Lessons from the Nazer State: Crowdsourced Denunciation and the Privatization of Political Repression

Consider the operational architecture of a surveillance system that requires no central command center, no dedicated corps of agents, no budget for field officers. Consider, too, a system in which the population monitors itself — in which the gaze of the State is distributed across millions of ordinary subjects who have been recruited, under the logic of civic duty and the convenience of a smartphone application, into the work of political repression. This is the structure that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been constructing, with increasing technical sophistication, since the death of a twenty-two-year-old woman in September 2022. Her name, on the official documents that recorded her death, was Mahsa Amini — but her Kurdish birth name was Jîna, a name the Iranian state had never permitted her to use publicly, because the government strictly regulates and suppresses non-Persian and non-Islamic names. Out of this erasure, and the uprising it ignited, rose a unique apparatus: a surveillance instrument whose name translates to he who watches, whose primary objective is the female body, moving, uncovered, through public space.

Nazer transforms ordinary citizens into surveillance agents, allowing both police and civilians to report hijab violations in vehicles. Users submit license plates, locations, and timestamps when they spot a woman with uncovered hair. The system automatically flags vehicles in an online database and sends real-time warnings to registered owners, who face fines and vehicle impoundment. Iran has integrated the application with law enforcement through the FARAJA police website, and in September 2024 its coverage was widened to include women traveling in ambulances, taxis, and public transportation. Thereby making any shared space a potential reporting site.

The scale of the operation is significant. Within two months of the system's operational launch, one million text-message warnings had been issued to women identified by cameras or civilian reporters. Over four thousand repeat offenders were prosecuted and two thousand vehicles confiscated. The sanctions handed down were administrative inconveniences only in the most euphemistic reading. They included prison sentences, floggings, and punitive labor assignments whose function was manifestly exemplary. One woman was ordered to wash corpses in a municipal morgue for a month. The punishment was designed to be spoken about, transmitted, absorbed as a lesson by every woman who heard it. The application does not operate alone. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps established a new enforcement unit in Tehran under the Noor, or Light, plan, calling its members "Ambassadors of Kindness." The unit issued promotional videos showing girls happily receiving headscarves, while footage circulating on social media showed women without hijabs being bundled into vans. Deployed at an international book fair in Tehran to identify non-compliant women, transmitting their photographs and locations to enforcers on the ground. The state's gaze has been multiplied and distributed: cameras above intersections, drones above book fairs, civilians with smartphones in traffic, IRGC units in public parks. All feeding into a shared architecture of identification and sanction.

The analytical argument is that while Nazer and the broader Noor enforcement infrastructure represent something more than a technologically upgraded version of the morality police, they also represent a qualitative transformation in the logic of political repression, one with implications that extend well beyond Iran's borders and well beyond the specific question of hijab enforcement.

The classical model of state surveillance concentrates the watching function in a specialized apparatus: a secret police, a morality enforcement corps, or dedicated agency whose existence is at once the precondition of repression and its visible limit. The concentration of surveillance in a dedicated body defines the scope of the state's gaze; it also defines the target of political resistance. One can protest the morality police. One can document their abuses, demand their disbanding, and — as happened in Iran in late 2022 — extract from the government a rhetorical acknowledgment of their dissolution. The state's watching function, when it is housed in a discrete institution, can be politically contested as such. Nazer, however, dissolves this structure entirely. When the watching function is distributed across the civilian population; when any neighbor, any fellow passenger, any stranger on the street is a potential reporting agent, the surveillance apparatus becomes structurally identical with the social environment itself. There is no discrete institution to target, no corps to disband, nor a building to identify as the seat of the watching power.

This is the privatization of political repression, and it accomplishes something that dedicated state surveillance apparatus cannot. It implicates the civilian population in the work of control, distributing responsibility for repression so thoroughly that the distinction between the state and the surveilled society begins to collapse. The woman who files a report through the application is simultaneously an instrument of the state and a private citizen exercising an application she downloaded voluntarily. The state's coercive function has been laundered through the logic of civic participation.

The consequences for democratic culture are structural and cumulative. Michel Foucault's account of disciplinary power observed that the panopticon's greatest achievement was to render the permanent exercise of power unnecessary. The inmate who cannot know whether they are being observed behaves as though they always are. Nazer accomplishes precisely this at the level of an entire society.

One morning during the Iranian New Year holiday in 2024, a woman walked through the historic Naqsh-e Jahan Square with her hijab draped loosely around her neck, her hair visible. Within fifteen minutes, her phone buzzed with a text from the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice headquarters demanding she correct her clothing. Shortly afterward, her father called. He too had received a message. His response was sharp: her appearance had endangered the entire family.

The chain of consequences in that single incident is the model in miniature. The state surveils the woman. The state contacts the family. The family disciplines the woman. The woman modifies her conduct. At no point does the state need to physically coerce her. The social network — the family, the father's anxiety, the anticipatory fear of endangering others — does the state's work at an intimate level the state cannot reach directly. This is the precise achievement of distributed surveillance as a governance technology: it recruits the ordinary bonds of social life into the machinery of political control by its privatization.

This dynamic carries implications that comparativists studying democratic backsliding have not yet fully absorbed. The privatization of repression through crowdsourced denunciation is a replicable model: its technical requirements are modest, its political cover is the language of citizen participation and community responsibility, and its effects on civic culture are devastating precisely because they are invisible to the measurement frameworks through which democratic health is assessed.

The Nazer state is not a novelty of Iranian theocracy. It is a governance model. The question for democratic observers is whether they will recognize it as such before it is adopted elsewhere.