Empathy, solidarity, and the work of law and humanitarianism

Abstract

Osanloo offers her book as a longitudinal study (p. 29), explaining that she conducted fieldwork and archival research for the project over a full ten years. In many ways, though, the overall thrust of the descriptions and analyses seem less longitudinal or diachronic than synchronic. I say this because the book is light on historical scaffolding relevant to sociocultural and political (as distinct from narrowly legal) developments in the post-Khomeini era. Readers are not provided a clear sense of how Iran’s juridical field as a whole—or the popular sentiments and dispositions bearing on its various features—may have changed in recent decades (or even over the course of her fieldwork) as a consequence of neoliberal globalization or other dynamics, though Osanloo does make clear that the global circulation of rights talk has resulted in a tempering or “seasoning” of some of the more harsh features of Iranian criminal justice and that “[c]alls for compassion and forbearance pervade daily public life” (p. 11). The issues are important both empirically and theoretically because in many parts of the world (e.g., the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, Chile, Turkey, Egypt, India, China, Malaysia, and the Philippines) processes of neoliberal globalization, like those of democratization and decentralization with which they are sometimes linked, have directly entailed or at least gone hand-in-hand with trends in juridical fields and more encompassing cultural-political (including religious) realms that have been variously characterized as punitive, authoritarian, conservative, and/or illiberal (Pratt et al. 2005; Peletz 2020a, 2020b). One question here concerns the forgiveness work that began to take shape and congeal around the mid-1990s (initially in relation to juvenile offenders), which Osanloo analyzes as unfolding in or comprising a semiautonomous social field in Sally Falk Moore’s (1973) sense. The question is whether developments in these areas, which have many features Foucault (2007) characterized as “pastoral,” constitute a more-or-less quarantined exception either with regard to changes in the more encompassing juridical field or with respect to the relative scope, force, and thrust of “penal populism” (Pratt 2007). (We don’t hear much about fear, anxiety, or panic associated with crime waves, state repression, or the challenges and precarity of everyday life.) Another question, related but analytically distinct, is the extent to which the growth and greater cultural salience of forgiveness work in recent decades may have directly or indirectly informed dynamics in other realms of the juridical field and/or in popular sentiment bearing on the punishment of variously defined transgressions other than murder and rape, especially drug offenses and what are construed as crimes against the state (where forbearance with regard to capital punishment is not an option). This is one area where Bourdieu’s work on social fields, especially juridical fields (Bourdieu 1987), might be more generative than Moore’s notion of the law as a semiautonomous social field, particularly if it is combined with insights gleaned from the literature on “the new punitiveness” (Pratt et al. 2005) and penal populism. More generally, if Iran’s criminal justice system as a whole has become “kinder and gentler”—or at least not significantly more punitive—in recent decades, it would be interesting to hear how and why it has bucked the exceedingly widespread (though not universal) global trends.