It is only in the sharpest social and political crises that words, expressions, actions, and undertakings reveal their real meaning.Footnote 1
The true problem, the central mystery [arcano] of politics is not sovereignty, but government; it is not God, but the angel; it is not the King, but the minister; it is not the law, but the police – that is, the governmental machinery that they form and they keep moving.Footnote 2
Summer 2012 was a typically turbulent period of Iranian contemporary history. President Mahmud Ahmadinejad was in the final year of his presidency, the revolts across the Arab world were matters of concern, interest and comparison in the streets and offices of Tehran, while everyone else was preparing for the European Football Cup in Poland and Ukraine. Arriving in Iran after a long first year at Oxford, I was getting ready for my first day of internship at the Tehran bureau of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). I was excited for many reasons, all of which speak rather clearly of my naiveté. Working for a UN office made me believe that perhaps once I finished my degree at Oxford, I could find employment back in Iran, or for that matter, anywhere in the world. The financial crisis that had struck Europe and the unholy competition for graduate jobs had made all of us students more desperate (including those at Oxford …) and hopeful of the potential of an unpaid, uninsured internship at a UN office. Besides, the UNODC seemed the ideal place to start my research about drug policy; Iranian public institutions were unlikely to accept foreign-based interns at that time.
A relative of mine, who hosted me upon my arrival, invited me after dinner to sit with him in the lounge, because he ‘wanted to say a few words before my first day of work’. I took the invitation as a further sign of pride among my family at the fact that I was working (a euphemism for internship) at the UN. Instead, my relative’s face became stern while he asked me, ‘Do you know the two Iranian researchers – what was their name? – who worked on HIV programmes and were very famous here and in Amrika? Have you read what happened to them?’ I was still a bit confused about the combination of his words and facial expression, when it came to my mind that only a year earlier, Arash Alaei, a doctor who had run a few HIV-prevention and treatment programmes in Iran, starting from the early 2000s, had been released after three years of incarceration in Tehran’s Evin Prison. His brother, Kamiar, had been released the previous year. Both had been charged with collaborating with the CIA and acting against national security.
Of course, it was not the first time that I had been warned of the risks of doing research on Iran in Iran. Yet, I felt a shiver run up my spine and thought that maybe the fact that I was working on a difficult issue, based in a British university and a college which has had a global reputation for being, among other more scholarly things, ‘a nest of spies’, could have attracted understandable suspicion among the Iranian authorities.Footnote 3 Nonetheless, during the following six years of research, which included multiple visits over a cumulative period of roughly 15 months, I did not encounter any problem with the authorities, nor I was reminded formally or informally, of the red lines of fieldwork, despite having touched upon highly sensitive issues related to the politics of drugs in Iran. Perhaps not sensitive enough. A typical question from colleagues in the social sciences or Iranians in general runs, ‘what did they [the Iranian authorities] tell you when you were there [Iran]? Were you interrogated about your research? Did they harass you?’ Truth be told, the presence of intelligence officers and security apparatuses in the conducting of my fieldwork is remarkable by its absence, at least perceived absence. At no time was I interrogated, nor did I ever meet people who warned me about what I was doing – apart from my family and friends. A fact, I should not hide, that triggered, in few occasions, accusations and suspicion of being a ‘spy of the Islamic Republic’ or an ‘apologist’ of the Iranian regime.
The subject that I had decided to investigate was an un(der)studied field, not only in the context of Iran but also in that of the Middle East and North Africa and, for that matter, the Islamic world.Footnote 4 The only other researcher who had paid heed to the issue of drugs, addiction and politics in Iran is Janne Bjerre Christensen, who had been expelled from the country in 2005 and not allowed back in until 2012.Footnote 5 Few researchers, especially anthropologists, had been able to work inside Iran between 2005 and 2015, especially to conduct studies of politics and the state. When the topic is discussed, often it occurs in the work of journalists, such as Ramita Navai’s City of Lies, in which, for instance, narrative accounts take an overtly sensational turn at the expense of analysis, misleading readers towards Orientalist ideas such as the fact Iranians have a tendency to lie. This frame plays instrumentally in the geopolitical game and is very much in tune with Israeli and American rhetoric on Iran (see Bibi Netanyahu’s big poster ‘Iran Lies’).Footnote 6 The axiom, Western countries speak truth, was never a serious assertion and less so in the aftermath of George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s Weapons of Mass Destruction tirade, let alone in the era of Donald J. Trump.
On the other hand, there is an abundance of research on illicit drugs and addiction inside Iran. This body of knowledge is unfortunately dominated by epidemiological studies with narrow quantitative methods at the expense of qualitative, sociological and historical approaches. When social scientists engage in the study of illicit drugs, the tendency is to portray drugs through an ideological lens, turning them into all-encompassing evils. There has not been a systematic treatment of illicit drugs from Iranian social scientists, perhaps with the exception of Said Madani’s historical sociology, Tarikh-e E‘tiyad (History of Addiction), which details the changing policies of drug control and addiction treatment from the Pahlavi monarchy up until 2005, the end of reformism. This book is currently out of print and its author sent in exile in the southern city of Bandar Abbas, for reasons unrelated to his research on addiction.
The dearth of scholarly work on illicit drugs prompted the project behind this book. With the generous support of the Wellcome Trust Doctoral Studentship in Society & Ethics at Oxford University’s Department of Politics and International Relations, I was able to design a qualitatively rich and fieldwork-oriented study of drugs politics in Iran. The book uncovers the politics of illicit drugs in their historical trajectories and through ethnographic engagement. It does not deal with the object of illicit drugs as a separate dimension in modern society. Instead, it regards drugs as part of the larger state–society relations and power dynamics evolving throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drugs are objects defining social and political life in a number of ways. People consume drugs, governments punish consumption and dealing of drugs, people seek sanitary and welfare support for drug dependencies, states intervene in facilitating, impeding or instructing public health measures on drug consumption. Drugs, hence, are part of a political game beyond the norms and regulations of drugs policy. This is what I refer to when discussing drugs politics.
In the case of Iran, illicit drugs are part of an underlying form of politics which assumes paradoxical outcomes. The Islamic Republic has systematically criminalised drug offenders and punished them with draconian measures, while it has also provided among the most progressive and controversial set of public health programmes (e.g. harm reduction) for drug (ab)users. Here, drugs politics works in a field of ambiguities and contradictions. In the book, these ethical contradictions and political articulations show how incongruities are essential to the maintenance and reproduction of political prerogatives, to the preservation of state interests. In doing so, the book dispels the idea of Iranian politics as a paradox and as exceptional.
