Description
The parameters of punishment and justice in the war crimes trial of Hamid Nouri in a domestic Swedish court, failed to include the insights of a diverse population of Iranians and represent different approaches to reckoning with the past, even international ones. The exclusion of marginalized people from international human rights struggles is nothing new (Allain, 2004; McCann, 2013; Mokhtari, 2023). I argue in this article that an anti-carceral feminist view is missing in Iranian feminism(s), despite the presence of an anti-carceral archive in post-1979 Iran. Relying on an anti-carceral feminist lens requires pushing the boundaries of the singular, and insisting on the inclusion of feelings, experiences and knowings that escape the law, but undergird how marginalized people think about their own liberation. This article shows that there are strong anti-feminist trends when implementing Iranian criminal justice transnationally. This is due to the entanglement of Iran’s carceral and human rights imagination with the exclusivist and exclusionary international governing system (Mokhtari, 2023; Nikpour, 2021). Work across the domestic and international divide in human rights and criminal justice, serves as a mechanism to garner popular support through practices of care and politicization of femininity by non-elite women inside Iran (Osanloo, 2009; Saeidi, 2022).
