Affective Resistances
Introduction
Biography of Chowra Makaremi
Chowra Makaremi is a CNRS tenured researcher in the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris.
She has worked on migration controls and border governance in Europe, based on an ethnography of border detention. She has coordinated several research collectives on these topics, including Enfermés dehors. Enquête sur le confinement des étrangers (Le Croquant, 2009) with C. Kobelinsky, and Entre accueil et rejet. Ce que les villes font aux migrants (Le Passager clandestin, 2018) with V. Bontemps and S. Mazouz. She co-wrote a graphic novel based on her PhD dissertation : Prisonniers du passage (with Matthieu Parciboula, Steinkis 2019)
Since 2011, she has been working on the Iranian revolution of 1979, the genealogy of the Islamic Republic and the question of state violence, based on an ethnography of archives. She led the ERC research program OFF-SITE: Violence, State formation and memory politics: an off-site ethnography of post-revolution Iran.
In 2019, she directed the movie Hitch. An Iranian Story (Alter Ego, France, 78 min.). He publications include: Aziz's Notebook at the Hearth of the Iranian Revolution (Gallimard, 2011/Yoda Press 2014) ; with Hannah Darabi Enghelab Street. A revolution through books 1979-83 (Le Bal/Spector, 2019); Woman! Life! Freedom! Echoes of a revolutionary uprising in Iran (La Découverte 2023/Yoda Press 2025 - France Culture/Arte prize for best essay); and Résistances affectives. Les politiques de l’attachement face aux politiques de la cruauté (La Découverte, 2025).
Biography of Chowra Makaremi
Chowra Makaremi is a CNRS tenured researcher in the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris.
She has worked on migration controls and border governance in Europe, based on an ethnography of border detention. She has coordinated several research collectives on these topics, including Enfermés dehors. Enquête sur le confinement des étrangers (Le Croquant, 2009) with C. Kobelinsky, and Entre accueil et rejet. Ce que les villes font aux migrants (Le Passager clandestin, 2018) with V. Bontemps and S. Mazouz. She co-wrote a graphic novel based on her PhD dissertation : Prisonniers du passage (with Matthieu Parciboula, Steinkis 2019)
Since 2011, she has been working on the Iranian revolution of 1979, the genealogy of the Islamic Republic and the question of state violence, based on an ethnography of archives. She led the ERC research program OFF-SITE: Violence, State formation and memory politics: an off-site ethnography of post-revolution Iran.
In 2019, she directed the movie Hitch. An Iranian Story (Alter Ego, France, 78 min.). He publications include: Aziz's Notebook at the Hearth of the Iranian Revolution (Gallimard, 2011/Yoda Press 2014) ; with Hannah Darabi Enghelab Street. A revolution through books 1979-83 (Le Bal/Spector, 2019); Woman! Life! Freedom! Echoes of a revolutionary uprising in Iran (La Découverte 2023/Yoda Press 2025 - France Culture/Arte prize for best essay); and Résistances affectives. Les politiques de l’attachement face aux politiques de la cruauté (La Découverte, 2025).
Prolog
The politics of cruelty are not reducible to sadistic abuses of power. As the anthropologist Chowra Makaremi argues in her latest book, they constitute the political register of an increasingly vast array of regimes whose purpose is no longer to justify or even to conceal the violence they inflict. On the contrary, displaying their ability to cause pain and kill with total impunity is how these regimes seek to not only quell and preempt opposition but also to secure the acquiescence of those who are made to witness their deeds.
Cruelty is thus a method of government. Chowra Makaremi quotes the Argentinian anthropologist Rita Laura Segato who calls it a form of social pedagogy. By exposing the vulnerability of their targets, by demonstrating their ability to convert human beings into corpses as well as to make them disappear without a trace, the practitioners of the politics of cruelty intend to teach important lessons. They expect the people they govern to realize the precariousness of the bonds on which they rely and, for that very reason, to grow indifferent to the suffering of others. Fright followed by stupor, resignation and, eventually, detachment are the emotions that the politics of cruelty aim to produce.
That resistance occurs under such circumstances and sometimes even sparks an uprising is a kind of miracle, Chowra Makaremi marvels. Tracking recent examples of such miracles, from Tehran to Minneapolis, from Buenos Aires to Shaheen Bagh, from Diyarbakir to Khartoum, from Kyiv to Gaza, is the primary purpose of her book, Résistances affectives. While the politics of cruelty attempt to corrode and sever the bonds that sustain empathy and enable solidarity, “affective resistances” endeavor to buttress existing attachments but also to create new ones in the face of loss and destruction. Hence the role of mourning as an essential way of warding off the reduction of the dead to corpses destined to oblivion.
Born in Shiraz in 1980, Chowra Makaremi moved from Iran to France in 1983 with her father and her brother. Her mother, who took part in the 1979 revolution but opposed Ayatollah Khomeini’s rule was arrested when her daughter was a few months old and eventually executed, in the 1988 massacre of political prisoners. Trained as both a political scientist and an anthropologist in France and Canada, Chowra Makaremi started working on the politics of cruelty deployed by the Islamic Republic of Iran when she discovered a notebook in which her grandfather had chronicled the period ranging from the incarceration of his two daughters to the execution of Chowra’s mother.
