Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper theorizes "anti-policy" not as a failure of governance, but as a modality of power. Ethnographic data from Iran's disability bureaucracy reveals how 'governing through chaos'—via procedural absurdity and infrastructural failure—produces a politics of suspension and exhaustion.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on an ethnography of Iran's welfare bureaucracy, this paper argues that what Shore and Wright term "anti-policy"—decisions made arbitrarily and incoherently—is not an anomaly, but a central logic of statecraft.

My analysis begins with a material artifact: a tactile paving for the blind in a local welfare office that leads directly to a closed wall. This "crooked line" serves as a metaphor for a system that operates not through rational implementation, but by governing through chaos. In this modality, the state's failure to create coherent, rights-based policy is not a weakness; it is the very mechanism that grants it power.

I demonstrate how this 'anti-policy' approach—manifested in floating budgets and strategic inaction—generates a "Politics of Suspension." This is not a grand conspiracy, but an emergent logic where systemic fragmentation becomes a resource for governance. By rendering the law perpetually present on paper but absent in practice, the bureaucracy traps citizens in what I call the 'administered life': an exhausting struggle waged through personalized negotiations with street-level bureaucrats. This shifts the political terrain from collective rights-claims to tactical, relational bargaining.

Ultimately, this paper contributes to the anthropology of policy by showing that "anti-policy" is not merely an "anti-politics machine." In contexts of scarcity and fragmentation, it is a durable technology of rule. The system sustains itself not despite its chaos, but precisely through it, transforming bureaucratic failure into a tool for demobilizing dissent and producing an exhausted, yet governable, populace.