Paradoxes are analytical venues for the understanding of modern politics in Iran, as elsewhere. For example, Iranian authorities, based on religious interpretation, allow and actively sponsor so-called temporary marriages (sigheh in Farsi, mut‘ah in Arabic), while forbidding de jure and punishing premarital sex.Footnote 7 In practice, this has resulted in the legalisation of prostitution and sex work, especially in sites of religious pilgrimage. But it is also used as an expedient for people willing to engage in a flexible union as for those engaged in white marriages (ezdevaj-e sefid), unmarried couples living together.Footnote 8 Strict sexual codes and the adoption of normative sexuality intersect with the secular trends among younger generations, in defiance both of family and of state mores and norms.
Transgender identities in Iran are another apparently paradoxical situation. Since the late 1980s, the authorities have legislated in favour of gender reassignment surgery (‘sex change’), legalising and providing welfare support for people who want to change gender, while denying legal status to homosexuals.Footnote 9 In this way, the Islamic Republic has maintained an orthodox ban on same-sex desire through an unorthodox religious interpretation facilitated by the development and use of medical technology. In that respect, the status of transgender people is protected and legally safeguarded, potentially facilitating social and gender integration, while that of homosexuals remains unlawful and unrecognisable.
To these two cases, one could add the legal framework of organ donations, which in Iran operates under a legal, regulated market where individuals have the right to sell their organs to private citizens for a quantifiable amount of money. The law approved in 2000 regulates the private market of human organs in an attempt to curtail the mushrooming of the illegal organ trafficking market, as it has in other contexts such as India and other developing countries. Iran does not have a waiting list for transplant organs, especially for kidneys. Organised through public associations, under the control of the Ministry of Health, neither the transplant centre not the transplant physicians are involved in identifying potential vendors.Footnote 10 Nonetheless, this approach exacerbated the classist dimension of the legal organ market where economic hardship often compels individuals to resort to the sale of their organs for the benefit of wealthier people in need.
Another manifest paradox is the political structure of the Islamic Republic. The centre of gravity of this order stands in the coexistence and fluid balance between religious anointment, represented by the guidance of the Islamic jurist (in the shadow of god), with electoral representation of most major institutions. This systemic ambivalence is a rare thing in global politics and, thus, Iran seems a political exception of modernity. Uninterrupted national and local elections testify to the existence and endurance of democratic elements within the Iranian state, in spite of domestic and foreign challenges to which it had been exposed since the victory of the 1979 revolution. In this way, the political order, from a formal standpoint, adopts two diverging – incompatible – forms of legitimacy: a religious, theological one and a popular electoral one.
These are just a few examples of political paradoxes in Iran. It is no surprise, therefore, that the scholarship on Iran is also rife with references to ‘paradoxes’.Footnote 11 A land of self-contradictory enigmas to which one cannot respond in a logical way, Iran’s politics is regarded as being exceptional and differing from political trends as much in the West as in the East. In particular, the theocratic and republican paradox has been the object of countless academic publications, which in turn claim that the Islamic Republic is either a theocracy (and therefore implying that it is politically retrograde) or a faulty Islamic democracy, with potential of reform. Political practice is not part of the analytical picture. Scholarship of this type looks at paradoxes as opportunities for intellectual divagation and not as existing political reality. Instead of discussing modern Iranian politics and its inconsistencies as a paradox, my objective in this book has been that of dissecting this much appraised incongruence, the paradox itself, and bestowing meaning to it in the governmental practice of the state. The Iranian state cannot be explained simply by employing the metaphor of the paradox or, for that matter, that of a theocracy. Instead, the paradox has become the way power (and the state) operates, the mechanism through which it governs.
In the chapters of this book I do not argue that Iranian modernity is simply animated by paradoxes and self-contradictory phenomena, but that it is constituted by the oxymoron, and an oxymoronic dimension. The difference between these two figures of speech (paradox versus oxymoron) is capital: the etymology of ‘oxymoron’ indicates something that is ‘sharp/pointed’ (oxus) and ‘dull/foolish’ at the same time, as a ‘wise fool’, an ‘eloquent silence’; in the realm of politics, the oxymoron reproduces the underlying, inescapable contradictions that animate political life and on which politics is ultimately constructed. Paradoxes, instead, remain simply a condition that defies logic and to which one cannot bestow political meaning. The examples of gender reassignment, organ donation and temporary marriage clarified situations of oxymoronic value. Oxymora are bearers of unusual meaning, which, beyond their poetic value, enable the formulation of new concepts and the opening of new intellectual avenues. In that, they hold chimeric value for they are not trusted at first glance, but make possible the overcoming of old habits, like that of getting used to words and ideas in the social sciences.
Observers often understand the harsh penalties for drug offences as a side effect of Islamic law. Indeed, following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, authorities adopted stricter rules and measures against drugs trafficking and drugs use. This strategy contributed to the militarisation of anti-narcotics, especially in the southeast region of Sistan and Baluchistan, but also in the adoption of the death penalty against drug traffickers up until 2017. However, a closer look at the history of drugs in Islam shows that Islamic law remains rather silent on the matter of narcotic drugs. Those expecting religion to be the driving force behind political decisions vis-à-vis illicit drugs will be disappointed. Only recently, following the appointment of clerical figures at the head of state institutions, have Islamic jurists taken a bolder, overt stance against narcotics. Even then, the clergy has often adopted a more nuanced and compromising approach on narcotic drugs compared to their civilian counterpart. Unrelenting calls for anti-drug operations comes from officials unconcerned with religious matters. For instance, once inquired about the medical and therapeutic use of substances such as cannabis, a number of Islamic jurists – often with highly influential followings – do not shy away from saying that, if scientifically proven, cannabis use is not against the rule of Islam for medical and therapeutic use.Footnote 12 This apparent paradox shows that regulation of illicit drugs does not derive from religious exegesis or persuasion, but rather from the workings of state. Religion could potentially be even a way towards reform of the current prohibitionist laws on illicit drugs. The book will not discuss the way religion treats the subject of drugs in the Islamic Republic. It avoids it with intent, for religion has little influence over the making of public policy on illicit drugs – or, for that matter, in most other fields of contemporary life. So, religion here is discussed by its absence in the thought and practice of drugs politics.
