An original contribution to the cultural anthropology of the Iranian cyberspace, Sima Shakhsari’s book is a chilling scholarly account of the dark sides of the major Iranian blogosphere, the Weblogistan, often celebrated as a conduit of liberal democracy, as observed during the first decades of the twentieth century. Taking its primary theoretical force from, yet also extending, Michel Foucault’s and Achille Mbembe’s notions of biopolitics and necropolitics, The Politics of Rightful Killing analyzes Weblogistan—that is, the Iranian blogosphere “figured [by many bloggers] as a microcosm of the Iranian civil society with aspirations for a democratic future” (xxiii)—“to explore the role of militarism, ‘democratization,’ and neoliberal governmentality in the Iranian cyberspace” (23). In examining Weblogistan as a site of civil society and its representations of “the people of Iran,” Shakhsari deems both biopolitics and necropolitics insufficient, as they fail to “explain the work of death in relation to populations that...

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