The everydayness of spectacle violence under the Islamic Republic: ‘Fire at will’

Abstract

On 17 June 2017, Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, called on pro-regime vigilantes to ‘fire at will’ or to act on their own discretion in putting the state’s Islamic teaching into practice without the need to consult either their superiors or the relevant authorities. Our article argues that, since 1979, the policy of ‘firing at will’ has been the defining feature of the Islamic Republic’s model of governance and corresponds to the spirit of its constitution. Inspired by the scholarship on disciplinary policies, this article seeks to contextualize the ‘firing at will’ policy within the ethno-religious and racial discourse embodied in and warranted by the Islamic Republic’s constitution. Finally, by discussing the state’s violent treatment of Kurdish kolbers (cross-border laborers), we will show how the Iranian state’s internal colonial policies have engendered a state of exception and normalized the daily spectacle of violence in Eastern Kurdistan.

Blood for bread: Necro‐labor, nonsovereign bodies, and the state of exception in Rojhelat

“…The regime sees Rojhelat as a place of resistance where its unitary nation-state discourse has historically failed and continues to be undermined. Therefore, the Iranian state employs kolberi as a powerful instrument of governmentality to constantly remind the Kurds of their restricted agency by exposing their bodies to systematic violence and punishment, ensuring that Kurdish bodies will conform to the desired political and discursive racialization (see Soleimani and Mohammadpour, 2023).…”

“…Mbembe extends Foucault's concept of biopower and Agamben's concept of state of exception, arguing that sovereign power also exercises its right to kill and create “death‐worlds” where people live as if they were dead. He criticizes Foucault and Agamben for being Eurocentric and failing to capture the complex dynamics of sovereign power in non‐Western contexts, where biopolitics is shaped by language, religion, and identity (see also Soleimani and Mohammadpour, 2023). This approach has garnered considerable scholarly attention and application, especially in non‐Western contexts, such as Latin America (see Emerson, 2019) and Palestine (Mbembe, 2003), when studying marginalized communities based on ethnicity, religion, and gender differences (Bailey & Mobley, 2018; Chakraborty, 2021; Islekel, 2022).…”

“…The constitution enables the arbitrary treatment of the citizen and governance through the principle of “firing at will,” a political concept drawn from a 2019 speech by the supreme leader in which he called upon the security forces to use whatever force necessary to crush the opponents of the “sacred system” (see Soleimani and Mohammadpour, 2023). This arbitrary interpretation of law and the deployment of violence against the ethnic other has generated a Gramscian common sense that legitimates the right to kill, allowing the state to maintain the strategy of “annihilating difference,” in Hinton's (2002) words.…”