Following Gilles Deleuze’s line of thought, the book does not question ‘what is the nature of power’, whether Iran is a theocracy, a republic or just another authoritarian state, but rather ‘in what ways power is exercised, in what place it is formed and why it is everywhere’.Footnote 13 This new approach recasts the primacy of political practice over political rhetoric and formality. It privileges bottom-up analysis of social and political change as opposed to changes in political outlook and institutions. Paraphrasing Giorgio Agamben: this book is unconcerned with god and theology, but attentive to the intervention of its angels and agents; it leaves the king (or the Supreme Leader) aside and looks for the ministers; it reads the laws, but goes after the police.Footnote 14 Ethnographic observation and engagement, therefore, become a preferred method of study, instead of the classical use of discourse analysis and formal interviews. Practice over rhetoric, politics over policy, political order over the regime mean that the close-up narrative on Iran is seen transversally in light of political transformations globally.
This is a time when both illicit drugs and Iran are experiencing a surge in global interest. For the first time in a century, there is a direct challenge to the prohibitionist regime, with new models of drug regulation being discussed and proposed across the globe, the effects of which could be far-reaching in terms of social, cultural and politico-economic futures.Footnote 15 The legalisation of cannabis adopted by Uruguay, Canada and a number of US States is a distinctive sign of the change in the global approach to illicit drugs to which the Iranian case is very much connected. And for the first time in several decades, in the wake of the nuclear negotiations in Vienna, Iran and the Western world are laying the hazardous ground for a broader rapprochement, an event that so far lives in the erratic environment of US president Donald Trump’s foreign policy and in the regional confrontations across Eurasia and the Middle East. Regardless of the outcome of the current geopolitical earthquake, Iran is set to be a gravitational epicentre for regional and international politics, constructively or destructively. Although this book does not deal with either drug legalisation or post-nuclear-deal Iran, it pays attention to changes in Iran’s drugs politics as a litmus test for larger societal and political transformations, in Iran as well as globally.
The study of drugs and politics also represents an unusual endeavour. No material product has been the object of systematic, global and unflatteringly ideological and practical interventions by the state as has illicit drugs. This has occurred with exceptional conformity, like no other global phenomenon. There is no country on the planet that has not adopted, in the last hundred years since the inception of international drug control, some sort of policy about illicit drug control. Regardless of cultural specificities or the economic and social importance of drugs (e.g. coca, opium, cannabis) states across the globe have adopted specific measures to bring under control, or to eradicate, these substances. The case of Iran, in particular, provides a paradigm of what has come to be known as the ‘War on Drugs’, in a political and cultural setting that has been characterised, by most of the area studies literature, by other investigations and scholarly questions. Iran, nevertheless, represents an outstanding case for the study of the War on Drugs; it is at the geopolitical crossroads of international drug routes, it has one of the world highest rates of drug ‘addiction’ – estimated at between 2–3 per cent and 6–7 per cent of the entire populationFootnote 16 – and it has progressively seen the rise of synthetic, industrial drugs, such as methamphetamines (crystal meth, aka as shisheh, ‘glass’). Iran systematically reminds the international community that its anti-narcotics efforts are ‘a price paid on behalf of the West’, which would be otherwise overwhelmed by the sheer size of drug supply going westwards.Footnote 17 Because of its sheer quantitative dimension, the issue of drugs would deserve ample and in-depth scrutiny by scholars of Iran, the Middle East and the Islamic world as well as by those working on international drug policy. However, this subject of inquiry is almost absent not only from the radar of most area studies scholars, but also from those researching issues of the state and politics. Attention to Iran’s role as a transit route for narcotics and the media focus on capital punishment – 80 per cent of sentences fell on drug traffickers up to 2017Footnote 18 – have obfuscated the political relevance of the drug phenomenon at a domestic level and its interaction with the transformation of Iranian politics over the past decades.
This book is divided into two Parts and an Interregnum. Diachronic narrative and synchronic analysis coexist throughout the chapters. Following this brief Prologue, I introduce the theoretical and methodological coordinates guiding the argument. The Introduction defines what I mean by ‘drug assemblage’ and ‘apparatuses’ of management of illicit drugs and what is ‘addiction’, where it comes from, and how it operates as a governmental category. In a cursory way, I take the opportunity to illustrate how I dealt with data in Iran, mapping the archival and ethnographic fieldwork, which, in the Iranian context, was a significant challenge for researchers.
Three historical chapters (Chapter 2, 3 and 4) constitute Part One. Chapter 2 looks at the origins of drugs politics and drug control in modern Iran, tracing the coordinates of the first drug laws in the 1900s and the modernising drugs legislation of the Pahlavi state. The fall of the Pahlavi state and the bouleversement of its drugs policy is the object of Chapter 3. The 1979 Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War determined a fundamental change in all political affairs and drugs were no exception. The chapter explores the populist call against drug trafficking and drug addiction and the way it intermingled with the war efforts during the 1980s. Chapter 4 discusses reformism and drugs. Rather than an overview of the way the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005) intervened vis-à-vis the drug assemblage, the chapter shows the way the drug crisis, both material and discursive, contributed to the adoption of reformist policies at the heart of the state. Legal reforms materialised through a coordinated engagement ‘from below’ among civil society agents, public officials and international consultants, and the opportunistic surfacing of an HIV/AIDS epidemic triggered by injecting drug use. The chapter demystifies the philosophical and intellectual take on reformism and shows how reforms work in practice.
Following Part One, the historical narrative leaves way to the Interregnum of Chapter 5. In this chapter, I analyse how crisis is institutionalised in the Islamic Republic and how it drives political machination. The case that I discuss is that of the Council for the Discernment of the Expediency of the State, known as Expediency Council. The chapter provides innovative accounts on how this institution has become the venue of crisis management and crisis politics in post-revolutionary Iran. It is not a coincidence that the Expediency Council is the only institution charged with the power to amend and reform drug laws, whereas all other laws are discussed and drafted in Parliament. Taken as a case study, the Expediency Council enables us to understand the micropolitics of crisis management in Iran’s turbulent politics.
