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Crossing the mountain and negotiating the border: Human smuggling in eastern Turkey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2018

Özge Biner
Özge Biner*
Affiliation:
Institut interdisciplinaire d’anthropologie du contemporain, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 54 Boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris, France; ozge.biner@ehess.fr.
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Abstract

Human smuggling is a complex process. Made up of actions both organized and chaotic, it compels migrants to deal with different structures and agents of power, among them smugglers, the state(s), and migrants’ own social networks. The current literature on human smuggling provides a detailed analysis of the different phases of this process, within which discussion of the structure and operation of this “business” can be situated. However, only minimal attention has been paid to migrants’ agency in the smuggling process. Engaging with recent perspectives in migration studies, which emphasize the need to conceptualize human smuggling by focusing on the interdependencies between the different actors involved, the analysis developed in this article aims to explore the different phases of the human smuggling process by focusing on the multilayered relations between smugglers and undocumented people. Drawing upon qualitative ethnographic fieldwork conducted with migrants on the Turkish-Iranian border, the article examines how the physical and sociopolitical conditions of border crossing affect people’s ways of thinking, behavior, and engagement with different structures of power. In doing so, the article attempts to further our understanding of how smuggled migrants mobilize their agency in such a way as to manipulate and challenge the system, as well as of how this process transforms migrants’ capacity to simultaneously recognize and unsettle state bordering practices.

Keywords

human smugglingTurkeyIranian migrantsborder crossing experience
Type
Special Dossier: Researching human smuggling in the Mediterranean
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 59 , November 2018 , pp. 89 - 108
Copyright
© New Perspectives on Turkey and Cambridge University Press 

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Footnotes

Author’s Note: An earlier version of this article was presented in 2014 at the Clandestine Migration Journey workshop held at Brown University. I would like to thank the organizers of the workshop, Noelle Brigden and Cetta Mainwaring, for their excellent insights and feedback. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their helpful suggestions.

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