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Queues turn scarcity into a tool of power, privilege, and control, training people to wait, hope, and obey. |
Twelve years ago, I spent some time in the “Triple” ward of Tabriz Prison—a section with five warehouse-like rooms housing over seven hundred prisoners. About half of the inmates slept on triple-decker beds, while the rest slept on the floor. When a prisoner was released, their empty bed would go to a floor-sleeper who had been waiting for months.
Life in the ward revolved, from the very beginning, around queues. Of the ten toilets available, four were broken, leaving six for seven hundred people—each with constantly dripping pipes. The bathrooms were similarly inadequate; of eight baths, two were reserved for the ward’s lawyer and his aides, while six were left for the remaining prisoners, becoming sites of constant struggle and waiting. Ten public telephones had a daily ten-minute allowance, forcing inmates into lines that lasted several hours.
Yet what pushed this experience beyond simple scarcity was a mechanism that replaced the concept of “right” with “privilege.” The facilities I mentioned were, in principle, basic rights of every prisoner. Still, the prison’s terrifying system turned these rights into scarce commodities, distributing them as privileges. In effect, the basic rights of prisoners became conditional and suspendable. This seemingly minor conceptual shift revealed the prison’s fundamental order—a place that not only deprives individual freedom but also strips the meaning of rights at its root, replacing them with a system of privilege and discrimination. Through this mechanism, queues became arenas for producing and redistributing power; every extra minute on the phone, every turn in the bath, every empty bed turned into a privilege—a tool for servitude, loyalty, submission, or conflict. Privileges were granted as rewards and revoked under the pretext of punishment.
My experience in the Triple ward of Tabriz is not just a story of the past; it is a small-scale model of a larger mechanism—one that operates outside prison walls as well.
Life in Iran means learning the art of standing in line: lines for ration coupons, fuel, milk, frozen chicken, foreign currency, loans, university entrance exams, jobs, cars, housing, and more. These queues are not merely responses to scarcity; they are the pillars of a complex mechanism that preserves scarcity, making it appear natural, legal, and even moral. In appearance, a queue is a tool to manage limited resources. But these artificially sustained scarcities, delivered in drips while demand escalates, ensure that queues remain long and permanent.
Queues reproduce networks of power. The person at the end of a line today, hoping to be closer tomorrow, rarely questions the existence of the line itself. Their concern is not the queue, but improving their place in it. This situation fosters horizontal tension among citizens while deferring questions about the structure of power. The hope of reaching the front instills a psychological dependency on power. Every privilege—bed, phone call, chicken ration, or housing loan—becomes a tool to select and cultivate loyal subjects. Those with access to connections, patronage, power, ideological loyalty, or shared values are propelled from the back to the front of the line.
Privileges without waiting are not only symbols of injustice but also models for others, nurturing the hope that their position can improve through connections, vouchers, or other means. As Hannah Arendt observes, such hope can paralyze collective action: instead of breaking the unjust system created by scarcity, rationing, and queues, we are moved to act within its framework. Hope alleviates the pain of scarcity and makes waiting bearable, yet through this very alleviation and anticipation, the cycle of discrimination continues. This is the moment when hope leads to silence, and silence sustains the structure. Those who hope in the existing order do not shout—they endure and wait.
The phenomenon of queues in Iran is a permanent stage for displaying power. This display, like a repeated ritual, operates through control of time and bodies, managing tension, cultivating flattery, producing servitude, creating ideological affinities, and administering hope in small doses. In an economy where the state is the largest distributor of resources, queues and the politics of queuing serve to train obedient citizens—citizens who wait through hope, fall silent through waiting, and through their silence, make normalization and control possible.