Context and Methodology

The Afghans I worked with were refugees, undocumented individuals and asylum seekers whose experience of military involvement in the regional conflicts was inseparable from their wartime migration to Iran. They carried different precarious legal documents, made periodic visits to Afghanistan to see their families, and were mainly employed in menial jobs.

The presence of Afghans in Iran must be situated in a long history ‘predating the formation of the state system in the region and, indeed, constitutive of it’ (Adelkhah and Olszewska 2007: 148). The recent history of this cross-border mobility has been shaped by several key events. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent war displaced four million Afghans, mainly to Pakistan and Iran, with the largest influx of refugees, three million, occurring in 1991. The past four decades have seen further displacement due to Afghanistan's civil war (1992–1996), the US-led invasion in late 2001, and the Taliban's return to power in 2021. These events led to over five million Hazara Afghans seeking refuge in Iran.

Iran has responded to these arrivals through various migration policies over the years, ranging from welcoming asylum seekers in the early years after the 1979 Revolution to enforcing mass deportations in the last two decades. With these shifting state policies, millions of predominantly Shi'a Hazara Afghans are now living in a ‘gap of non-citizenship’ (Feldman 2007: 138), either with temporary residence permits that provide limited access to services, or in a state of illegality, with no rights of citizenship.

In this context of protracted displacement, disenfranchised Afghans find themselves in a position of precarity, where fighting in Iran's international military campaigns becomes an attractive career option for men. This offers the promise of good wages, institutional recognition and welfare benefits as war veterans. In effect, military mobilisation may be valued as a means of gaining entry into new social or political networks (Vigh and Jensen 2018). These networks not only provide the possibility of access to resources, they give opportunities of inclusion through dependency and the obligations of state care. State care makes welfare and healthcare services accessible to disabled Afghan veterans based on their injuries, and their families receive services that are otherwise unavailable to them.

State services for veterans and their families should be contextualised within the attempts at post-Revolution state-building and responses to unfolding war situations. During the Iran–Iraq war (1980–1988), the mass mobilisation of soldiers increasingly required material incentives: Iran had to rely on a ‘labor-intensive military strategy’ to confront ‘Iraq's capital-intensive, technologically advanced army’ (Harris 2013: 81). The state's efforts to provide greater resources and status to soldiers and volunteers (both Iranians and Afghans) led to growing links between warfare and welfare, in a bureaucratic process in which the state must account for war-related services and the sacrificial loss of war veterans. This accounting largely took place through the expansion of state welfare institutions, mainly the Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans’ Affairs (hereafter the Martyrs’ Foundation) and the Foundation for the Dispossessed. These institutions channelled monetary compensation to veterans and their families, and extended priority access to education, private employment and licences, among other benefits. Through these institutions, a ‘martyr's welfare state’ (Abrahamian 1989: 70) formed, in which martyrdom is awarded the highest value. Reparations and rudimentary access to welfare benefits are differentially granted to veterans based on their percentage of disability. While these social rights and benefits have created pathways for newly valued status groups (Harris 2017: 110), their uneven distribution has shaped post-war societal hierarchies among veterans.

My fieldwork with veterans allowed me to understand the everyday bureaucratic and medical practices of the state in which differences within the population of veterans are in the making, as well as the modes of contention that the making of these differences engenders. I engaged in diverse activities, from attending mosque gatherings and martyrs’ processions in Tehran to observing interactions between physicians and Afghan veterans at the Martyrs’ Foundation's medical committees. My fieldwork with Afghans primarily involved managing documents and observing their interactions with state bureaucracy. This has revealed how documents govern Afghans’ lives, offering insights into the challenges of navigating materiality of bureaucracy, and shedding light on the ambivalent attachments Afghans have developed towards the state.

In the next section, I outline the typical interactions between non-citizens and physicians on medical committees, focusing on the process of appealing medical decisions. Studies on migrants’ access to welfare and social protection demonstrate that medical staff, like other civil servants ‘do the state’ in their daily work – not only by adhering to rules but also through emotional entanglements and a professional ethos centred on client assistance (Andreetta 2022: 36; Perna 2023). Building on this, and drawing on Ilana Feldman's (2018) work on Palestinian refugees in camps, I argue that the bureaucratic assessment of needs and the allocation of limited resources inevitably foster mutual suspicion between caregivers and care-receivers in large organisational settings.

