Veysel Firat Bozcali

VEYSEL FIRAT BOZCALI, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2021 to aid research and writing of “Borders Unenforced: Kurdish Smuggling Economies and Techno-legal Politics in Turkey.” Support allowed the grantee to finalize two writing projects: a book manuscript, “Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands” (under contract with Stanford University Press), and a journal article, “Corridors of Countersovereignty,” published in Anthropological Theory (2024, vol. 24, no. 3). Taking the readers from border villages, mountain passes, and road checkpoints to courtrooms, law offices, and forensic laboratories, the book examines how Kurdish smugglers disrupt the legal exercise of state sovereignty in criminal courts. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Wan/Van Province of Turkey, it demonstrates how Kurdish smugglers and lawyers, as members of a persecuted people, adopt and rework legal procedures, rules, and reasonings in ways that interrupt the courts’ capacity to coopt, discipline, and oppress. The article explores how “insurgent corridors” in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands, controlled by guerrilla forces, challenge state sovereignty and the forms of spatial control associated with it. Unlike nation-states that dominate space to extract value, Kurdish guerrillas used these corridors to facilitate smugglers’ mobility without monopolizing or extracting from the traffic. These insurgent corridors thus constituted “countersovereignty,” a distinct political act that contests nation-state sovereignty and associated forms of biopolitical governance, while also rejecting the mimicry of such models.