That is a theoretical introduction to Part Two, where I tackle Iran’s contemporary drugs politics through ethnographic means. Few studies have tackled the period following 2005, and, especially 2009, through on-the-ground research. In Chapter 6, I introduce the epochal mutation characterising social and cultural life under the populist government of Mahmud Ahmadinejad. This period unveils the long-term transformation of Iranian society, a process akin to an ‘anthropological mutation’. Rather than discussing this event in general terms, I privilege a situated analysis with an emphasis on consumption, psyche and sociality, visible in the manifestation of the drug phenomenon. The chapter accounts for the dramatic change in drug consumption starting from the 2000s, with the rise of shisheh, ‘crystal meth’, among large sections of society. These changes have substantial political effects, which I explain in Chapter 7. The chapter shows the logics behind governmental intervention vis-à-vis the new drug assemblage. The shift in popular consumption from narcotic to stimulant substances renders state-led programmes outdated and incapable of controlling the presence of drug consumers in the public space. A new governmental approach emerges, driven by ‘the maintenance of disorder’, a practice based on the outsourcing of drug control treatment and punishment to non-state, grassroots agents. The chapter discusses this new strategy through the paradigm of the addiction recovery ‘camps’, based on extensive ethnographic observation. The ethnographic narrative terminates with Chapter 8, where I engage with the role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and their relations to the populist government of Mahmud Ahmadinejad. The mushrooming of NGOs working on drug control and addiction recovery turned the field of civil society into a key partner of the government, especially in those terrains regarded as socially problematic. NGOs turn into ‘twilight institutions’: they are not the state but they exercise public authority. In this chapter, I argue that what is often labelled as authoritarianism is not necessarily the effect of a state-led ideology. There are forms of grassroots authoritarianism emerging from the work and ideas of social agents and ordinary citizens. They intervene in the social field with autonomous means, regardless of state ideology. At times, grassroots elements are the main obstacle in adopting progressive and humanitarian codes of conduct in drugs politics. These micropolitical manoeuvrings, instructed by fluid political logic, represent the art of managing disorder and governing crisis in the Islamic Republic. The Iranian case is part of a global process of contradiction and tension in which progress, change and setbacks are the outcome of infrapolitical, counterintuitive and historically rich developments.
The literature on contemporary Iran has laboured considerations of elite politics, institutional and theological/theoretical reform at the expense of studies of social and political transformation from below.Footnote 19 Nonetheless, there is an emerging trend of scholarly works attentive to the on-the-ground shifts characterising political life in contemporary Iran. Among these works, there is a symptomatic prevalence of studies based on ethnographic and historical approaches, which highlight issues related to public health, social policy and gender politics. Through the lens of public health, especially, this new scholarship has produced empirical knowledge on the way government rationalities have followed counterintuitive developments in social and political terms.Footnote 20 By discussing the phenomenology of drugs politics and addiction recovery, this book situates itself at the crossroads of these emerging debates. Its objective, rather than simply providing a historical or ethnographic narrative of the phenomenon, is to locate drugs politics within paradigms of government that have unfolded in the post-revolutionary era. This connects to broader critical issues that may be at work in political processes beyond the field of drugs.
The Iranian state has demonstrated unexpected flexibility in relation to these (and other) controversial issues, suggesting that its image as an inherently conservative, reactionary state is not only misplaced and inaccurate, but, in part, a myth. Instead, this book incites for a study of the Iranian state as a modern political machine, whose processes of formation and transformation do not necessarily differ from other, so-called liberal, and neoliberal, cases. Thus, the case of drugs politics brings Iran and the rest of the world closer, highlighting the art of managing disorder as a fundamental taxonomic imperative, which rests upon the use of crisis as a paradigm of government. The art of managing disorder, hence, comes forth as an analytical category for the interpretation of events and phenomena – for instance, corruption, security threats, immigration – which touch upon controversial and ambivalent questions across the Global South and North.
Introduction
In the social sciences, as in any scholarly endeavour, getting used to words is like acquiring a bad habit. And yet the necessity of adopting analytical categories remains paramount in the quest to interpret the world and, for that matter, politics. The history of the social sciences and, particularly, political science, has seen in the category of the ‘state’ a lasting frame of analysis, somehow bestowing on it a mythical unity and encompassing power.Footnote 1 Much of the theoretical gist of the deconstruction of the state is contained in Philip Abraham’s seminal article ‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State’. Abrams proposes to abandon the category of state as a material object altogether and to take it as an ideological object, a ‘unified symbol of an actual disunity’.Footnote 2 It is this inherently multifarious and, at the same time, amorphous feature of the state that begs for an interdisciplinary and process-oriented study of politics.
The usual object of investigation of political science, power, has been transformed by the theoretical contribution of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault’s definition of power as a dynamic and omnipresent relational element contrasted starkly with the classical definitions of power – and the state – as legitimate source of authority. The reluctance of political science to look into other fields of the social to find the political was shaken by Foucault’s methodological and theoretical invitation to read everything. Indeed, Foucault proceeded over the emergence of a study of politics (often not carried out by political scientists) that sought after the political in topoi traditionally prefigured as non-political.Footnote 3 The prison, the clinic, the school and the barracks became institutions entrenched with political value, and marginal categories – the ‘dangerous class,’ or the lumpenproletariat of Karl Marx – entered the scene of analysis. This modus operandi was not simply explicatory, to use Foucault’s phraseology, of the mechanics of power and of the micropolitics of modern societies; its objective was to unearth more general and systemic questions around the state, government and power.
The study of political processes can only be accurate if taken through a historical lens, which captures the movements (however rhapsodic and multi-directional) of different events in time. In other words, genealogy is key to understanding politics and its changes. In genealogical quests, the flow of events may appear as a history of incongruity and discontinuity; it might manifest ‘hazardous and broken trajectories’ proceeding towards what Foucault labelled ‘a barbarous and shameful confusion’.Footnote 4 Yet, it is a close-up analysis of how politics works as a productive force. In our case, it is a genealogy of drugs politics in Iran and its entanglement with crisis and state formation. In that, the narrative falls parallel with Foucault’s invitation to take social, medical and cultural objects as political facts. That is also the case for drugs.
