Escaping isn’t for everyone: How Kurdish smugglers navigate checkpoints

Peyman Zinati

Roadblocks & Revenues Working Paper Series #09

Peyman Zinati has spent years studying how smugglers navigate state and insurgent checkpoints in the Kurdish region of Iran. Drawing on his ethnographic research, he explores smugglers’ tactics of ‘Persin’ (negotiation) and ‘Jimi’ (evasion) that co-produce emergent orders at checkpoints. Through bribes that secure negotiated passages or using modified cars that enable evasion and circumventions, Kurdish smugglers co-produce contingent informal orders that vary significantly across these spatial nodes of power along illegal trade routes. In doing so, he also draws attention to the opportunities and limitations imposed on smugglers’ options by the physical landscape and material infrastructures, and how these inform the creative shapes that smuggling takes.

This paper is the nineth in a new working paper series on Roadblocks and Revenues, a collaboration between the Danish Institute for International Studies, the International Centre for Tax and Development and the Centre on Armed Groups.