This volume’s first set of essays draws together the antecedent of death, the process of dying, and the care, labor, and rituals that constitute deathwork. What can we know of death through understanding the events and experiences preceding and producing it – as transformation or transcendence; as “good” or “bad,” aberration or rupture; a process embedded within a web of relations and imbued with meaning particular to the society or community in which it occurs? How should we theorize about death’s work and those who undertake it? What is the relationship between the “hurt and wounded” and the “soothing hand” that seeks to pacify, and, later, once the body is drained of life, to tend in word and deed?

This book has examined the lives of non-Muslims in Iranian society during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In towns and cities, religious communities often lived in distinct quarters or maintained separate villages on the margins of urban life. Within these spaces, they enjoyed limited autonomy – practicing rituals, constructing temples, and later establishing schools. Beyond these confines, however, they were readily identifiable by clothing, language, and accent, and their interactions with Muslims were constrained by local power structures. Restrictions affected where they could live and work, even as they were paradoxically entrusted with sensitive professions such as banking, moneylending, and goldsmithing. This tension – between trust and suspicion, purity and impurity – shaped broader social attitudes and reinforced their classification as outsiders.

Chapter 5 examines the renegotiation of kinship and gender relations within Tunisia’s post-revolutionary public sphere. Activists across gender and ideological lines confront the persistence of patriarchal discourses that shaped both the 2011 revolution and the subsequent democratic transition up to 2016. Legitimising hierarchy in both private and public spheres. In response, activists work to dismantle traditional filiation and its gendered consequences, seeking new forms of alliance and intimacy. This process challenges dominant conceptions of the Tunisian public and reflects broader efforts to rethink social relations in democratic spaces. Drawing on the anthropology of revolution and democracy which considers both experiences as profoundly social’, the chapter engages with North African scholarship on the intersection of kinship and politics, applying it’s insights to the evolving dynamics of Tunisia’s (post)revolutionary democracy.

This chapter examines 1940s African American poetry, nonfiction, and drama that share tropes of being outside time to explore attitudes on visual and historical representation, national sovereignty, and civil rights. Contextualizing this work between 1920s New Negro literature and 1960s Black Arts Movement literature, it charts changing African American perspectives on the uses of history, the symbolism of apocalypse, and the ever-elusive promises of democracy. The 1940s texts are Melvin Tolson’s Rendezvous with America, Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” Langston Hughes’ The Sun Do Move and “Jim Crow’s Last Stand,” Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, and Roi Ottley’s New World A–Coming. These authors expand global 1940s conversations about colonialism, democracy, and sovereignty to include domestic civil rights in the US, seeking capacious literary and visual means to capture an interconnectedness with Western European artifacts, contrasting both 1920s and 1960s African American texts, which tend more toward spotlighting African American achievement.

Chapter 4 examines the motivations and consequences of religious conversion. It specifically focuses on socioeconomic reasons rather than spiritual motivations. Although most conversions involved embracing Islam, conversions to other faiths also occurred. Using social identity theories by Tajfel and Turner, the chapter argues that conversion is not just a transition between communities but the creation of an ambiguous social space – belonging to both, to neither, or parts of both. Converts often kept ties to their original communities while trying to gain acceptance in their new ones, developing fluid identities to navigate different social worlds. In response, each religious community would reward converts and punish those who left. Rewards included access to resources, inheritance rights, or marriage prospects, while punishments involved public shaming, annulment of marriages, or exclusion from burial rites. The chapter employs Foucault’s concepts of discipline and punishment to analyze these reactions.

This chapter first presents an ideal type of a hybrid regime. This account sees a hybrid regime as a regime that presents itself as a functioning democracy, but in which the incumbent has disproportionate control over the rules of the game. The chapter then identifies points of tension between a hybrid regime’s constitution and the constitution of a good state. It shows that three constitutional features tend to be found in a hybrid regime: rivaling constitutional ideologies of democracy and guardianship; a trifurcated dual state legal order; and two levels of constitutional battle. Along the way, the chapter suggests how these features might impact a constitutional court in a hybrid regime.

This chapter discusses recent developments in the “undoing” of the Valley of the Fallen, Francisco Franco’s most important memorial. After a brief introduction to the complex making of the monument and its multiple frictions with emerging cultures of memory in twenty-first-century Spain, the text focuses on the dismantling of its necropolitical layout. This funerary unmaking is part of a refashioning of the monument in the context of what in Spain is currently called “democratic memory.” Major achievements have already been made: dictator Francisco Franco was exhumed in 2019 and the founder of the Spanish Fascist Party in 2023. In June 2023, after a complicated legal, political, and technical process, an exhumation began in the crypts to search for 180 bodies claimed by relatives, revealing all the contradictions and shadows that still linger in the monument. At the time of writing, sixteen bodies of Republican civilians have already been identified and returned to their families. The chapter is based on a twenty-year multisite ethnography of mass grave exhumations dating back the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). Over time, my research project branched out to include analysis of the memorial conflicts emerging around the Valley of the Fallen.

The chapter argues that courts in hybrid regimes face a legitimacy paradox: An activist court risks attracting backlash from the authoritarian, whereas a deferential court may undermine the trust of a democracy-supporting population. The chapter first lays out the conventional view of perceived legitimacy, including the mechanisms behind it and its utility. The conventional view is premised upon the political dynamics of a democracy; this requires modification in order to be applicable to a hybrid regime. It then takes on this task by introducing a relational angle. An audience-based framework is shown to help us identify the key audiences that are relevant to judicial legitimacy in different regime-types. The audience-based framework is then applied to a hybrid regime to set out the legitimacy paradox. The effects of the paradox are practical, as exemplified by the tensions between the expectations different political actors within a hybrid regime have of a constitutional court. It will be explained how these conflicting expectations create challenges for judicial maneuvering in a hybrid regime.

The Introduction situates the book in its historical time and place and establishes the framework for the chapters that follow. It explains the focus on the period from 1891 to 1911 and shows how debates about the Iranian nation entered public discourse more prominently during and after the Tobacco Movement. The book examines four non-Muslim communities in Iran – Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, and Babis/Bahaʾis/Azalis – and provides a brief overview of their historical presence in the country. The Introduction also analyzes the various names and labels applied to non-Muslim individuals and communities during this period, as well as the meanings and assumptions embedded in these terms. A historiographical section reviews the existing scholarship on the subject before outlining the theoretical approaches that inform the study. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Giorgio Agamben, and James C. Scott, the Introduction briefly presents key concepts used throughout the book, including discipline and punishment, heterotopia, the production of social space, homo sacer, the state of exception, and shatter zones.

In this chapter, we explain the main ideas of the proof of Theorem 4.3.5. This proof has been developed in a series of papers: [LTT18], [HJ17], [LT17], [Sen21], and [LST22].We now explain the history of this theorem. In [LTT18], Lehmann, Tschinkel, and the author proved that the exceptional set for the ainvariant is a proper closed subset assuming the weak BAB conjecture (Corollary 3.5.6).