The American political scientist Paul Brass refers to the impact of Foucault’s theories on the study of politics – and the discipline of political science – with his self-explicatory article ‘Foucault Steals Political Science’. While most of the discipline has persevered in applying exogenous categories of analysis in order to re-enhance the taxonomic difference between Western states and the rest of the world, Foucault argued that, no matter the forms authority metamorphosed into, modern states share the trait of being ‘police states’, or in other words, governmental machines of disciplinary mechanisms.Footnote 5 Although one should be aware of Hannah Arendt’s warning that whatever the similarities between totalitarian (or, I dare add, authoritarian) regimes and democracies, their differences remain essential; the depiction of authoritarian states as more or less powerful unitary actors oversimplifies the complexities of processes of political formation. This reduction to a single all-powerful element within the realm of formal politics – the state – or, more recently with the rise of rational choice theory, the transformation into numerical data and statistics of any other material sign of power, has confined the study of multifaceted political phenomena to other disciplines of the social sciences, in primis political anthropology and political sociology.Footnote 6 Not particularly concerned with what disciplinary affiliation this research carries on board, this book discusses drugs through the lens of politics, of state formation and crisis intervention. Drugs as an ideological object remain ultimately tied to political formulations.
The life and history of illicit drugs is symbiotic with that of states. A weakening, a retreat, a dilution of the state is often announced in favour of the emergence of other international, or localised sub-state, forces. The withdrawal of the state manifests, instead, what Beatrice Hibou defined as a form of indirect government, or ‘government at a distance’, whereby processes of privatisation, delegation, outsourcing and devolution of state power are intended not to diminish, but to enhance political control at the expense of other terrains of state intervention, such as welfare, education, health, development and participation.Footnote 7 In this regard, neoliberal forms of bureaucratisation are not fixed, or clearly defined types of administration, but they are ‘a point of entry, a microcosm … around which and within which are played battles for power, [and] are expressed conflicts of legitimacy’.Footnote 8 State forms otherwise inconsistent with each other seem to represent similar modes of government when taken from the perspective of practice, policy and grassroots political developments. That applies also to drugs politics.
Policy analysis, generally, has been understood as ‘a quasi-scientific activity that requires a clinical approach’. Given that, the category of policy has not been interpreted as a political, ideological or hegemonic project, but rather as objects proclaimed in ‘neutral, legal-rational idioms [which] appear to be mere instruments for promoting efficiency and effectiveness’.Footnote 9 Borrowing Steinmetz’s definition, I refer to ‘policy’ as
cultural texts, as classificatory devices with various meanings, as narratives that serve to justify or condemn the present, or as rhetorical devices and discursive formations that function to empower some people and silence others … [as] fundamental organizing principles of society, [which] contain implicit (and sometimes explicit) models of society.Footnote 10
Policies are practices of government that work both along formal institutional lines – for instance, through the mediation and operations of public institutions – and along informal, societal repertoires – such as personal, clandestine connections and everyday public rhetoric.Footnote 11 They are a powerful illustration of how power intervenes and bear ideological and symbolic value. The coherence, effectiveness and, in Foucauldian parlance, disciplinary power of these political technologies (read ‘policies’) should not overstate the state’s capacity to shape the social. Policies are the outcome of multiple scripts, inputs and lines of resistance: they can be produced through pressures from below – in spite of institutional resilience to change – by public officials, academics, NGO activists as well as a multitude of ordinary people.Footnote 12
Health crises, of which drug crises are part, have been moments ‘for the reconfiguration of the role of the liberal [and, I suggest, non-liberal] state’.Footnote 13 The concept of ‘crisis’ is key in framing political initiatives in terms of policymaking as much as in terms of practical intervention. 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. Thence, how does politics diagnose a crisis? And how are social groups, especially marginal ones, treated by political institutions when they are under (invented or material) conditions of crisis? The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that in contemporary governance the use of ‘emergency’ is no longer provisional, but ‘constitutes a permanent technology of government’, and has produced the non-juridical notion of crisis.Footnote 14 It is the engendering of ‘zones of indistinction’ between the law and its practice to which Agamben applies the notion of the ‘state of exception’. In the words of the author himself,
[the state of exception] defines a ‘state of the law’ in which, on the one hand, the norm is in force [vige] but is not applied (it has no ‘force’ [forza]) and, on the other, acts that do not have the value [valore] of law acquire its ‘force’.Footnote 15
The prognosis of crisis is rooted in the modern conceptualisation of politics and the political;Footnote 16 and because crisis operates as a narrative device regulating the framing of the present (or of history), it functions also as an analytical category, a prism of understanding of complex phenomena throughout historical progress. It is therefore a central interpretative category for studying state formation and state–society relations, in the West as much as globally.
Apparatuses (dispositifs) are a key dimension of crisis politics and crisis management. Social service organisations, medical personnel, gangs, charity workers and volunteers, as well as ideological machine and media tools, all embody different forms of apparatuses.Footnote 17 According to the definition, apparatus is a ‘device of population control and economic management composed of disparate elements that coalesce in particular historical conjectures, usually moments identified as “crises”’, composed of ‘discourses, institutions, architectural arrangements, policy decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, moral and philosophical propositions’.Footnote 18 Seen as such, crisis and apparatus live in a symbiotic relation. Crisis justifies the existence of apparatuses, whereas apparatuses give shape to the perception and materialisation of crisis.
This brings us to the subject matter of this book: Because the framing of the ‘drug problem’ has rhetorically and materially produced and reproduced multiple lines of crises – health, social, ethical and political – both globally and locally, an array of different, and often apparently incoherent, apparatuses have emerged over the course of a hundred years.Footnote 19 I shall now consider some of these apparatuses.
Apparatuses: Addiction, Treatment, Harm Reduction
It is an unattainable task to arrive at a definition of ‘drug’ in today’s parlance. Linguistic references are ambiguous and refer to multiple things at the same time; or, perhaps, language is precise enough and the problem lies in the politics of definitions. After all, ‘drug’ in the English language refers to a large variety of ‘substances’, which have, or might not have, therapeutic, alimentary or other psychophysical effects. The use of adjectives such as ‘narcotic’, ‘stimulant’, ‘illicit’ or ‘psychoactive’ is intended to clarify the ethereal nature of words such as drugs and substance. The words drugs and substances can only be temporarily discharged of their ambiguity with the use of an attribute: illicit or illegal. That confirms to us that the nature of drugs in modern societies is inherently political, for drugs are tied to a political classification enunciated through legal means: the prohibitionist regime.
