Geographies of precarity and violence in the Kurdish kolberi underground economy.

This paper investigates the precarious lives of the Kurdish kolbers, underground laborers who transport cargo on their backs across Iran's border with Iraq. Throughout their arduous journeys, kolbers experience various forms of violence, including direct shooting by border guards. Findings from interviews with the kolbers indicate that kolberi, a strenuous, dangerous, precarious type of labor, is a response to pervasive unemployment in Iranian Kurdistan (Rojhelat), and a long-term consequence of the Iranian state's systematic economic disinvestment in the Kurdish region. Although kolbers assert agency within their labor at localized scales, the social organization of kolberi is a reaction to the Iranian state's biopolitical strategies of economic disinvestment and violence. Drawing on a biopolitical framework, we illustrate the analytical interconnections among the economic marginalization of Rojhelat, violence against the kolbers, and the kolbers' precarious lives. The article offers ideas for future research that come out of our examination of the complexities of kolberi—an examination that demonstrates the importance of incorporating political-economic, ethno-territorial, and biopolitical factors in analyses of underground border exchanges and precarious marginalized lives. • Kolbers are underground Kurdish laborers that transfer cargo on their backs across Iran's border with Iraq and Turkey. • Kolbers experience various forms of violence, including direct shooting by Iranian border guards. • The strenuous labor of kolberi is a response to the pervasive unemployment and underdevelopment in Iranian Kurdistan. • Kurdistan's underdevelopment is situated within a geopolitical context of systematic state disinvestment and securitization. • Kolberi's precarity is simultaneously a part of, and a resistance to the Iranian state's biopolitical strategy in Kurdistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]