Appeals: Intimate Bodily Knowledge, Suspicious Numbers

Bodies that participate in war share an ‘embodied continuity’ (Sørensen 2015: 234). One aspect of this continuity is observed through bureaucratic procedures, where the injured bodies of veterans are routinely assessed against the disability frameworks of state care institutions. This evaluative process is considered essential in Iran, as the monetary benefits for disabled veterans are directly tied to assessments of the extent of their bodily loss and damage (Moradi 2022). Such evaluations are typically documented in ‘medical certificates’.

This medical assessment procedure is not unique to veterans. Anthropologists focused on humanitarian practices have extensively discussed medical certificates in the context of displacement and asylum seeking (Ticktin 2011). As Didier Fassin explains, medical certificates play a key role in the bureaucratic processes of settlement for refugees and immigrants, as they turn the body into a site of evidence where truth is sought (Fassin 2011: 284). In this ‘process of objectification’, the bodies of asylum seekers are placed in a ‘climate of suspicion’, where their words and accounts are not considered sufficient evidence (Fassin and d'Halluin 2005: 598). Disabled Afghans, whom I discuss here, undergo a similar process of bodily reification, where the disability of their bodies is assessed and certified through expert mediation. However, a key difference is that Afghan veterans, as I will show in this section, consistently invoke the language of sacrifice – a religious resource to express contention against this biomedical criterion of evaluation – a resource not available to the asylum seekers and refugees discussed in the humanitarian literature.

Inspired by Salih Can Açıksöz's study of disabled veterans in Turkey, I view veterans with disabilities as ‘problematic sacrificial subjects’ (2020: 88). As Açıksöz notes, while martyrs’ bodies are revered, the disabled veteran's body ‘is consecrated in the religio-political realm but faces frequent desecration from the military medical system and state institutions’ (2020: 88).

The same tensions between the religious and biomedical valorisation of veterans’ disabled bodies exist in Iran. Disabled veterans usually spend a substantial amount of time with the medical committees of the Martyrs’ Foundation, where physicians assess their functional limitations. Through this practice of ‘objectivity’ (Assor 2021: 106), disability becomes a matter of ‘rational-technical administrations’ (Petryna 2002: 4): impairments are calculated, and percentages, ranging from 5 to 100 per cent, are assigned to the impaired body parts, allowing individuals to qualify for varying levels of financial and medical care entitlements. The results of the biomedical assessment are normally presented as medical certificates.

Prior to acquiring the medical certificate, veterans have to compile a large number of documents, including forms and certified documents with their personal, job and service details; personnel and unit information and the employing armed organisation; details of the operations they participated in; the dates of their presence at the front; information about service in artillery and missile weapon units; the nature of their injuries; certified evidence of the information declared; verification and matching of statements; and the preparation and submission of an injury report to the High Medical Commission of the Armed Forces.

The provision of benefits by the Martyrs’ Foundation has long drawn criticism from disabled veterans. Apart from the lengthy process, which may take years to complete, and the need to compile a vast array of documents which veterans call a ‘paper game’ (kāghaz bāizi), they argue that the medical diagnoses are inaccurate. They contend that the percentages they receive do not typically correspond to the levels of disability they experience. This discrepancy has fostered enduring mutual suspicion between veterans and physicians acting as state officials. This suspicion is often expressed by veterans while appealing medical decisions.

Appeals are usually submitted in writing, detailing their arguments against official decisions. The appeal forms can be obtained from the Martyrs’ Foundation, an office specifically designated to receive veterans’ complaints. Many Afghan veterans, being either illiterate or unfamiliar with the official language, seek assistance from the Foundation's employees to draft their appeals. This process typically creates a space for dialogue between veterans and employees on how to articulate frustrations and translate those feelings into words. Throughout these exchanges, which I observed almost every time I visited the Foundation, veterans frequently describe how they intimately understand their disability through their everyday knowledge of their bodies – a form of corporeal knowledge that stands in contrast to the medical knowledge upon which physicians base their assessments and which could potentially refute the veterans’ claims.

