The Medical Republic of Iran: Pathology, Crisis and the Management of the Margins

‘Contamination’, ‘risk’, ‘prevention’, ‘cleansing, ‘quarantine’, ‘emergency’, ‘plague’ and, as I specifically illustrate, ‘pathology’ and ‘crisis’, have been brought in the everyday speeches of politicians and in the vocabulary of politics. Medicine has become a constituent part of ordinary politics as much in governing the population as in making the population govern itself. The state, hence, operates programmes on marginal and mainstream population, which qualify it with Andrew Polsky’s attribute of the ‘therapeutic state’.
Medicine, as a primary device for the management of life, has become the deus ex machina of politics. A case in point is that of the clergy in the Islamic Republic, which has adopted, increasingly in the last decades, the language and reasoning of medicine, technology and sciences, in order to legitimise controversial decisions vis à vis the populace. By doing so, the Iranian state has also adopted the frame of ‘pathology’ in relation to contentious issues, enabling or justifying reforms and changes.
This can be seen in the state interventions vis à vis homeless drug users, sex workers and, as in the work of Afsaneh Najmabadi, transgender individuals. The concept of ‘crisis’ is key in framing political initiatives in terms of policymaking as much as in terms of practical intervention. Indeed, crises operate in such a way that allow societal forces to push for change in certain fields, where governments have previously been unwilling or reluctant to intervene. How does the Iranian state diagnose a crisis? And how are marginal categories treated by state, or para-state, institutions, when they are under (invented or material) conditions of crisis?
These and other questions are investigated in this paper which has the ultimate aim of demonstrating how the Islamic Republic has witnessed the eclipse of Islamist and post-Islamist (pace Asef Bayat) nature, in favour of truly secular – in the sense that they belong to the material world – politics, one which is coterminous with global trends. By looking at the specific, yet quantitatively conspicuous, phenomenon of drug (ab)use as well as homelessness and HIV policies, I trace the making of a new milieu of Islamist politics based on a progressive medicalisation of ‘disorderly, problematic groups’. These can be qualified as the margins of contemporary Iran; margins that, nonetheless, remain central to the making of the country’s politics and political transformation.