Juristalks: Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands
Tuesday, March 10, 2026 from 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm
- In-person event
- D492, Loeb Building, Carleton University
- 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6
The Kurdish-populated Wan/Van Province is a major smuggling hub between Turkey and Iran. Kurdish smugglers cross this 180-mile-long land border, transporting everyday consumer goods—fuel, tobacco, sugar, and tea—as well as legally banned items. As the Turkish state has introduced increasingly punitive anti-smuggling laws alongside its counterinsurgency war against Kurdish guerillas, these cross-border economies have become a site of contentious politics. In Smuggling Law, Fırat Bozçalı attends to this terrain and highlights the criminal court as a key arena where borders and claims of sovereignty are simultaneously remade and disrupted. Moving from border villages, mountain passes, and road checkpoints to courtrooms, law offices, and expert witness processes, Bozçalı examines how Kurdish smugglers and their lawyers legally disrupt state sovereignty in criminal courts. Through their strategic use and reworking of legal procedures, rules, and reasonings, these smugglers and lawyers interrupt the courts’ capacity to coopt, discipline, and oppress. Bozçalı theorizes this evasive engagement with the Turkish legal system as a form of techno-legal politics among marginalized and persecuted groups, one that resonates beyond the Kurdish case.
About the speaker: Fırat Bozçalı is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His first book, Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands, was recently published by Stanford University Press. His research engages themes of law and legal activism, technopolitics, borders and transnational flows, contraband economies, sovereignty, counterinsurgency, authoritarianism, cyberspace activism, and more-than-human legalities. Bozçalı has published articles and commentaries in English and Turkish in venues including American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Anthropological Theory, Cultural Anthropology, Journal of Cultural Economy, Middle East Report, Toplum ve Bilim (Turkish), Birikim (Turkish) and Jadaliyya. He has also translated Partha Chatterjee’s Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World into Turkish.
Light refreshments will be provided. Please register below if you wish to attend.