The physician's comments shed light on how disability status is formulated and managed through biomedical criteria. Although the physician viewed medical science as unequivocally objective, the determination of disability percentage actually relies on two key observations. Firstly, it considers the extent of bodily losses, for example, ‘if a finger is cut off in the war, the veteran gets five per cent; if two fingers, then ten per cent’, and so on. Secondly, the calculation takes into account the impact of the bodily damage on the veteran's life. This impact is assessed through consultations with veterans, examinations of bodily functions, and ultimately, the physician's own judgement. It is around these interactions and judgements that disputes often emerge, as veterans frequently argue that their disabilities are more severe than is officially recognised.

This discontent often morphs into suspicion among veterans concerning physician integrity, leading to allegations that the Foundation and its medical professionals ignore corruption. Suspicion arises from instances where veterans allegedly bribe doctors to unjustly inflate their disability percentages. Afghan veterans may see these discriminatory practices as influenced by economic incentives and possibly deep-rooted issues of citizenship and national identity. For instance, there is a widespread belief among Afghan veterans that physicians, who are all Iranians, do not give them the same level of care as Iranian nationals.

Suspicions and accusations of corruption are the lens through which physicians and veterans usually understand each other, the terrain on which they interact, and a vector for forwarding claims and complaints. Accusations of corruption involve charges about personal character and systemic orientation, making suspicion central to the state care dynamic. This complex web of suspicion is intricately tied to the role of documentation, which forms the medium through which suspicions are legitimised. While documents can evoke strong emotional responses and connect individuals to the state, they can also highlight instances of perceived corruption or discrimination, taking on a dual role in fostering both intimacy and suspicion between veterans and the state.

Beyond concerns around diagnostic accuracy and corruption, many veterans also challenge the criteria used to officially determine disability levels. The root of this suspicion lies in the perceived inaccuracy of diagnoses, which are presented to veterans in tables outlining the functional limitations of each body part. This method of quantifying disability often leads to doubts about state officials’ adherence to Islamic doctrines. Veterans commonly argue that the essence of sacrifice is immeasurable and cannot be accurately captured by such biomedical and bureaucratic standards.

Avaz's suspicion of officials lies at the intersection of sacrificial logic, biomedicine and bureaucracy. Whereas the Revolutionary Guards insist on the incommensurability of sacrifice, the Foundation relies heavily on biomedical criteria to measure disability, thus quantifying the extent of sacrifice.

To elucidate these seemingly contradictory modes of valuing within state apparatus, I follow Michel Foucault's suggestion that one should not think of state policy as determined by an unequivocal and coherent rationality, but that there are multiple and at times competing rationalities of the state (Foucault 2008). In Iran, these competing rationalities are entrenched in the ‘layering effect’ of modern bureaucratic administration, in which the bureaucratic network consists of ‘key Shi'i principles and modern state technologies’ (Osanloo 2020: 95).

Within these layered bureaucratic processes, appealing to sacrifice as the highest Islamic virtue and Shi'a telos creates space for state institutions to uphold specific modes of virtue. At the same time, sacrifice serves as a potent affective mode through which ordinary people – particularly war veterans – contest civic inequalities, and view their social exclusion as evidence that the bureaucracy has failed to confirm their moral and virtuous commitment. In fact, during my fieldwork, I observed how appeals to sacrifice occasionally enabled Afghan veterans and their families to access benefits, such as reduced fees at public hospitals, even though healthcare access often did not fully cover their families or sometimes even the veterans themselves.

Focusing on this affective mode of reasoning, which centres on sacrifice and its accompanying sentiments, clarifies how Afghan veterans question the medical and bureaucratic boundaries of deservingness within a theocratic healthcare system. Such questioning often hinges on suspicions and accusations of corruption – an enduring undercurrent that, paradoxically, also enables non-citizens to stake claims on the state and contest the allocation of its benefits.