Despite the recent debates about changes in the global policy on illicit drugs – exemplified by cannabis legalisation in Canada, a number of US States, and Uruguay – most of the world’s states adopt rules and regulations which prohibit, limit and outlaw a rather uniform set of substances.Footnote 20 These, to be brief, include, narcotic drugs such as opiates (opium, heroin), cannabis (marijuana, weed, hashish) as well as amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS: ecstasy, MDMA …), hallucinogens (LSD, ‘magic mushrooms’ …) and a set of pharmaceutical products considered controlled substances (methadone, morphine, Ritalin, etc.).
When one studies drugs politics, it becomes inevitable to define a key question about drugs: addiction. It is often considered as a chronic disease by the medical community, which has bolstered this reading within the policymaking community.Footnote 21 However, one could argue, along with Toby Seddon, that addiction is de facto a governmental concept, whose historical roots cannot be traced beyond two hundred years ago.Footnote 22 As a governmental concept, addiction has been instrumental in defining limits of morality regarding public and private behaviour. Individuals develop neurotic, chronic relationships with such different things as food, sex, gambling, internet shopping and any other material or immaterial object.
Drug addiction is a definition with a public life – but weak scientific legitimacy. Public authorities, NGOs, medical and welfare workers use it to refer to a broad spectrum of human situations. I refer interchangeably to this definition of addiction as drug (ab)use. By using the idiom (ab)use, I want to suggest the malleability of the concept of addiction, which is both dynamic and ambiguous. It is a practice deemed problematic, but the boundaries of which are not clearly defined and, as such, leave room for interpretation of what is addiction. Although it is beyond the scope of this book to treat the issues around the definitions of addiction, I invite a look at addiction as a total social fact – un fait social total, as Marcell Mauss would say – that echoes through the legal, economic, religious and individual fabric of life. Footnote 23
When faced with growing complexities of social facts, states react through forms of governmentalisation. Seen through phenomenological forms, by seeing like a state, drugs (ab)use affects and is affected by political transformation.Footnote 24 How do governments treat drug (ab)use? And what does this treatment signify in political terms?
Multiple apparatuses partake in the drug assemblage made of consumption, treatment and punishment. Methadone is a device that illustrates the many dimensions of the assemblage. A synthetic drug first produced in late-1930s Germany, methadone is a substance that mirrors the effect of opiates. Included by the World Health Organisation in the List of Essential Medicines, methadone is a cost-effective substitute of opium, morphine and heroin. For this reason, it is administered in clinics or through other medical facilities, under so-called methadone maintenance treatments (MMT). These programmes administer methadone as a substitute substance to drug (ab)users over a prolonged period, sometimes indefinitely. The introduction of methadone into the technologies of treatment remains nonetheless contested, for methadone induces a strong dependency in the patients. For the medical community, it is considered a pharmaceutical product, a medicine and it is prescribed as such in case of opiate dependency. Among law enforcement agencies (LEAs), however, it has been widely considered as an illegal substance and, indeed, methadone is currently scheduled as a ‘narcotic drug’ under the Single Convention of Narcotic Drugs (1961), the modern regulatory base of international drug control.Footnote 25 Civil society groups supporting abstinence-based treatment (aka ‘cold turkey’) – the most famous being Narcotics Anonymous – cast it as a drug both dangerous and unethical, as do many religious groups that do not make distinction between methadone and other narcotics.Footnote 26 An increasing number of drug (ab)users consume methadone as their primary intoxicant drug, buying it in the illegal market. Supporters of MMT argue that its benefits outdo its harms: by substituting dangerous drugs, such as opium and heroin, with a legal, prescription drug, methadone produces a positive change in drug (ab)users. Yet rather than causing a positive transformation in the medical condition of the drug (ab)user, methadone prevents the subject from entering the world of illegality, with all its obvious harms, the most remarkable of all being, perhaps, the threat of the police and the prison. In fact, its pharmacological effects are similar to heroin and morphine, as is its addictive (dependence inducing) nature. But the normalising effect, the power to transform unruly individuals into ‘docile bodies’, accounts for methadone’s status as a privileged technology of government, beside its cost-effectiveness given that methadone remains a relatively inexpensive product. Often labelled as ‘liquid handcuffs’, methadone treatment produces immediate biopolitical effects on its target subjects. By stopping the cravings for narcotic drugs and hooking the patient onto a controlled substance, methadone produces stability and legibility within the disorderly community of drug (ab)users. One should not avoid saying that, for injecting drug users, methadone treatment can prevent the risk of intravenous infectious diseases, notably HIV/AIDS and hepatitis caused by shared needles and paraphernalia. That said, methadone is an apparatus, a technology of government, political in nature and medical in its unwrapping, with underlying political effects. In the words of anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, methadone is ‘a pernicious and intense exercise of biopower, an attempt by a hostile state’ – which after all condemns the use of narcotic drugs – ‘to control unruly misuse of pleasure’ and to ‘reform unproductive bodies’.Footnote 27
But methadone is not the only device in the drug assemblage. Drug policy in general, and treatment technologies in particular, are updated with changing paradigms of government. This does not imply that previously accepted treatment forms are substituted by new models amid political change; more often, it implies a coexistence of multiple forms of treatment technologies that apply at different times, to different political contexts and for different purposes. Coexistence of multiple techniques is the key to the state objective of management of risk. Harm reduction is a case in point. A set of ‘policies, programmes and practices that aim to reduce the harms associated with the use of psychoactive drugs in people unable or unwilling to stop’, harm reduction’s defining features ‘are the focus on the prevention of harm, rather than on the prevention of drug use itself, and the focus on people who continue to use drugs’.Footnote 28 The provision of clean needles and injection paraphernalia – known also as Needle Exchange Programmes (NEPs) – as well as condoms, account for the main, but not exclusive, practices of harm reduction. A highly controversial practice, harm reduction has faced great obstacles since the start of its journey as a public policy approach to drug consumption. Conceived in the 1980s, amidst the HIV epidemic that had struck Europe and North America, harm reduction called for a pragmatic understanding of the public health and welfare challenges represented by people using drugs. Over the years, harm reduction encompassed different ideological strands, which turned it into a spectrum of ideas rather than a clear public policy plan. It included radical harm reduction activism which called for toppling down the prohibition, law enforcement regime against drug users – therefore guaranteeing their rights to safe and protected drug consumption – to state-led forms of harm reduction, which coexist with clearly punitive drug policy. Despite this inconsistency, harm reduction policies have been introduced as a legitimate public policy approach by an increasing number of countries. Initially in Western and Northern Europe, the discourse of harm reduction is currently discussed and considered as a viable policy on drug consumption in several MENA countries. Harm reduction, thus, turns into an apparatus of management of drugs crisis which coexists with apparently incompatible forms of drug control, such as incarceration, police control, forced treatment and prohibition of drug consumption. The Islamic Republic of Iran is among the countries implementing one of the most comprehensive harm reduction strategies at a global level, as explored in Part Two of this book.
