Borderwork [electronic resource] : smuggling, techno-legal politics and the making of national borders in the Kurdish borderlands of Turkey
Keywords: Anthropology.

My dissertation challenges the understanding of national borders and law as stable and self-evident forms of orders that are designated and enforced exclusively by state authorities. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in law offices, criminal courts, and border villages in Van, a Kurdish-populated province on the Turkish-Iranian border, I examine how Kurdish smugglers and their lawyers reworked the national borders through techno-legal practices that ranged from official paperwork to expert witness processes. I develop the concept of techno-legal borderwork to examine the processes whereby smugglers and lawyers rework the porosity of national borders. I examine how smugglers and lawyers construed this techno-legal borderwork within the political and moral context of the armed conflict between the Turkish military and Kurdish guerillas, and thus reshaped the politico-moral limits of justifiable smuggling. I eventually show that the state's regimes of surveillance and prosecution gave legal and political agency to Kurdish smugglers and lawyers, who framed their borderwork as a distinct mode of political action countering state sovereignty. During its three-decade-long armed conflict with the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, the PKK) guerillas, the Turkish state authorities militarized the Kurdish region by establishing military bases, military checkpoints and temporary security zones as well as village evacuations and the forced displacement of more than two million people. This militarization devastated existing economic activities of agriculture and animal husbandry in the Kurdish borderlands, and compelled many people to engage in smuggling. Despite the Turkish state's military apparatus, the PKK created guerilla-controlled zones in the Kurdish highlands and borderlands. Even as the PKK guerillas offered their zones to smugglers as free passage corridors, the Turkish state authorities increasingly accused Kurdish smugglers of supporting guerillas and tightened their border enforcement, introducing punitive anti-smuggling laws and arresting more people under the smuggling allegations. In criminal courts, however, Kurdish smugglers and their lawyers, subverted the state's anti-smuggling surveillance. As court experts examined the provenance of allegedly smuggled items through laboratory substance tests that are based on probabilistic uncertainty, the border-crossings of contraband became detectable only with uncertainty. Kurdish smugglers and their lawyers used this uncertainty as a counter legal argument to establish the non-il-legality of contraband and re-articulate national borders as unenforceable limits. In addition to this probabilistic borderwork, for the court cases in which state authorities were accused of killing smugglers, Kurdish claimants and lawyers engaged in ballistic borderwork, a different kind of techno-legal borderwork that designated national borders at metric scales through ballistic evidence to prove the crime location as well as indict culprit(s), without which the cases would be left unresolved. would otherwise stay as unknown and unresolved. Kurdish smugglers and lawyers have engaged in both probabilistic and ballistic borderwork in contrast to and in competition with state authorities, and re-framed national borders in ways that enable certain counter-state political action. While the probabilistic borderwork re-framed national borders as unenforceable limits, and thus undermined the state's monopoly of border-making and border-enforcing, the ballistic borderwork re-enforced national borders to prove the state's crimes against its Kurdish population. Borderwork ultimately undermines the understanding of national borders and law as stable and self-evident order-giving configurations which border-crossers can either comply with or defy. Showing how border-crossers can also rework the ways in which national borders and law are designated and enforced, I present a dynamic and participatory approach to understanding the state and borders. Through my analysis of the unexpected political, legal, and moral agency that techno-legal processes lead to, I conceptualize techno-legal politics as a distinct mode of political actions that enables not only alternative rights claims but also a much more radical form of politics that counteracts state sovereignty.