Nevertheless, not all Afghan veterans are successful in being recognised by the state as disabled, leaving them without a platform to express their discontent with the financial handling of their disability. The account of Syed Mousavi that follows illuminates the experiences of one such veteran. It shows how, in the absence of official recognition, Syed Mousavi employed kinship idioms and the language of relatedness to affectively express modes of intimacy and kin-making with the state.

Missing Document: Intimate Brothers, Suspicious Kin

In September 2015, I joined an oral history project conducted by the Research Office of the Islamic Revolution Cultural Front. This pro-regime cultural institute aimed to document the untold stories of Afghan veterans whose experiences of the Iran–Iraq war had never before been recorded. The interviewees mainly consisted of the parents of martyrs and the disabled veterans who assisted the research team to identify over 3,000 Afghan martyrs in the 1980s. I met Syed Mousavi during one of these interview sessions on the outskirts of Tehran.

Before leaving Syed Mousavi's house, we broke into small groups, and he joined mine. ‘I just came back from a trip to Herat to bring my son back to Iran. I'm not able to work as a construction labourer anymore. God knows I am not asking for much. Maybe if I could get my son's job permit renewed, and get my medical certificate sorted’, he said, sharing his concerns with me separately, and after finishing his interview with the pro-regime project.

While the project was interested in documenting his experience of armed struggle across national borders, Syed Mousavi seemed primarily concerned with his own documents, which he had collected over several decades. He clutched a worn-out folder in which he had amassed documents chronicling his post-war recovery and the challenge of proving his disability. This challenge arose from his inability to find a signed document verifying his place and duration of treatment in a hospital near the war zone: the hospital appeared to have lost his records. This loss was partly because the hospital was targeted by Iraqi bombardment, and partly because Syed Mousavi himself had lost other documents leading up to his hospitalisation.

Syed Mousavi first arrived in Iran from Afghanistan, at age fifteen, while accompanying a wounded Iranian military advisor. During the early stages of the 1979 Revolution such military advisors had been sent to train Afghan Mujahideen in their fight against the Soviets. When one such advisor was wounded in an ambush, Syed Mousavi's name was drawn to escort him back to Iran, with a short stop in Quetta, Pakistan. As a reward for his bravery, Syed Mousavi was sent to Qom, Iran, to pay respects at the shrine. There, he decided to stay on as a refugee, joining millions of Afghans who had sought asylum in Iran following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Shortly after this, in 1980, the Iran–Iraq war broke out. He served on the front as a soldier and a labourer constructing trenches. At this time, newly arrived Afghan men were offered limited social opportunities, which materialised during the war in the form of employment as construction workers in governmental revolutionary organisations, like the Jihad of Construction that provided infrastructural services in conflict zones, such as building trenches and field removal with heavy machinery.

Syed Mousavi's involvement in the war was interrupted by his hospitalisation due to an injury in 1985. For three decades, he struggled to gain recognition as a disabled war veteran, a status which never materialised due to the absence of crucial documents, chiefly those related to his hospital treatment. Now in his late fifties, his accounts of disability and sacrifices on the fronts in Afghanistan and Iran are set against the backdrop of another conflict, the Syrian war, in which Afghan refugees have again taken an active role as Iran-backed proxy forces. Oscillating between narratives of war disability and negotiations for disability care, Syed Mousavi's accounts of armed movement in Afghanistan, Iran and Syria are as revealing of transnational organised violence as they are of state–non-citizen relations of care, negotiated across different state care institutions and mediated through documents.