Despite harm reduction’s prominence in the public debate around illegal drugs, the most widespread approach to treatment of drug (ab)use remains that of ‘therapeutic communities’ (TCs), which in the context of Iran, are called addiction rehab camps, or simply kamp. Developed in the early 1950s in the United States, this model of treatment reached global diffusion in a matter of decades and today more than sixty-five countries operate TCs. These are centres where people with substance abuse issues refer to kick their habit and find psychological and physiological stability. The spectrum of different activities and philosophies of treatment is great, but detoxification through peer-to-peer support is its defining trait. Based on a democratic, grassroots and participative model of self-help, one of the basic tenets of these communities was the refusal to accept that people with substance-use disorders (addicts – but also, generally, heterodox social categories) need to be institutionalised in formal, hierarchical centres.Footnote 29 The TC method is not uncontroversial. Their ideology espouses strict prohibition. At times, TCs appropriated the violence of state prohibition onto their own treatment of drug (ab)use. Their target continues to be marginal and impoverished individuals, the condition of which is never understood in political, social or economic terms, but exclusively through the prism of their medical(ised) condition, addiction. In Chapter 7, I provide an ethnographic analysis of how these centres work and how they reproduce a grassroots government of the drug crisis that is in tune with state interests.
Dealing with Data: Allegories, Disorders, Methods
Apparatuses work on multiple levels, in the micropolitical dimension as much as in the realm of discourse and ideology. The study of the drug assemblage – and its many apparatuses – demands careful methodological consideration. Methods must uncover how the machine of politics intervenes, in praxis, on illegal drugs. To do so means to subordinate the methods to the questions being studied. The hermeneutic approach I adopted instructed that all situations are complex, but complexities can be dissected and re-ordered through an inductive approach, echoing the multi-vocal dimension of politics.Footnote 30
To start with, I had to make sense of the dissonant statistics, which populated the world of drugs policy. In Iran, statistics as such did not explain the transformation of the drug phenomenon. They remained both static and monolithic, an image of the state itself in its outer mask. After all, it is telling that the official number of drug addicts (mo‘tadan) since the 1979 Revolution up to 2017 had been, unchangeably, 1.2 million, despite the doubling of the country’s population, from roughly forty million to eighty in 2016, and the appearance of new drugs and drug cultures. In 2017, ex abrupto, the Drug Control Headquarters (DCHQ), the umbrella organisation on all illicit drug matters, announced that the number of addicts had reached 2.8 million people.Footnote 31 Before then, state officials themselves had repeatedly and insistently declared that the number of drug addicts was ‘going up’ every year.Footnote 32 It is clear that the numbers do not hold water in this realm.
I situated the statistics and the discourses that emerged from public institutions within a puzzle – the assemblage, one might say – which I then followed throughout my fieldwork. Javier Auyero suggests, ‘scientific objects are conquered in the field’ and often by identifying, tracing and following ‘puzzles, enigmas and paradoxes’.Footnote 33 In the case of Iran, the enigma was the political effect of drugs over the process of (trans)formation of the state after the 1979 revolution. Consequently, this generated a state effect on the phenomenon of drugs. For instance, how did an Islamic Republic secularise its fight against drugs and drug (ab)use? And how did it legitimate and promote controversial programmes of harm reduction (such as needle exchange in prisons and methadone substitution) on a national scale? How can this paradox be followed in the field, given agency, image and voice? What does drugs politics reveal about government and power?
The paradox as such is not a sufficient metaphor, because it does not explain a ‘situation’. That is why I refer throughout the book to another figure of speech to cast light on the case: the oxymoron. The juxtaposition of otherwise apparently (and allegedly) incongruent elements can be explained by the acceptance that reality has (and perhaps must have) an oxymoronic dimension. I observed and studied the subject in the form of an allegory, ‘the art of meaning something other and more than what is being said’.Footnote 34 In fact, where information is controlled and confined or distorted – as in Iran and on Iran and, if there was any doubt, in light of recent revelations of media distortion (e.g. Facebook), also in the West – allegory becomes a prime form of expression and materialisation of events that would otherwise not be coherent.Footnote 35 In this way, I describe and situate how, for instance, the Iranian state could apply severe punishment towards drug (ab)use but at the same time accept a comprehensive system of welfare and public health support for drug (ab)users. This line of inquiry conducted to the art of managing disorder. To understand how to manage disorder instead of disposing order, one needs to tackle a condition that is sharp and foolish at the same – an oxymoron – the image aptly fitting the situation through which the drug war in Iran – and differently elsewhere – is reproduced.
From a practical point of view, I adopted a variety of methodological tools in carrying out this project. One of the most conventional ways of expanding research data is that of interviewing stakeholders. I decided to do so, aware, however, of the limits that the Iranian political context put in front of researchers. Government officials need their superiors’ approval before any declaration to a national or foreign researcher. It also did not seem the best strategy on qualitative grounds; public officials and state representatives have a bureaucratic tendency to reproduce the official position of the state, about which I was all too aware given also my rich archive of public declarations in the newspapers. To gain fresh insight from state representatives I needed to be accepted as a member of the drug policy community – an endeavour that fell naturally in my academic profile. My connection with the UNODC proved instrumental. As an intern at the office in Tehran, I participated in meetings with many officials from the various ministries, the DCHQ, NGO workers and medical advisors. As a prohibitionist organisation, the UNODC has enjoyed positive relations, compared to other international agencies, with the Iranian government, a fact that helped my integration into the drug policy community. As an Oxford doctoral student, I was received with respect and my views were taken more seriously than I probably deserved. Between 2013 and 2017, I participated in drug policy conferences in Tehran (Addiction Science Conferences), Beirut (MENAHRA conferences), Bogotá and Rome (ISSDP Conferences) where many of Iran’s drug policy scholars and policymakers took part. By that time, I was an active member of this community, I was included in the selective mailing list and newsletters, including the social media venues (i.e. Telegram app) in which issues where often debated. In other words, I developed a certain familiarity with the people who I wanted to interview, a fact that I believe positively shaped the exchange of information.
