‘Escaping Isn't for Everyone’: Kurdish Smugglers’ Navigational Tactics at Checkpoints in Iran

Abstract

This article examines how Kurdish smugglers navigate state and insurgent checkpoints in the borderlands of western Iran. Drawing on ethnographic research, it analyses two key navigational tactics: persin , a form of negotiated passage involving transaction, recognition and the contingent toleration of authority; and jimi , rendered here as fugitive passage, comprising situated manoeuvres to evade, avoid or escape checkpoint control. These tactics operate as constitutive practices that forge the informal and contingent orders emerging at checkpoints. Smugglers co‐produce these checkpoint orders by physically and relationally navigating the infrastructures that govern mobility. Grounded in the ‘politics of passage’, the analysis positions checkpoints as active arenas of claim making where authority is enacted, transacted and reconfigured in practice. Attending to divergent checkpoint regimes, the article demonstrates that state checkpoints rely on personalized and unpredictable extraction, whereas insurgent checkpoints impose routinized, moralized systems of taxation. Smugglers adjust their tactics accordingly, revealing how infrastructures of mobility are shaped by both sovereign enforcement and those who navigate, subvert and rework their constraints.