Several recent studies have shown how states frequently develop differentiated policies that favour specific veterans over others, depending on the wars in which they participated, their ethnicity and nationality (Bougarel 2006). These distinctions play a key role in determining how disability care is administered, and shape the moral economies of who deserves treatment (Redfield 2013; Ticktin 2011). Unlike citizen-soldiers whose injuries the state readily sanctifies, Afghan refugees labour in war zones without a binding social contract. In contrast to professional military cadres with clear ranks and specialised skills, Afghans are locked in deeply precarious working relationships that resemble common wage-labour arrangements. This situation is akin to what Darryl Li describes as ‘military migrant workers’ (2015: 128). Such unstable military and working conditions have caused Afghan veterans, particularly the first generation who fought in the Iran–Iraq war, to become ‘invisible veterans’, denied state or public recognition (Wilson 2019: 132). Nonetheless, recognition for war veteranship is not static; it should be understood as an ongoing struggle (Crapanzano 2011; Weigink et al. 2019).

Despite being recognised as a refugee in Iran, Syed Mousavi, like millions of his fellow Afghan refugees, lives in the margins of the state, with limited social rights. He and his family hold a residence permit which needs to be renewed annually and allows him to only take up menial occupations. On his fingers, Syed Mousavi counts all the fees his family must pay to renew the permit: insurance card, labourer card, municipality costs, employment costs and many more. In addition to all these charges, he and his family also have to cope with myriad legal restrictions. For example, his daughter could not go to university ‘because if she did, she would have been deported to Afghanistan’. Although his daughter was born in Iran, she is not an Iranian citizen, and her access to free university education is granted on the condition that deportation follows graduation.

Syed Mousavi finds these imposed restrictions unfair, not only because they are against the discourse of Shi'a brotherhood that the Iranian regime has propagated but also because he feels that his services in the Iran–Iraq war have gone unrecognised. Although Syed Mousavi and other recruited Afghans enjoyed relatively equal standing during the war, they found themselves increasingly estranged after 1989. The word he, and other Afghan veterans, use to describe intimacy during the war and post-war estrangement is the Persian neologism khon-sharki (shared blood). This makes explicit reference to Shi'a brotherhood and the unity between Iranian and Afghan soldiers who died during the Iran–Iraq and Syrian wars. Khon-sharki also frequently appears in the language of state officials about Iran's foreign policy in relation to Shi'a-populated countries and its transnational ambitions of exporting revolution. It is this double sense of the term which enables it to work as an effective and affective rhetorical device.

‘Brotherhood’ was also the reason Afghan fighters repeatedly gave for why they joined Iran-backed Shi'a militias in Syria and fought in the Iran–Iraq war. The language of relatedness is not restricted to Iran, as it is commonly used by members of militant organisations around the world, both Islamic (Li 2019: 116) and non-Islamic (Posocco 2014: 129). Studies have shown how brotherhood is mobilised in contexts of migration to mitigate civic inequality and state violence (Andrikopoulos 2017).

Anthropologists have documented the diverse ways in which projects of nation-making are informed by the language of kinship, and how the close entanglement of kinship and state has helped to bolster claims concerning the naturalness of national unity (Bryant 2002; McKinnon and Cannell 2013). Michael Herzfeld, for instance, suggests that kinship terms and ideas are effective boundary makers because they ‘provide the foundation for a whole discourse about what is natural, normal, and national’ (1992: 76). In her work with supporters of the Iranian regime, Rose Wellman shows how the Iranian state has capitalised on the ‘naturalizing effect of kinship’ by using the metaphor of the martyr's blood as ‘a striking form of sanguinary politics, participating and flowing between the seemingly distinct domains of kinship and national politics’ (Wellman 2017: 505). The intertwining of kinship and blood sacrifice further shapes citizenship status, where the act of sacrifice and the metaphor of shared blood not only establish connections between kin and state but also reinforce the moral and civic obligations that emerge from such bonds. This dynamic operates for both citizens and non-citizens, including Afghans, as they strive for inclusion and recognition within the broader polity.

In this context, Afghans mobilise the same language of relatedness – often understood as the building blocks of a nationalist form of belonging – to forge unity and contest their post-war abandonment by the state. In effect, by casting themselves as kin, Afghan veterans make claims on the state beyond legal documentation and bureaucratic procedures. Using the language of kinship opens up a strategic stance from ‘the other side of legality’ (Chatterjee 2004: 56), where kinship provides disabled Afghan veterans an affective realm and a potential counterweight to the bureaucratic imperatives that subject their bodies to legal and medical frameworks.

