This project will examine oil smuggling cases in Turkish courts along the Turkish-Iranian-Iraqi borderland. In this region, which is mostly Kurdish-populated, oil smuggling has emerged as a substantial way of earning a living for people facing economic devastation wrought by three decades of armed conflict between the Turkish army and Kurdish guerillas. The project aims to understand the persistence of illegal oil trade in the face of intense military surveillance and frequent court cases about oil smuggling in this borderland. The PI will examine how the mobilization of various legal arguments, court documents with different content and scope of validity, and material qualities of oil (such as the difficulty of marking smuggled oil when it is mixed with legally marketed oil) frame smuggling cases as concerning contested understandings, such as private enterprise or criminal activity. The project will demonstrate how individuals alter legitimate ways of border crossing through binding precedents that establish alternative framings of smuggling in the legal system. Ethnographic work in offices specializing in oil smuggling cases in city centers near Iraq and Iran will allow the researcher to conduct participant-observation, in-depth, semi-structured, life history interviews, and textual analysis of court documents.
The project will contribute to studies of borderlands. The project addresses how the material qualities of objects (i.e. documents and oil) influence social and legal processes, and thereby broadens its analysis of practices through which the legal system is contested. The project will also promote a dynamic approach in analyzing and administering the customs and border protection in eastern Turkey and elsewhere.
States have become increasingly concerned with protecting the integrity of borders while also facilitating legal trade. This study will contribute to understanding how this line is open to contest in legal fora, contributing to understanding significant questions in national security.
The project examined smuggling cases in Turkish courts along the Turkish-Iranian borderland in which the formal economic sectors have been devastated by three decades of armed conflict between the Turkish army and Kurdish guerillas. Initially following the oil smuggling cases, the scope of the project has been extended to cover the smuggling cases of other mass consumption items such as cigarettes and sugar throughout the 12-month long research period. In the project, 52 court cases were collected and analyzed. Semi-structured formal and informal interviews were conducted with the judges, prosecutors, lawyers, paralegals, defendants/litigants, and witnesses involved in these cases. The project has documented and analyzed how traders and lawyers challenge the smuggling allegations in the courts. Through various legal arguments, alternative documentation for export transactions, and different and contending expert witness reports, traders and lawyers propose alternative legal framings of smuggling as legitimate cross-border trade, private property, or individual enterprise. In doing so, traders and lawyers can eventually make courts drop the smuggling charges. Some of these court decisions even become binding precedents and eventually establish the alternative framing of smuggling as a legitimate way of trading. The project calls this work of contesting the smuggling allegations and making courts recognize alternative framings of smuggling, ‘borderwork.’ Although the project has documented and analyzed various examples of borderwork, it has also found that the borderwork requires certain sources that only a number of traders can afford, such as financial capacity to hire a high-profile lawyer. Therefore, borderwork must not be seen as an unlimited capacity available to traders and other border crossers to challenge the state authorities. Moreover, the project has also found that many traders and smugglers justify smuggling as the only means of livelihood available to the locals who suffered from poverty and unemployment wrought by the devastation of formal economic sectors along the armed conflict. In that sense, the project has detected and analyzed how the local population considers lawfulness and morality of smuggling differently from the state authorities. While facilitating international trade, states aim to protect integrity of borders and raise security measures against global threats, illegal migration, and contraband. Although the state authorities make and implement these policies on border protection, this project shows that the border-crossers can and do contest and rework these policies through the legal processes. Therefore, ultimately, the project has provided empirical findings to promote a more dynamic and participatory approach in analyzing and administering issues of international trade, national security, and border protection in Turkey and elsewhere.