The core of my personal archive for this research, however, is represented by a collection of newspaper articles, reports, official documents, unpublished material and images dating between 1978 and 2015. It also includes around three thousand articles in Persian from leading national newspapers (Iran, Kayhan, Resalat, Jomhuri-ye Eslami, Etela‘at, Jam-e Jam, E‘temad-e Melli, Sharq, but less systematically also others) published in Iran over that period.Footnote 36 I capitalised on a peculiarity of the Iranian press: newspapers have a tendency to report direct quotes and declarations of political agents, experts, civil society groups and representatives of the government; at times, a dialogue becomes visible between diverging views that can be read through the press, in different locations. Not only does this feature enable us to follow the allegory of the drug phenomenon in the public discourse, it also facilitates the ethnographic use of newspapers, especially when political debates are grounded in state intervention in the field. Content analysis and deconstruction were central in this process.
Familiarity with the UNDOC office put me in a privileged position in finding technical material on drug policy programmes implemented or discussed in Iran between 1999 and 2015. I had the opportunity to read internal reports, unpublished and published statistics, and communications between the Iranian ministries, the DCHQ and the UN office as well as international reports. The publications of the DCHQ also proved an important source for data on policy implementation, as well as a rich and readily available collection of proposals, views and ideas about drug policy.
As I was conducting fieldwork in Iran, I learnt and tuned my skills as an ethnographic observer/participant, educating myself in the arts of immersion, mimesis, and ‘thick description’ in/of the field.Footnote 37 I convinced myself that I had reached an acceptable level of ethnographic immersion, when, while visiting a drop-in centre (DIC: a centre which provides low-threshold support to drug users) in southern Tehran, the psychologist with whom I had spoken on the phone mistook me for a homeless drug user and started interrogating me with the ordinary questions, in a dismissive tone. I found myself in the position for long enough to be immersed in the role I was mistakenly given – thus gaining original insight in what it means to be a drug user in that part of the city – before taking out my business card with the Oxford logo and handing it to the very embarrassed doctor. Mimesis and immersion can be of great value – and reward – in the field.
In my ethnographic fieldwork, which focused on the presence/latency of the state rather than individual subjects, I visited and worked in multiple sites, as opposed to the traditional ethnographic experience that tends to restrain the research to a community, a village, or a setting. Political ethnographies, in fact, need to be multi-sited for the simple reason that politics has no clear boundaries and the processes that produce the political are often not confined to an office, a ministry, a group of individuals or a certain geographical area. They are uncontained and uncontainable. Conference venues have been a surprisingly telling site of observation and participation of ethnographic narratives. There, given the participation of officials of the state, civil society groups, activists, medical experts and advisors, as well as international guests and organisations, I followed the people and the allegory of ‘drugs/addiction’ in the public display of opinions among speakers.
More narrowly ethnographic was my experience as observer/participant in therapeutic communities (TCs), generally referred to in Persian as camp. They number in the thousands and did not allow me a systematic coverage. Nonetheless, I attempted to visit as many as I could, multiple times, and to be attentive to the different type, geographical location and gender. Overall, I personally visited fifteen camps. As for female treatment camps, they represented a harder site of fieldwork as access is often denied or restricted to female visitors. Yet, I had the opportunity to access a female treatment camp half a dozen times. Although this represents a single case, I made sure to compare the observations that I had in the female camp with that of other sources, including newspapers, reports, and accounts of women who have been interned in other camps.
Conclusions
This Introduction is an analytical compass to aid in reading the book. Here, I situated interpretative categories such as oxymoron, assemblage, crisis, state formation, drugs, addiction and harm reduction. I also provided a synthetic description of the means I used to carry out fieldwork in Iran and on the ways research was done on the sensitive subject of drugs (ab)use. History and ethnography were two guiding tools in deconstructing drugs politics and its ‘crisis’ in modern Iran. A set of questions guided the discussion: what is the effect of crisis on the (Iranian) state and its formation? And how does crisis operate throughout different regimes of power and in different political environments? How to study politics in practice rather than on formal grounds?
The book assesses the potential of crisis as an idiom (and time) for reform. Crisis, it seems, produces responses that can be understood and explored in the form of assemblage. By deconstructing the drug phenomenon into its multiple parts – repression, treatment and make-believe worlds – the book discusses the way power and politics went through remarkable and unexpected transformations amidst crises. The case in point is limited, but at the same time, is one that falls at the crossroads of key institutional and societal axes. Drugs as epiphenomenon of state-society unfold the challenges that government and political orders face when the crisis acquires multiple faces – medical, ethical, security and social – in that the drug crisis remains an ultimately political fact, whereby all responses are produced, in nuce, through a political scheme.
While countries bolstering a secular, technically oriented paradigm of government, such as the United States, Russia and China, have regularly adopted a moralising – even religious – approach to drug policymaking, the clerical and political establishment in the Islamic Republic of Iran has felt at ease with the scientific, medical and technical lexicon of drug policy. Both can be affiliated to two diverging aspects of contemporary governmentality, often labelled as neoliberal: the increasing religious, moralising approach to social questions (e.g. Pentecostalism in the United States; Christian Orthodoxy in Russia) and the dominance of technical experts and knowledge on social problematiques, as in the case of Iran.Footnote 38
A fundamental demystification needs to be done regarding the study of drugs politics. Dominated by a highly ideological and distorted debate, drugs are used as a public enemy to discredit opponents or to indicate something standing outside all moral boundaries. Ironically, the subject of drugs shares its status of anathema – especially in the West – with that of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is telling that both drugs and Iran have been labelled as evils against which the righteous should move in combat. At a time of epochal changes in international drug policy and Iran’s place in the world (dis)order, this double demystification, I believe, is a worthwhile endeavour.
The failure of security responses to the drug problem – across the globe – has become an unshakable datum among scholars of drug policy. Toby Seddon points out that ‘it is very difficult to study drug policy for any length of time without coming to the conclusion eventually that the prohibition paradigm is fatally flawed’.Footnote 39 It is with this in mind that one can say the study of politics has become such that no scholar who studies it for any length of time can deny that the discipline craves for an interdisciplinary, fieldwork-oriented engagement, and is in search of topoi that have hitherto been regarded as the turf of others, lest it be complacent and complicit with the current state of affairs.Footnote 40 It seems that in research, as sometimes in everyday life, trespassing is key to any advancement.Footnote 41
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