Alyssa Miller describes how Tunisian families whose sons have become fighters in Syria perform kin bonds and familial sentiments in public ‘to pressure a resistant state into facilitating [their son's] repatriation’ (Miller 2018: 598). Through explicitly political performances of kinship addressed to the state, she explains, families ‘appeal to state assistance [which] is not framed within a legal-juridical framework, but rather presented as an act of moral reasoning rooted in kinship relations’ (Miller 2018: 602). Afghans’ use of kinship should be seen in the same light, as the kinship language of brotherhood enables disabled Afghan veterans to emphasise the state's responsibility to provide ‘protection and reciprocal moral commitment’ (Yang 2005: 494).

Yet, Afghan veterans’ demands for the state to act as kin and fulfil its promises by mobilising the rhetoric of kinship often attract public hostility, where relating intimately with the state is perceived as siding with the authoritarian oppressor. In this political context, the intimate identification of Afghans with the state is met with suspicion and derision by neighbours and close-knit communities. I discuss this ‘affective arrangement’ (Slaby et al. 2019) through the production of a local petition in a low-income neighbourhood of Tehran, where neighbours were requested to attest to a specific matter: the financial constraints of an Afghan veteran and his family.

Local Petition: Suspicion of Intimacy

Neighbours’ petitions (esteshhad-e mahalli) are an integral part of Afghan life in Iran. For instance, if an Afghan family needs to prove length of residence in Iran, they need written testimonies in the form of neighbours’ petitions to establish it. As discussed in the literature on the lives of Afghans in Iran (Adelkhah and Olszewska 2017), the process of obtaining signatures is normally smooth. This is mostly because long-time residence in neighbourhoods creates interdependencies between households which strengthen trust networks and serve as important survival strategies amid life's hardships.

In the case of Afghan veterans returning from war, this process does not work as usual. In place of trust, (un)neighbourly relations can be fraught with suspicion. I noticed this during one of my interactions with Jamal, who was collecting signatures for a neighbours’ petition (esteshhād-e mahalli) in Islamshahr, a satellite town of Tehran. The petition asked neighbours and ‘local trustees’ (moa‘tamedin-e mahalli) to testify that Jamal, as a disabled veteran, was financially constrained and unable to support his family because of his limited income, and that he had no other financial resources. More than half of Jamal's neighbours declined to sign the form. They refused to testify to his poverty as they were not sure ‘how much money he has been receiving from Bashar al-Assad’, suspecting that he had accrued wealth in exchange for his services in Syria: ‘a large sum’ and ‘in dollars’.

The neighbours’ suspicion was rooted in the secrecy that surrounded Jamal's participation in the Syrian war. His recruitment as a ‘volunteer’ fighter was kept secret when he first joined up in 2013, and his wife explained his months-long absence by saying he was in Bushehr working as a seasonal labourer, something he did routinely as a construction worker. This is where the ‘labour of love’ that kinship relations often entail also involve the hard ‘labour of secrecy’ (Andrikopoulos 2020: 312). At the time, no one questioned the explanation for Jamal's absence, except for rumours circulating that some Afghan men in the neighbourhood had joined the Syrian war to make money. Jamal's return, injured, did not ease the rumours. The secret could no longer be contained.

At the time of my initial fieldwork in 2015, the presence of Iran-backed militia forces in Syria was kept secret and disabled Afghans struggled to acquire state care and social recognition while concealing their involvement. The bodies of Afghans became sites of concealment and revelation, requiring public ‘performance of secrecy’ (Herzfeld 2009) and constant negotiations among families, extended kinship, neighbours and the public at large. Here, the wounded bodies emerged as ‘public secret’ (Taussig 1999: 2), something that many tacitly knew or claimed to know but was difficult to articulate or to know for sure.

