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Governing through Vice

By Jonathan Simor

Before that, the Basij, including female units, had been used primarily as a kind of vice squad, looking for drug addicts, prostitutes and mostly women but also men wearing immodest dress.Neil MacFarquhar, reporting in yesterday's NYTimes notes that the Basij, the often motorcycle driving "volunteer" militia that have been the shock troops of the Iranian government's violent suppression of Tehran's protests, have their origin in the vast policing of "vice" that goes on in Iranian society. Tactically, this means the government's elite Revolutionary Guard (where most of its recent leaders have come from) is given tremendous capacity to act at the micro-level of society through this extensive network of informants and government agents.That combination means that the military has rather intimate knowledge of the populations of cities and neighborhoods across Iran...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on June 24, 2009 (boomark / email).