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In Turkey's Kurdish borderlands, smugglers occasionally entered insurgent corridors, the guerrilla-controlled mountainous passages, to bypass state control. This article takes insurgent corridors to frame sovereignty as monopolization of space-making and proposes space-making as a key analytic to examine the forms of sovereignty that facilitate or undermine specific extractive practices. As a spatial form, corridors are central to the claiming and exercising sovereignty and extraction without having complete territorial control across a bounded space or the whole population in that space, the territoriality identified with nation-states. By controlling corridor space and monopolizing the traffic in them, colonial empires, nation-states, corporations, and rebel movements exercised sovereignty and extracted value that is carried or generated by corridor traffic. The insurgent corridors further complicate corridor sovereignty as the Kurdish guerillas monopolized corridor-making without monopolizing and extracting the corridor traffic under a post-nation-state political vision that favors grassroots democratized organization of mobilities and livelihoods rather than centralized exclusive authority and biopolitical governance on them. The insurgent corridors constituted what I call countersovereignty, a practice contesting not only the existing state sovereignty but also political models of nation-state sovereignty and territoriality. While anthropologists understand refusal as disengagement from actors claiming sovereign superiority, the insurgent corridor countersovereignty entailed a distinct form of political refusal that rejects mimicking state sovereignty and associated forms of biopolitical governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurdish smugglers have been targeted and killed by security forces in Turkey's Van borderlands systematically and with impunity. In response, the killed smugglers' families and their lawyers conducted what I call vernacular counterforensics—the forensic examination both of the killings and of the legal authorities' failure to investigate them properly. Associating the Kurdish borderlands with terrorism, the legal authorities often avoided collecting evidence on the killings to make potential perpetrators remain unknown or legally authorize the killings. By documenting this impunity work through their counterforensics, Kurdish complainants and lawyers demonstrated the judiciary's complicity in the systemization of state anti‐Kurdish violence. While anthropological studies show that criminal law operates by individualizing violation claims and perpetrators, vernacular counterforensics illustrates a distinct use of criminal law that reveals, rather than blurs, the state crimes' systematic‐collective aspects. Rather than differentiating technoscientifically produced crime scene evidence from the political circumstances of state crimes, Kurdish complainants and their lawyers used the selective production of such evidence to corroborate the killings' unlawfulness and their systematic‐collective character. This dual use of forensic evidence permits us to rethink analytical and methodological premises that view forensic evidence as fully verifiable and universally applicable and contrast it against contextual and contingent knowledge forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When is a horse not just a pack animal but a criminal accomplice? When is a lamb more than just livestock, but a form of contraband or a witness in court? Pursuing these questions in Van, a Kurdish-majority province of Turkey bordering Iran, this article examines how human-animal collaborations facilitated Kurdish smuggling economies, or what locals called qaçax. I conceptualize qaçax and kaçak (the Turkish word from which it originated), as the inexhaustible capacity to escape control. As the state's counterinsurgency against Kurdish guerillas established an extensive regime of surveillance and control in the Van borderlands, pack animals enabled smuggling convoys to evade state control and survive deadly anti-smuggling ambushes. Smugglers (and smuggler animals) also collaborated to elude the legal evidentiary processes and undermine allegations of smuggling brought against them. Rather than viewing animals as mere objects of legal knowledge, as existing studies have tended to do, the human-animal collaboration in court shows how the animals actually co-produce such knowledge. The smugglers' evasion of criminal charges in court further troubles the categories of illegality and informality that are frequently associated with smuggling, and permits us to think of smuggling economies beyond binaries of legal-illegal, formal-informal, human-nonhuman or living-nonliving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]