Doctoral Dissertation Research: Borderwork in Courtrooms: Documents, Oil, Smuggling in Eastern Turkey.

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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.