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

In this latest conversation with Golnar Nikpour, we discuss her book, The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran (Stanford University Press, 2024). We discuss how modern Iranian prisons illuminate broader questions about political modernity, state formation, and democratic aspiration. The conversation examines the contemporary stakes of the book’spublication and its intervention in debates on authoritarianism, penal reform, and democracy, while probing the author’s concept of the “public life” of prisons as active producers of political subjectivity and belonging. Thedialogue questions the analytical distinction between political and ordinary prisoners, using this to reflect on how societies define the “political” and confront the ethics of incarceration. It also foregrounds the foundational roleof institutions like Qasr prison in shaping Iran’s modern state and explores the transnational circulation of penal ideas that informed Iran’s carceral system. Further, it delves into the tension between secular and religious framings of incarceration, the paradoxes of technocratic reformism andharm-reduction strategies under authoritarian regimes, and the criteria by which the modern Iranian carceral project might be understood as a “failure.”The conversation positions prisons as key sites where democratic hopes, disciplinary projects, and visions of social order converge and collide.