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Cette étude reprend la notion d'« état d'exception » énoncée par Giorgio Agamben et la revisite dans le cadre du système politique de la République islamique d'Iran, généralement considérée comme un État autoritaire par les observateurs occidentaux. Dans ce pays, la catégorie de crise a été pourvue d'un statut juridique par l'institution de la notion de maslahat , « intérêt », interprétée au croisement de l'exégèse théologique chiite et de l'État moderne. Dès lors, la crise n'a pas abouti à la production formelle d'un « état d'exception », selon le raisonnement d'Agamben. Depuis la fin des années 1980, une institution, le Conseil de discernement de l'intérêt de l'ordre politique, est spécifiquement dédiée à la gestion des crises identifiées par les autorités. La mobilisation de cette catégorie a permis d'éviter l'installation de points aveugles du pouvoir législatif – et donc du droit – qui auraient créé une zone d'indistinction dans la formation de l'État. Le Conseil prend en effet en charge les domaines d'ambigüité où l'application « normale » – et normative – de la loi ne peut s'exercer. Compte tenu du fait que les États prétendus illibéraux sont souvent considérés comme ne respectant pas les droits individuels et collectifs, il ne s'agit pas là d'une disposition mineure de l'État iranien. Cette étude entend ouvrir de nouvelles perspectives pour la compréhension des phénomènes politiques à travers la déconstruction et la théorisation de la politique de crise.

The drug assemblage -- A genealogy of drug politics : opiates under the Pahlavi -- Drugs, revolution, war -- Reformism and drugs : formal and informal politics of harm reduction -- Crisis as an institution : the expediency council -- The anthropological mutation of methamphetamines -- The maintenance of disorder -- Drugs and populism : Ahmadinejad and grassroots authoritarianism -- Epilogue : power, crisis, drugs.

The article explores the effect of the covid-19 epidemic on politics in Iran. It asks how people's organisation and transformative experiences can counter forces and phenomena such as the current epidemic. The article reflects upon the extant and emergent potentialities of the current situation, imagining trajectories from the presence to the coming life in the post-epidemic future. The article is organised in the following sections: firstly, it provides an overview of the unfolding epidemic crisis in Iran to familiarise readers with the existing conditions and structures, including the effect of geopolitical constraints such as US-led sanctions and domestic models of crisis management. It then looks at how crises and health crises in particular destabilise the framework of interaction between power and people, and how this can be remodelled through the technologies of trust (such as vaccines and medical practice) that become essential to the continuation of political and social life. Within this frame, the article analyses how the epidemic produced and continues to shape forms of social organisation and cultural praxis, which originate from the mobilisation of solidarity and mutual help networks. These include an array of categories that have the potential to set the ground for a new sense of community amidst impeding crisis, counterpoising the high-tech, authoritarian vision of grand solutions to the crisis with a low-tech mobilisation and human-centred vision. Finally, the objective is to inquire into the potentialities of a politics of solidarity and hope and its counter-values of demoralisation, fear and desperation. This is what the article elaborates as the 'pedagogy of the virus', a cognitive and practical journey resulting from the concurrence of crises in health/politics, whereby ordinary people learn to (re)enact organisation and community to change everyday life amidst societal and political disruption.

How can we conceive alternative policy models that embrace the empirical potentialities emerging from the lifeworld of drugs? The article reflects on this question, concluding that to reassess and to reinvent current policies on drugs, we need to think with a political ontology. Incidentally, the article also responds to the critique dismissing ontological inquiries as obstructing – or, at best, not informing – alternative drug policies. In an archaeological approach inspired by the work of Giorgio Agamben, the article unearths the case study of opium maintenance programme in Iran (1969–79), a forgotten policy experiment in an understudied and yet crucial geo-cultural environment for the global study of drugs. Mobilising the conceptual framework of ontological journeys, the article recomposes the lifeworld of opium within the horizons of transformative cultural practices, international borders, policy regimes and public ethics. Here, the materiality of drug consumption under the maintenance policy links with the changes in opium's transnational political economy and with shifting regimes of health and bioethical orthodoxy. Ontological journeys, hence, develop in a fluid space and time, making it possible to illuminate the lifeworld of drugs in places and times hitherto deserted by global policy studies. In building theoretical reflections upon a non-Western case, the article also incites the possibility of theory beyond Eurocentric knowledge and Euromerican cases. In this way, the article's purpose is to analyse the be-coming of opium beyond 'good' or 'evil', as a 'medicine' or a 'drug' and its real or perceived classification as 'licit' or 'illicit' across the Afghan-Iranian border. In conclusion, the article reflects upon the significance of this forgotten policy experiment, understood as an ontological journey, for contemporary drug policy and drug studies, but also for reinventing notions of care, welfare and health.

Iran has largely abandoned its hard-line policies and now treats drug abuse as a public health problem. Why is it so hard for other nations to renounce their costly embrace of prohibition?

Cet article porte sur les drogues illégales en Iran, au xx e et au xxi e siècle, et sur leur impact sur la société iranienne. Il tente d'analyser le rapport entre les drogues et l'espace public, les classes sociales et la classe politique, et pose la question suivante : quelle est l'influence de la drogue sur les différentes dimensions de la société iranienne ? Dans quelle mesure peut-on parler des effets de la drogue sur la gestion urbaine ? Afin de répondre à ces questions, cet article se base sur une analyse de l'évolution de ce phénomène, la drogue, d'un point de vue historique et géographique au cours du xx e et xxi e siècle en Iran. C'est le résultat d'un travail ethnographique réalisé entre 2012 et 2018, au sein de la capitale, Téhéran. Ce travail est constitué d'entretiens avec des leaders de la lutte antidrogue, des experts, des employés municipaux, des membres d'ONG et des consultants, et se base également sur une immersion dans le monde des consommateurs de drogue. Cette approche ethnographique repose également sur des recherches aux Archives nationales, au centre d'archives Majles et au Bureau de surveillance de la drogue et du crime de Téhéran, et ses trois mille documents, portant sur la période 1900-1979.

The article provides an ethnographic study of the lives of the 'dangerous class' of drug users based on fieldwork carried out among different drug using 'communities' in Tehran between 2012 and 2016. The primary objective is to articulate the presence of this category within modern Iran, its uses and its abuses in relation to the political. What drives the narration is not only the account of this lumpen, plebeian group vis á vis the state, but also the way power has affected their agency, their capacity to be present in the city, and how capital/power and the dangerous/lumpen life come to terms, to conflict, and to the production of new situations which affect urban life.

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.