Lse Middle East Centre Podcasts

This event, with research drawn from Dr. Golnar Nikpour's book manuscript 'The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran', examined the making of the carceral state in modern Iran. Until the turn of the 20th century, prisons were virtually nonexistent in Iran. Even by the 1920s, as the first modern prison network was being built in central Tehran, there were only a few hundred detainees being held by the centralising Pahlavi government. By the eve of the 1979 revolution, that number had ballooned to approximately 20,000 detainees. Now, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, there are at least a quarter of a million detainees being held in 268 official jails and prisons. How and why did this extraordinary transformation and expansion occur? How did Iranians come to understand their increasingly policed and punished social worlds? What does Iran’s penal history tell us about the expansion of prisons across the world? Golnar Nikpour is Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth University. Nikpour is a