeed, it had no precedents even when one looks at the historical window of terrorist attacks during the 1970s and 1980s, for instance in the operations carried out by Ilich Ram ırez Sanchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal. Nonetheless, crisis operates beyond immediate concerns over security as in the case of terrorism. It applies to the framing and understanding of migration, economics (debt and austerity) or the environment (climate change, water shortages) and other fields of everyday governance. For instance, the Italian government declared a state of emergency in the wake of the 2016 earthquake that hit its central regions of Marche, Abruzzo and Umbria. This enabled the government to request an ease on the EU budgetary restriction and access extrabudgetary monies. Similarly, Italy has on several occasions stressed that it should be given an exceptional status, as it faces a refugee crisis, again permitting the unlocking of financial resources otherwise unavailable. The justification, in both cases, came under the necessity to face the crisis, which could not be dealt with by normal means and which, therefore, enabled governments to play beyond the agreed rules and restrictions of the EU. Lastly, Donald J. Trump's use of 'emergency funds' to bypass legislative obstacles against his 2016 electoral pledge of building the wall along the US-Mexico border confirms that the notion of crisis stands now at t...

To counter the trend toward mechanization of research and aridity of critical analysis, this article makes a case for an interdisciplinary quest. To borrow Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s phrase, we are convinced that ‘everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics.’ With an eye to open-ended research questions, this article attempts to build a body of theoretical, political and anthropological considerations, which, it is hoped, could function as a case of enquiry into the mechanics of power, revolt and revolution. The objective is to draw comparative and phenomenological lines between the events of the 2011 ‘Arab Spring,’ in its local ecologies of protest, with its global reverberations as materialized in the slogans, acts and ideals of Greek and Spanish Indignados and the UK and US occupy movements. In order to do so, it proposes to clarify terminological ambiguities and to bring into the analytical scenario new subjects, new means and new connections. The article resolves to lay the ground for a scholarship of silence, by which the set of unheard voices, hidden actions and defiant tactics of the ordinary, through extraordinary people, find place in the interpretation of phenomena such as revolts and revolutions.