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Paper short abstract

Focusing on Afghan refugees turned war-injured veterans, this paper shows how caregiving families seek justice after the Syrian war through tazallom bordan, a form of moral claim-making at the limits of law in their host country, Iran.

Paper long abstract

This paper reframes victim-centred renditions of postwar justice by following Hazara Afghan refugees in Iran. It examines the 'homecoming' of Afghan refugee veterans who, after fighting in Syria under Iran’s command, returned injured to neighbourhoods in Iran. It focuses on their ambiguous status as refugees who fought for their host country, and their efforts to seek justice amid dynamics of post-war non-recognition and misrecognition.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in one low-income district since 2015, I ask how wounded veterans and their caregiving families pursue justice when legal pathways are unstable or foreclosed. I show that caregivers seek redress through what they call 'tazallom bordan' in effort to present one’s grievance to a superior authority. More than a juridical petition, tazallom is an existential appeal born of deprivation. Where law tallies rights, tazallom seeks recognition of moral responsibility and insists on being seen and heard. It resembles what Kristin Doughty (2016:21) calls a 'legal architecture of social repair' through grassroots forums, yet it stands outside legal debate and emphasises moral claim-making. In practice, tazallom is not litigiousness, but an effort to render domestic hardship in the state’s grammar of recognition.

Situating tazallom bordan as a politics of postwar recovery and a struggle for non-humanitarian care at the limits of law, the paper argues that war wounds serve not simply as evidence of victimhood, but as a contested resource through which refugee families seek recognition and an owed place in the moral economy of the host state.