‘Escaping isn’t for everyone’: Kurdish smugglers’ navigational tactics at checkpoints in Iran

This article examines how smugglers navigate state and insurgent checkpoints in the Kurdish region of Iran. Drawing on ethnographic research, it explores smugglers’ tactics of ‘Persin’ (negotiation) and ‘Jimi’ (evasion) that co-produce emergent orders at checkpoints. This article argues that Kurdish smugglers, through their navigational tactics, actively reinforce and challenge the power dynamics at state and insurgent checkpoints. By foregrounding the ‘politics of passage’ – the mutually constitutive struggles over movement and authority – this article illuminates Kurdish smugglers’ agency in navigating both the web of social relation that undergird checkpoints and the practices of mobility in and around the physical infrastructure itself - whether through bribes that secure negotiated passages or using modified cars that enable evasion and circumventions. This article also argues that smugglers do more than just navigate their way through or around formal regulatory regimes established at checkpoints, showing instead how smugglers co-produce contingent informal orders that vary significantly across these spatial nodes of power along illegal trade routes.