Selected Publication
Nauru Prison Theory as Public Philosophy
Displacement, exile, and creative resistance against border violence
Elahe Zivardar & Omid Tofighian
The Philosopher Spring 2024: Punishment
This collaborative work develops what we call Nauru Prison Theory, a form of public philosophy emerging from lived experience, incarceration, and collective resistance.
Drawing on writing, art, and testimony, the piece reframes philosophy as something produced in dialogue with those subjected to border violence, where knowledge is created under conditions of exile.
Launch event
This work was presented and discussed at the public launch of the issue, bringing together contributors and researchers working on border violence, displacement, and carceral systems.
Read full publication.
Essay · Political Theory · 2023
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This work moves between documentation and theory, refusing the separation often imposed between them. The text does not stand apart from the conditions it describes; it emerges from them.
What follows is not illustrative material. These images are part of the same inquiry—produced within the same structures of restriction, proximity, and witnessing. They do not explain the argument. They extend it.
What appears from above as ordered and functional is in fact a deliberately constructed system—where form and function operate together as an architecture of torture, designed to control, contain, and break.
Inside, space is reduced below the minimum conditions for human life. Partitioned into narrow cells, these structures repeat a single message: that those confined within them are meant to feel as though they do not exist.
The environment itself becomes an instrument of control—heat, toxicity, and exposure deliberately sustained to produce exhaustion, illness, and a constant sense of helplessness.
Even within systems designed to erase identity, acts of visibility persist. The body becomes a site of resistance—refusing reduction, refusing silence, refusing disappearance.
What cannot be contained by documentation returns through memory, distortion, and repetition. These forms emerge from trauma—where violence exceeds structure and persists beyond the site itself.
To document under such conditions is not to make everything visible, but to trace the limits of what can be seen—and to insist on their political significance.