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Policing repertoire of knowledge practices in neo-authoritarian governance: authority of sovereignty cluster of global norms, and the constitution of legitimizing narrative for suppression in Iran’s “Woman, life, freedom” uprising

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: How is the suppression of mass protests epistemically conducted in neo-authoritarian governance? Given that legal invocations alone are insufficient to legitimize the brutal suppression of a state's own citizens' protests, the article aims to identify the epistemic practices through which neo-authoritarian policing actors manipulate public perceptions of protest situations, thereby seeking to legitimize their suppression. The policing rhetoric of the Iran uprising “Woman, Life, Freedom” in 2022 is selected as an empirical case. The textual data is collected from two influential Iranian state-led news agencies, and analysed quantitatively by corpus linguistic methods and then qualitatively by discourse analysis as elaborated in Epistemic Governance analytic. As the findings revealed, the governing technology works through the strategic invocations of the authority of the “sovereignty cluster of global norms” in the constitution of a legitimizing narrative including four counter-frames, which convert the protesting situation into a security context and bypass the internationally recognized “right to protest.” The set of epistemic practices identified here signals the invention of a “neo-authoritarian policing repertoire of knowledge practices.” Given the states’ privileged position on sovereignty matters, the study warns against the repertoire as it constitutes a condition of epistemic closeness, effectively blocking democratization attempts.
DOI: 10.1080/13510347.2025.2482626
Institution: Tampere University
Language: English
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4408946968
FWCI: 8.866
Cites: 79
Cited by: 5
Related to: 10