Monographs
This is the first comprehensive study on the politics of drugs in Iran. It shows how and why Iranian authorities experimented on drugs and addiction policy prior to and after the revolution. It explores the dynamics determining the Islamic Republic’s transition from a punitive to a public health-oriented policy on drugs.
Edited Volumes
This edited volume is the outcome of the two-day symposium sponsored by a Wellcome Trust Small Grant in 2016. It brings together several leading scholars of drug studies from various disciplinary backgrounds and different area studies, triggering a redefinition of our ways of understanding drugs.
Peer-reviewed articles
This article studies ‘crisis’ within the Iranian political order. It argues that it is neither the government nor the Supreme Leader that intervenes in situations of ‘crisis’. Taking the case of public health crises, it shows that it is an ad hoc institution, the Expediency Council, that governs crisis.
The article is an ethnographic study of the lives of the ‘dangerous class’ of drug users based on fieldwork carried out among different drug using ‘communities’ in Tehran between 2012 and 2016. It is one of the first ethnographies of addiction in Middle East, inspired by Philippe Bourgois’s research.
The article engages with the question of medical cannabis in the legal interpretation of religious authorities in the Islamic world, focusing on Iran. It is the result of a direct engagement with leading religious authorities. The authors redacted a list of eight questions about the status of cannabis.
This article provides an example for studying public policy through ethnographic methods. It takes the case of Iran’s policy with regard to addiction treatment. It is based on participant observation with health and policy officials, NGOs working in treatment settings and informal rehabilitation ‘camps’ for drug users.
This article revisits the scholarship that emerged in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’ and reassesses some of its shortcomings, proposing alternative ways of engaging with social mobilisation through interdisciplinary methods. It is a collaboration with an Exeter scholar in Middle East politics, therefore combining empirical research (Brownlee) with theoretical formulations (myself).
A historical study of the impact of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 on Iran’s drug problem, the article uses untapped archival material, showing how the anti-narcotic impulse of the 1980s was guided by anti-imperialist concerns rather than religious ideas. It won the Best Article Prize at Oxford in 2013.
Chapters in edited books
Ghiabi, M., ‘Deconstructing the Islamic Bloc: The Middle East and North Africa and Pluralistic Drug Policy’. In Stothard and Klein, Collapse of the global order on drugs? From UNGASS 2016 to the High Level Review 2019. London: Emerald, 2018, pp. 167-189.
The chapter is part of an edited volume which discusses the developments in global drug policy ahead of the UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs. My contribution looks at the different drug policy regimes in the Middle East and North Africa, focusing on the potentials for public health-oriented reforms.
This is historical research into the policies with regard to opiates in pre-revolutionary Iran (1925-1979). The chapter is part of an edited volume on the global history of Pahlavi Iran, showcasing aspects of its social, medical, economic and political life in the increasingly globalised world of the 20th century.