RevDem Podcast · Review of Democracy

Carceral Politics: “Public Life” of Prisons in Modern Iran and Beyond

·46 min·3 clips

Drug charges, Tehran sweeps, and Kahrizak link ordinary prisoners to political detainees.

Anubha Anushri opens by introducing Gulnar Nikpur and the argument of her book, which places modern prisons inside a wider history of public life in Iran. Nikpur insists that incarceration should not be divided into separate stories for the global South and the global North. She treats that split as misleading. She argues that there is a political, moral, and historical urgency in seeing those categories as more connected than they are usually described. The conversation then turns to the 2000s in Iran, where sweeps of poor and under-housed neighborhoods in Tehran brought many people into a new carceral space. Nikpur describes those sweeps as the criminalization of poverty. Kahrizak becomes a central example. She explains that it had dire and inhumane conditions, but it was not widely visible on the global human rights circuit at first because incarcerated dissidents had not yet been held there. That changed a few years later, when it was used during the 2009 Green Movement uprising in Iran. At that point, protesters were held there en masse. Some died in custody. Nikpur uses that sequence to show how the state can apply similar techniques to different vulnerable populations. In one setting, the target is the poor and under-housed. In another, it is political dissidents. That comparison matters to her argument. It reveals what the government itself sees as a political problem. It also shows how repression can move across social groups while still operating through a shared carceral logic. The host briefly raises Saeed Rostai's 2019 film, and the exchange widens into a broader reflection on prisons and public life. Nikpur does not treat prisons as a narrow legal issue. She treats them as part of the larger political structure through which modern life is organized. The discussion keeps returning to the question of who is considered worthy of advocacy. Nikpur challenges the idea that only some prisoners belong inside the classic human rights frame. She pushes for a broader politics that can see how punishment, poverty, and dissent are linked. The tone stays measured throughout. The argument is built carefully, with each example feeding the next. Historical context is not decoration here. It is the method. Nikpur repeatedly returns to the need for comparative thinking, because comparison helps explain how state violence travels across settings. The conversation moves between contemporary crisis and deeper history without rushing the connection. That gives the episode its shape. It is less a summary of events than an attempt to build a more expansive vocabulary for prisons, vulnerability, and political life. The closing turns toward the unresolved question of what comes after those institutions. Nikpur does not pretend to have a final answer. She frames the book as a way to think historically about the present and to leave the larger political question open.

As heard by us

A patient, searching look at prisons as public power, from Tehran outward.

Review of Democracy uses a prison conversation to widen the frame on Iran, and it does so without losing the ground under it. Gulnar Nikpur moves between poor neighborhoods, protest crackdowns, and the language of human rights, keeping the episode tied to carcerality and the…

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Why you'd press play

You want prisons, poverty, and protest in the same frame.

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