Jamal returned to Iran in 2014, after his leg was amputated following a gunshot wound. During 2015, I met him every couple of months, and he often showed me photos he had taken in Khan Tuman, Syria, on his phone. In each group photo, he would point out fellow fighters who had been martyred in military operations there. Almost every time, our conversation would lead to a point where he would sigh and complain about people's scorn. ‘Since I came back from Syria, people have been making angry remarks behind my back’, he said. ‘The other day in the mosque, people asked my father how much money I had claimed from the state and how come my father still uses his old bike now that we are so rich’.

Jamal, like thousands of other Afghans, was no stranger to public suspicion regarding militant involvement in the Syrian war. Afghan veterans and their families refer to this collective scorn as the ‘wound of the tongue’ (zakhm-e zaban), a phrase that captures the pain caused by remarks from relatives, neighbours, and acquaintances. Veterans and their families often lamented that their fighting in Syria was labelled as ‘mozdori’, a term that literally means working for payment. In this context, however, mozdori carries a derogatory political meaning, implying they served the political regime – in this case, the Islamic Republic of Iran – purely for financial gain. Afghan veterans and their families stressed that hearing such accusations from kin and neighbours was more painful than physical injuries or the loss of loved ones in the war, as it undermined their sacrifice and religious motives. These remarks highlighted how proximity and familiarity did not guarantee solidarity or trust. On the contrary, the hurt struck at the very heart of sociality, with the ‘attack from within’ being the most frightening, ‘poisoning personal relations by omnipresent suspicions’ (Geschiere 2013: xiii).

Anthropologists have long explored how intimacy can be fraught with danger, particularly in studies of domestic relations or witchcraft (Das and Addlakha 2001; Favret-Saada 2015). These works show that ‘closeness often breeds fear’, with threats more likely to come from kin, friends, or neighbours than from unfamiliar outsiders (Geschiere 2013: 27). It is precisely because those who are close to us understand our vulnerabilities that they can hurt us where it matters most (Graham 2018: 41; cf. Kelly 2012).

The secretive nature of Afghan involvement in the Syrian war intensified the situation. With the expedition still a military secret, Jamal's neighbours found it difficult to uncover any details. While the brutality with which al-Assad and his allies won the war is widely known – and his neighbours may have guessed it – in the absence of trustworthy information, the covert role of Iran and the militias it backed in Syria became visible through the injured bodies of veterans returning to live among them. Their already marginalised refugee status, combined with their disabilities, made Afghan veterans conduits through which transnational conflicts surfaced locally. This reveals how histories and geographies of violence are deeply ingrained in the everyday social realities of war and displacement (Dewachi 2015).

As scholarship on war and its aftermath has shown, wounds can animate both the material and narrated myths of war and conflict (Abu-Sittah 2019; Feldman 2008). This places injury at the intersection of the physical and the social (Das and Addlakha 2001). As Omar Dewachi (2015) observes in his work on Iraqi refugees in Lebanon, a wound develops a social life in everyday encounters such as those between refugees and host communities. Focusing on the social life of wound (Ralph 2012), it is important to note that the wounds of Afghans are often entangled in other histories of violence in a war-stricken region. This is certainly true for Afghans living in Iran, a country that has had to absorb the effects of eight years of war in the 1980s, crippling decades-long economic sanctions, and several regional refugee crises. The social landscape for Afghans in Iran has become even more volatile and hostile in the aftermath of the Syrian conflict and the widespread recruitment of Afghans by the Iranian regime. The situation prompted heated public debate about Iranians’ responsibility towards their Afghan neighbours amid their own struggles with violence and enduring social injuries (Dewachi 2021; Scarry 1985).

This becomes particularly evident against the backdrop of successive rounds of political uprisings, including the 2019 nationwide street protests against the sudden spike in the price of petroleum and, most recently, the 2021 Woman, Life, Freedom movement. At such moments many Iranians question the legitimacy of the state and the substantial foreign aid and weapons it provides to Shi'a fighters across the Middle East. In this hostile public environment, the struggle of foreign combatants for state recognition are perceived as complicit in advancing an oppressive agenda, thrusting Afghan veterans and their families into positions of social mistrust.

