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 ninth in a new working paper series on Roadblocks and revenues, a collaboration between ICTD, the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), and the Centre on Armed Groups (CAG).
- Read the first paper, which introduces the working paper series
- The second one, which focuses on cross-border trade and state formation in Afghanistan
- The third, on the political economy of opium flows in Burma/Myanmar
- The fourth, on criminal group checkpoints governing cross-border smuggling between Colombia & Venezuela
- The fifth, on how checkpoints drive increasing autonomy in the Myanmar civil war
- The sixth, on checkpoints, fragmentation, and social differentiation in Somalia
- The seventh, on the dramaturgy of Congo’s roadblocks
- And the eight, on the rebel-territorial trap in Myanmar
