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Paper short abstract

This paper theorizes anti-policy as governing through chaos: not disorder as collapse, but rule through incomplete promises. Ethnographic scenes from Iran’s disability bureaucracy show how suspended access and procedural absurdity keep rights visible yet unresolved, producing exhaustion.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Iran’s welfare bureaucracy, this paper rethinks what Shore and Wright call “anti-policy” not as the absence of policy or failure of implementation, but as a durable policy form. I understand this as governing through chaos: not as institutional collapse, but as a governable condition produced through incomplete promises.

The paper begins with a tactile paving route for blind citizens in a local welfare office. The line promises accessibility: policy has been imagined, funded, installed, and displayed. Yet following it reveals that access remains unreliable, dependent on assistance, and practically unresolved. I read this “crooked line” as an incomplete promise materialized on the floor.

In Iran’s disability bureaucracy, similar promises appear in laws, budgets, digital portals, eligibility categories, and service procedures. Rights are present on paper and in administrative forms, but their realization is deferred, displaced, or made conditional: not yet, not here, not without another document, not before the budget arrives, not unless someone follows up.

Through scenes of suspended access, procedural absurdity, and frontline improvisation, I show how bureaucratic disorder becomes governable. This is not a grand conspiracy, but an emergent logic in which fragmented rules, unstable budgets, broken infrastructures, and deferred implementation redistribute policy’s incompletion onto disabled citizens and street-level bureaucrats.

The paper argues that anti-policy is not merely an anti-politics machine. In contexts of scarcity and fragmentation, it becomes a technology of rule that keeps rights visible but unresolved, redirecting collective claims into waiting, negotiation, exhaustion, and keeping access barely possible.