After translating, editing and publishing the notebook in French, Chowra directed a documentary film, called Hitch, in 2019, based on her last trip to Iran, where she looked for traces of her mother. Then, in 2023, she published Femme, vie, liberté, a historically and theoretically rich ethnographic account of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising set off by the death in custody of Mahsa Jina Amini, a Kurdish-Iranian woman, in September of 2022. More recently, Résistances Affectives, published in French in 2024, widened her anthropological exploration of the politics of attachment to a variety of terrains such as Ne Una Menos, the movement against feminicides in Latin America, the Sudanese revolution of 2018, the Shaheen Bagh protests in India, and Black Lives Matter in the US.
In our interview, we started by inviting Chowra to reflect on the current fog of war and its impact on the people with whom she is in close contact – in Iran, Palestine, and Lebanon but also in Ukraine. We then talked about her singular way of weaving the personal and the political, from the discovery of her grandfather’s notebook to her engagement with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and its aftermath. How did the unanswered questions of her childhood but also her situation as an exile or diasporic subject inform her method as an anthropologist as well as her political sensibility? The third part of our interview focused on the Iranian regime, its enduring structure, its transformations since the Revolution, and the different modes of resistance that it has generated. Finally, we asked Chowra to walk us through her recent work on attachment and cruelty at a transnational level, but also to flesh out the feminist dimension of both her perspective on the social movements that she studies and of her own activism.
Our interview took place in Paris on April 15, 2026.
Prolog
The politics of cruelty are not reducible to sadistic abuses of power. As the anthropologist Chowra Makaremi argues in her latest book, they constitute the political register of an increasingly vast array of regimes whose purpose is no longer to justify or even to conceal the violence they inflict. On the contrary, displaying their ability to cause pain and kill with total impunity is how these regimes seek to not only quell and preempt opposition but also to secure the acquiescence of those who are made to witness their deeds.
Cruelty is thus a method of government. Chowra Makaremi quotes the Argentinian anthropologist Rita Laura Segato who calls it a form of social pedagogy. By exposing the vulnerability of their targets, by demonstrating their ability to convert human beings into corpses as well as to make them disappear without a trace, the practitioners of the politics of cruelty intend to teach important lessons. They expect the people they govern to realize the precariousness of the bonds on which they rely and, for that very reason, to grow indifferent to the suffering of others. Fright followed by stupor, resignation and, eventually, detachment are the emotions that the politics of cruelty aim to produce.
That resistance occurs under such circumstances and sometimes even sparks an uprising is a kind of miracle, Chowra Makaremi marvels. Tracking recent examples of such miracles, from Tehran to Minneapolis, from Buenos Aires to Shaheen Bagh, from Diyarbakir to Khartoum, from Kyiv to Gaza, is the primary purpose of her book, Résistances affectives. While the politics of cruelty attempt to corrode and sever the bonds that sustain empathy and enable solidarity, “affective resistances” endeavor to buttress existing attachments but also to create new ones in the face of loss and destruction. Hence the role of mourning as an essential way of warding off the reduction of the dead to corpses destined to oblivion.
Born in Shiraz in 1980, Chowra Makaremi moved from Iran to France in 1983 with her father and her brother. Her mother, who took part in the 1979 revolution but opposed Ayatollah Khomeini’s rule was arrested when her daughter was a few months old and eventually executed, in the 1988 massacre of political prisoners. Trained as both a political scientist and an anthropologist in France and Canada, Chowra Makaremi started working on the politics of cruelty deployed by the Islamic Republic of Iran when she discovered a notebook in which her grandfather had chronicled the period ranging from the incarceration of his two daughters to the execution of Chowra’s mother.
After translating, editing and publishing the notebook in French, Chowra directed a documentary film, called Hitch, in 2019, based on her last trip to Iran, where she looked for traces of her mother. Then, in 2023, she published Femme, vie, liberté, a historically and theoretically rich ethnographic account of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising set off by the death in custody of Mahsa Jina Amini, a Kurdish-Iranian woman, in September of 2022. More recently, Résistances Affectives, published in French in 2024, widened her anthropological exploration of the politics of attachment to a variety of terrains such as Ne Una Menos, the movement against feminicides in Latin America, the Sudanese revolution of 2018, the Shaheen Bagh protests in India, and Black Lives Matter in the US.
In our interview, we started by inviting Chowra to reflect on the current fog of war and its impact on the people with whom she is in close contact – in Iran, Palestine, and Lebanon but also in Ukraine. We then talked about her singular way of weaving the personal and the political, from the discovery of her grandfather’s notebook to her engagement with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and its aftermath. How did the unanswered questions of her childhood but also her situation as an exile or diasporic subject inform her method as an anthropologist as well as her political sensibility? The third part of our interview focused on the Iranian regime, its enduring structure, its transformations since the Revolution, and the different modes of resistance that it has generated. Finally, we asked Chowra to walk us through her recent work on attachment and cruelty at a transnational level, but also to flesh out the feminist dimension of both her perspective on the social movements that she studies and of her own activism.
Our interview took place in Paris on April 15, 2026.