Public execution—a phenomenon in which the final moments of a human being’s life are put on public display—goes beyond mere punishment and, in Marcel Mauss’s terms, constitutes a “total social fact” that encompasses all dimensions of a society’s life (legal, political, religious, economic, ethical, and cultural). While the global trend in the modern era has moved toward the gradual elimination of capital punishment from the public sphere, its continuation and prominence in contemporary Iran make it an important subject for social and historical analysis. This essay seeks to answer the following questions: What transformations has the function and legitimizing foundation of public execution in Iran undergone from ancient times to the present? What are the historical roots of this public spectacle, especially in the ancient concept of “cheap death,” and how has it persisted in later periods? And finally, from the perspective of critical theories of power and politics—particularly relying on the theoretical framework of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt—what social and political consequences does this phenomenon hold for Iranian society?

The Concept of “Cheap Death” and the Legitimation of Execution in Ancient Iran
In ancient Iran, the death penalty was intertwined with the concepts of political power and cosmic order. In the Achaemenid period, execution was a tool for displaying the absolute power of the king and maintaining the unity of the empire. The Behistun Inscription, in which Darius the Great details the horrific punishments of rebels (cutting off ears, noses, and tongues, impalement, and crucifixion), is clear evidence of the terrifying and exemplary function of public executions. (1) Greek historians like Herodotus also mention brutal and theatrical punishments such as live burial. (2) In this period, the legitimacy of punishment derived from the king’s will, who was the representative of order on earth. With the transition to the Sassanid period, this political function was fused with a complex religious framework. In Sassanid law, which was deeply linked to the teachings of the Zoroastrian religion, the concept of marg-arzan, meaning “worthy of death,” emerged. This concept was used for major sins that threatened the sacred order of society. These sins were divided into two main categories: hostile sins (crimes that directly harmed others) and spiritual sins (crimes that damaged the spiritual realm of the individual and society, such as apostasy, sorcery, and sodomy). (3) The aim of these punishments was not only to punish the individual but also to “cleanse” society of the stain of sin and restore cosmic order. Sources such as the Mādiyān i Hazār Dādestān, the Dēnkard, and Pahlavi narratives have explained the legal and religious foundations of these punishments. (4) The theatrical execution of Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, whose skin was flayed, stuffed with straw, and hung at the city gate, is a prominent example of a political-religious execution in this period, aimed at eradicating a religious heresy and simultaneously displaying the joint authority of the king and the clergy. (5) Analysis of this period shows that the public display of punishment, with aims of deterrence, intimidation, and consolidation of (political and religious) power, has deep roots in Iranian history and its legitimacy was based on a dual foundation (the king’s will and religious commandments).

The Political Function of Execution in Islamic Periods
With the arrival of Islam, the legal framework of punishments changed, and execution was defined under jurisprudential concepts such as qisas, hudud, and ta’zir. Nevertheless, the political and theatrical function of execution persisted, and political power always played a decisive role in its implementation. The execution of Hasanak the Vizier, by order of Mas’ud of Ghazni on charges of being a Qarmatian and his public hanging, was an overt display of power meant to intimidate the political elite. Political treatises such as Siyasatnama by Nizam al-Mulk also emphasized the necessity of “awe” and “siyasat” (meaning the use of force and violence) by the king to maintain order. The public executions of prominent mystical figures like Mansur Hallaj and Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadhani on charges of “heresy” are classic examples of how political power and the official religious institution collaborated to eliminate voices that could challenge the established order. In the Safavid period, with Shiism becoming the official religion, execution turned into a tool for suppressing religious dissent. European travelogues from this period provide terrifying depictions of theatrical violence. (6) The Qajar era also witnessed the continuation of this tradition in the main squares of cities. (7) In the Pahlavi period, with efforts to modernize the judicial system, public executions declined and implementation of sentences was mostly transferred to the closed environment of prisons. However, execution continued to be used as a tool to eliminate political opponents. This historical process demonstrates the changes and transformations in the foundation of execution’s “legitimacy” (from royal decree/religious sin to religious law/ruling politics), while the political function of eliminating opponents and the instrumental use of public spectacle for intimidation and consolidation of authority remained unchanged.

