Maziyar Ghiabi – författare

The horizon of emancipatory politics is in ruins, scarred by defeats and ongoing conflicts. Under the auspices of technocapitalist elites and their political allies, a reactionary turn tightens its grip on the world. Civil wars and regional conflicts are surging. The Middle East has become the regional laboratory for a global reconfiguration of power.States Without People explores how revolts that preceded the outbreak of war have fostered a right-wing political culture. In a nuanced discussion of the defeat of popular revolts and the rise of mythological politics, hypermilitarism, and ethnosupremacism, Billie Jeanne Brownlee and Maziyar Ghiabi take readers into the phenomenological depths of citizen politics in Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Egypt, across the Arabian Peninsula, and beyond. The book highlights three pivotal moments: the outbreak and defeat of popular revolts, the ensuing civil wars, and the complex displacement that has forced millions from their homes.States Without People advances a paradigm shift in state–citizen relations from the vantage point of the Middle East. In the state without people, there is no ideological space for a heterogeneous or self-contradictory citizenry – only for partisans, whose interests overlap with the state’s, and for enemies.

More than a hundred years have passed since the adoption of the first prohibitionist laws on drugs. Increasingly, the edifice of international drug control and laws is vacillating under pressures of reform. Scholarship on drugs history and policy has had a tendency to look at the issue mostly in the Western hemisphere of the globe or to privilege Western narratives of drugs and drugs policy. This volume instead turns this approach upside down and makes an intellectual attempt to redefine the subject of drugs in the Global South. Opium, heroin, cannabis, hashish, methamphetamines and khat are among the drugs discussed in the contributions to the volume, which spans from Sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia, including the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America and the Indian Subcontinent. The volume also makes a powerful case for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of drugs by juxtaposing the work of historians, political scientists, geographers, anthropologists and criminologists. Ultimately, this edited volume is a rich and diverse collection of new case studies, which opens up venues for further research. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Iran has one of the world's highest rates of drug addiction: estimated to be between 2 and 7 percent of the entire population. This makes the questions that this book asks all the more salient: what is the place of illegal substances in the politics of modern Iran? How have drugs affected the formation of the Iranian state and its power dynamics? And how have governmental attempts at controlling and regulating illicit drugs affected drug consumption and addiction? By answering these questions, Maziyar Ghiabi suggests that the Islamic Republic of Iran's image as an inherently conservative state is not only misplaced and inaccurate, but in part a myth. In order to dispel this myth, he skilfully combines ethnographic narratives from drug users, vivid field observations from 'under the bridge', with archival material from the pre- and post-revolutionary era, statistics on drug arrests and interviews with public officials. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Iran has one of the world's highest rates of drug addiction: estimated to be between 2 and 7 percent of the entire population. This makes the questions that this book asks all the more salient: what is the place of illegal substances in the politics of modern Iran? How have drugs affected the formation of the Iranian state and its power dynamics? And how have governmental attempts at controlling and regulating illicit drugs affected drug consumption and addiction? By answering these questions, Maziyar Ghiabi suggests that the Islamic Republic of Iran's image as an inherently conservative state is not only misplaced and inaccurate, but in part a myth. In order to dispel this myth, he skilfully combines ethnographic narratives from drug users, vivid field observations from 'under the bridge', with archival material from the pre- and post-revolutionary era, statistics on drug arrests and interviews with public officials. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.