Necropolitics and the manufacture of indifference in Iran and beyond

Ancient maps are often labelled with a warning: “Hic Sunt Dracones” (here be dragons), marking the point where civilisation ended, and the unknown began. Today, we have updated the legend for a colder, more administrative age: “Here be collateral damage.”

The modern cartography of power trades the dragon for the statistic. And human loss is codified as a necessary friction of a global machine.

This logic does not remain confined to maps or language — it settles into terrain.

The geographic transition from the Anatolian heights in Turkiye to the scorched arteries of the Levant and the sub-Saharan corridors marks the threshold of a profound moral silence. In this landscape, faces dissolve into grainy wide-shots of a crowd, dubbed over with the dry, percussive phrase of “regional volatility”, where deaths are merely the ticking of a metronome: expected, rhythmic, and, eventually, ignored.

The value of human life is determined by its proximity to the centres of Western hegemony. Peering at the Levant or the Horn of Africa, the hegemon sees only a dashboard of risks and rewards. Dehumanisation, then, is the primary technology of rule.

Grievability: a geopolitical asset?

On April 7, when US President Donald Trump declared that a “whole civilisation will die tonight”, he did the same with Iran, a country with one of the oldest continuous cultural traditions in human history.

“Iran is portrayed in negative terms, using clichés and tropes that can be dehumanising, reductionist and unrepresentative of reality,” said Iranian journalist Kourosh Ziabari in an interview with Reuters earlier this month.

He gave an example of the Western coverage of the Minab school attack — when a US-Israeli strike killed at least 175 people, most of them schoolgirls. “I saw a commentator in the US claim that schoolchildren killed in an airstrike were better off dead because they would otherwise have to wear full face coverings,” he recalled.

An Al Jazeera report highlighted the same, pointing out how The Washington Post reported the February 28 US-Israeli strikes on Iran under the headline “In surprise daytime attack, US and Israel take out Iranian........

© Dawn Prism