The Islamic Republic and a New Phase in Executions
The history of punishment in Iran entered a new and more complex phase with the establishment of the Islamic Republic. This period is not merely a return to past traditions but a “strategic reconstruction” of the public display of power. To understand this complexity, Michel Foucault’s theory is helpful. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes modernity’s transition from the “theater of scaffolds” (displaying power on the body) to a hidden and efficient disciplinary system centered around the prison. (8) The judicial and penal system of the Islamic Republic operates in a dual and contradictory state: on the one hand, with an extensive judicial bureaucracy and most executions carried out in secret, it seemingly follows the modern logic of concealing punishment. But on the other hand, quite consciously and selectively, it brings public execution back into the public sphere. This return is not mere regression but a “modern strategy of power” that uses pre-modern tools for entirely contemporary goals: – Display of authority during crises: The intensification of public executions after nationwide protests serves a media function to display power and control. – Symbolic control of public space: Execution in the town square is a reclaiming of a space that might have turned into a site of disobedience. – Intimidation of society: The primary goal is to instruct by example and reproduce a collective fear that suppresses protest and replaces action with inaction. Therefore, from a Foucauldian perspective, public execution in contemporary Iran is not a rejection of penal modernity but a cunning coexistence of two power logics: disciplinary power (inside the prison) and sovereign power (in public), both serving the reproduction of raw violence for the existing political order.

The Socio-Political Consequences of Execution from Arendt’s Perspective
Hannah Arendt distinguishes between “power” and “violence.” In her view, any act that destroys the public sphere is an anti-political act. (9) Public execution is the ultimate embodiment of this anti-political act because it transforms the public space of the city—which should be a place for dialogue—into a stage for displaying raw sovereign violence and reduces citizens from “political actors” to “passive spectators.” Another key concept of Arendt is the “banality of evil,” which refers to the normalization of violent and evil acts through “the absence of thought” and blind obedience. (10) Public execution, especially in its repetition, plays a dangerously significant role in normalizing violence and promoting this banality of evil. When watching someone die becomes an everyday occurrence, society begins to lose its moral sensitivity and accept evil as a trivial matter. This lack of thought is precisely what allows “evil” to take root in social structures.

State Violence in Iran after the 1979 Revolution
Due to the deliberate lack of transparency and secrecy policy of the judiciary of the Islamic Republic, access to accurate execution statistics in Iran is impossible. The statistics compiled by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA), based on verification of multiple sources and citizen reports, merely represent the minimum number of executions; the actual figures, especially in non-public cases, are estimated to be much higher. Nevertheless, these figures indicate meaningful trends, especially in the distinction between covert executions (inside prison) and public executions (in public spaces). – The 1980s and the 1988 massacre: This decade was the bloodiest period in the history of the Islamic Republic. Execution of political opponents began in the early years after the revolution and reached its peak with the summer 1988 massacre. In this horrific killing of critics and opponents in 1988, thousands of political prisoners were secretly executed and buried in unmarked graves. Although these executions were not public, news of them quickly spread through society and had a tremendous intimidating effect. Human rights organizations estimate the number of victims of this massacre to be in the thousands to tens of thousands. These executions were mostly non-public and aimed at the organized physical elimination of the opposition. – The 1990s and 2000s (surge in public executions): After a period of relative decline, with the rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and following the protests against the results of the 2009 election, the use of public executions as a tool for public intimidation intensified. During this period, charges related to drugs and “thugs” became a cover for widespread executions, especially in city squares. For example, Amnesty International recorded that in 2015 alone, Iran executed at least 977 people, some of which were carried out publicly. (11) The purpose of these public displays was to create fear and show the unshakable authority of the government in response to social unrest. – The 2010s and protest movements: Despite international pressure, execution continued to be used as a tool of repression, especially against detained protesters. After the protests of December 2017 and particularly November 2019, several arrested protesters were sentenced to death and quickly executed after opaque and unfair trials. The execution of Navid Afkari, a protesting wrestler, is a prominent example of this trend, which, although carried out in secret, had widespread media coverage and was intended to intimidate society and protesters. During this period, although the number of public executions declined, the use of “political execution” with broad media coverage replaced it. – The year 2022 and the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement: After the death of Mahsa Amini and the start of nationwide uprisings, the government explicitly returned to the strategy of public execution to suppress the protests. The public execution of Majidreza Rahnavard in Mashhad was a full-fledged reconstruction of Foucault’s “theater of scaffolds.” The purpose of this action, which was carried out at unprecedented speed from arrest to execution, was to send a direct and clear message of raw violence to the protesters. In fact, for the first time in years, the government carried out a political execution in public. At the same time, other executions such as Mohsen Shekari’s on charges of “moharebeh” in Tehran (non-public but with extensive media coverage) were also carried out for the same purpose. According to HRANA’s annual report, in the 2023 calendar year (most of which was influenced by this movement), at least 746 citizens were executed, of which 6 were public and over 3.6 percent were on “political-security or ideological” charges. (12) These statistics show that although the volume of public executions is small compared to the total, their psychological impact and political function are far greater, and the government consciously resorts to this tool during times of crisis.

