Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran by Shahram Khosravi (review)

Shahram Khosravi’s third book, following Young and Defiant in Tehran (2008) and “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders (2010), explores the precarious lives and social vulnerabilities of Iranian youth. Unlike his first book, which focused exclusively on the urban middle-class, Precarious Lives includes material collected from rural areas, as well as from urban working-class contexts. However, exclusionary practices, the focus of his second book, continue to be a central research theme, this time those within the Iranian nation-state that “discriminate and exclude young people who do not fit the authorized forms of life” (3). These discriminating practices, and the intra-social borders they produce, result in multiple precarities, including economic uncertainty, fear of physical violence, and alienation. The underlying cause of these developments is discussed as the outcome of neoliberal ideas and practices that have entered Iranian politics, society, and the economy in the past two decades.

Khosravi dovetails his focus on the production of precarity in Iranian society with an ethnography of hope, arguing that the discriminating practices producing precarity also impact “how the potentialities of a better future are distributed” (14). The structurally less privileged who have few reasons for hope—like middle-class youth, women, rural-urban migrants, and young working-class urban men—respond to their disheartening situations with practices by which they (ostensibly) generate hope. These practices, Khosravi argues, amount to acts of citizenship by which people “claim their right to make prospects for a better future possible,” making the “right to hope” a basic political right (15). By conjoining an analysis of precarity with a study of practices of hope as an attempt to assert citizenship and political rights, the author, following the work of Jacques Rancière on the “politics of aesthetics and the distribution of the sensible” (2004 (2010), seeks to portray his actors, and Iranians in general, as having agency to renegotiate the socio-political order by making themselves heard and seen. Moreover, this joint focus on precarity and hope aims to circumscribe what in Khosravi’s view are the paradoxes and ambivalences that characterize everyday life in Iran.

The well-written introduction succinctly outlines the argument of the book and presents its theoretical framework, which is inspired by Ernst Bloch’s work on hope as a product of repetition and replication (1996, also Miyazaki 2004) and by Jacques Rancière’s work on politics and aesthetics (2004 (2010). Noteworthy is how the author establishes connections to developments experienced by Iran with similar ones in other parts of the world, a welcome comparative perspective. The introduction also candidly discusses the methodological and political difficulties of research on and writing about Iran. Not only was it challenging to conduct field research without a permit or links to Iranian research institutions, but in writing the monograph, Khosravi was also challenged by commonplace representations of Iranians and Iranian society in journalistic accounts and other public discourse that is either Iranophobic or victimizes, and therefore denies agency to, the Iranian people. The discussion of this conundrum of representation (21–22) is key to understanding how he later interprets his ethnographic material and crafts his overall account of contemporary social practices amongst Iranian youth.

Chapter 1 presents a sociological account of the crisis of the Iranian family, which until the Revolution provided marginalized youths with material and psychological support, buffering their precarity. This crisis is contextualized in political and economic developments since 1979, including, for example, the socio-political fissures cross-cutting and dividing many families, economic pressures resulting from war and sanctions, mass emigration, and discriminatory policies and practices targeting women. Various social problems like rising divorce rates, rampant domestic violence, and drug abuse have followed. This, Khosravi argues, has set the stage for governmental practices endeavoring to maintain an Islamic order that rests on the pious, patriarchal nuclear family, practices that ultimately contribute to the pathologization, criminalization, and precarization of youth, which is the topic of the following chapter.

In Chapter...