Families of Afghans frequently complain that their daily lives are shadowed by suspicion. Rumours about the financial gains and direct benefits from the war are everyday staples as they seek to reconstitute a way of living with life-long disability caused by their injuries. As families and neighbourly relations become entangled in complex social webs, the intimacy of these relationships is strained by suspicion and rage: the emotional scars of layered histories of transnational and sovereign violence.

Conclusion

This article addresses the care negotiations of Afghan veterans upon their return from regional conflicts. Focusing on the bureaucratic assessment of war disability and its documentary practices, it explores the intimate relationships that documents foster between non-citizens and the sovereign state, the broader historical and geopolitical entanglements these documents reveal and the opportunities they create for non-citizens to influence the state. The Iranian context is fertile ground on which to address the non-citizen and state relations of care. In this context, religion, modern governance, revolutionary ideology and transnational affinities inform forms of attachment to the sovereign projects of the state among marginalised subjects and reveal affective modes of claim-making on the state by non-citizens. In this sense, and in keeping with this special issue's focus on affects and the imaginings of the state, this article highlights how the Iranian state is intimately experienced and ‘felt’ through documents, particularly ‘claims, avoidances, and appeals that are made toward it and the affective registers that these invoke’ (Laszczkowski and Reeves 2015: 1).

Anthropologists have long shown how the state is embedded within intimate everyday interactions (Steinmüller 2022; Thelen et al. 2017). In this process, the practices of the state penetrate the most intimate aspects of life, and demand that people view these intimate relationships through the prism of the state. This constant movement between the abstract state that stands apart, and the state that is bound up in everyday hopes and fears, presents the state as an opportunity for feelings of intimacy but also as a source of suspicion.

Building on this understanding, this article combines discussions on suspicion in migration studies with feminist theories and anthropological insights into state intimacy. It offers a fresh perspective from the Global South and the Middle East – particularly Iran, the world's leading host of refugees in 2024 (UNHCR 2024). By exploring how intimacy and suspicion towards the state are forged across various scales of social life – neighbourhoods, state institutions, and transnational boundaries – it opens up new avenues of understanding within the anthropology of bureaucracy and the state.

While much of the migration studies literature – focused primarily on the Global North – often emphasises suspicion as the central organising affect in the relationship between refugees, documents, and the state, this article illustrates a more nuanced interplay between intimacy and suspicion. Documents, acting as ‘proxies of state–noncitizen intimacy’ (Abarca and Coutin 2018: 17), generate both a sense of attachment to the state and reveal moments when such attachments are strained.

By examining the contested production of three documents – an absent medical record, an appeal, and a petition – it becomes clear that suspicion is not the only lens for understanding refugee-state relations in Iran. Claims grounded in an intimate connection to the state play a significant role, opening new spaces to stake claims on the state. These claims are shaped by religious sensibilities (such as the Shi'a concept of sacrifice), languages of relatedness (like brotherhood rooted in shared language and history), and the enduring realities of long-term neighbourhood residency.

In this context, documents not only enforce official rules and mediate care negotiations, but also serve as mediums through which transnational, religious and local affinities are expressed – such as bonds of brotherhood and practices like esteshhad-e mahalli (neighbour's petitions). As a result, assessments of truth and credibility, largely mediated through documents, constantly extend beyond bureaucratic boundaries, with both transnational and local relationships influencing claims.

Additionally, truth and credibility assessments involve not only bureaucrats but also ordinary people, such as neighbours, who actively engage in establishing the truth through the production of documents. This active participation highlights how the mutually implicated relations of intimacy and suspicion take shape within a ‘lattice of relations’ that stretch from governmental institutions to poor neighbourhoods (Das 2020: 217).

By moving across scales of social life, from neighbourhoods and state institutions to regional wars, this article shows how the intertwined affects of intimacy and suspicion create spaces of potentiality where the state's imaginations and practices are experienced, performed, and contested. Neither simply an apparatus of domination nor an unproblematic language of resistance, the political affects of intimacy and suspicion unfold in open-ended yet patterned ways. These dynamics continuously reshape state and non-citizen interactions within a broader sociopolitical landscape and a situated history of rule.