Epilogue
Broadly speaking, public execution in Iran goes beyond mere punishment and constitutes a political ritual in which the body of the condemned becomes the site of a symbolic battle between the state and society. This essay, by tracing the genealogy of this phenomenon from the ancient concept of “cheap death” to its strategic reproduction in contemporary times, has shown that the “theater of scaffolds” has always been a tool for displaying absolute power and intimidating protesters. However, under the Islamic Republic, particularly in response to protest uprisings, this ritual has assumed a dual and more complex function. On one hand, during times of crisis when protesters’ bodies emerge as “political acts” in the streets and challenge the existing order, the state responds with a “counter-act” by staging the condemned body on the scaffold. This display is a demonic effort to reclaim the monopoly of violence and rewrite the meaning of the “body” in public space: the protesting body must be turned into a lifeless, exemplary body. This confrontation is precisely the tragedy of contemporary Iranian politics with the Islamic Republic’s bloodstained hands. On the other hand, as Foucault’s analysis showed, this return to pre-modern spectacle is itself a sign of a crisis in the efficacy of modern disciplinary power (prison, surveillance). When covert mechanisms of control are no longer sufficient to produce obedience, the state is forced to remove its mask and display its grotesque face in the form of theatrical violence. But this display is a double-edged sword. In a world where information and images spread with unprecedented speed, the scaffold not only produces fear but also anger and disgust. The body hanging from a crane, intended to symbolize absolute power, becomes a symbol of the fragility and lack of legitimacy of that power and reproduces the cycle of resistance in a different form. Therefore, it can be concluded that the public execution of protesters in Iran has ultimately become a rupture in the symbolic order. While public execution, by normalizing violence and promoting the “banality of evil,” damages the moral foundations of society and reduces citizens to passive spectators of death, it also—by exposing the violent nature of power—unintentionally sows the seeds of future resistance. The struggle to end this horrific spectacle is not only a defense of the right to life but also a fundamental effort to heal this rupture, to reclaim the body as a space of life, and to build a society where power arises from “collective will,” not from the terror imposed by a minority wielding money, force, and weapons. This struggle is, in essence, a struggle to move from witnessing death to experiencing life in a free and humane public space—a goal that the people of Iran will, sooner or later, achieve.

References: 

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2– Herodotus. Histories, translated and researched by Hadi Hedayati. Tehran: University of Tehran Press, 6th Edition, 2010 (1389).
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12– Annual Report by Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) on the Human Rights Situation in Iran, December 27, 2023 (6 Dey 1402).