Corridors of countersovereignty: Insurgency,smuggling,and post-nation-state politics in Turkey's Kurdish highlands

Abstract

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.

Introduction

I was visiting Baran, a 22-year-old man who survived an anti-smuggling ambush that the Turkish gendarmerie, the rural police force, had conducted.¹ Baran's village was located a few kilometers from the Turkish–Iranian borderline in Van's Çaldıran district. Sharing an over 180-mile mountain border with Iran, the predominantly Kurdish-populated Van province was known as one of the leading smuggling nodes that connected the Kurdish borderlands to Turkey's central and western regions. The ambush happened a few kilometers outside their village and several months prior to my visit. Seven mounted smugglers (qaçaxçî) were accompanied by a pack of mules carrying contraband cigarettes and diesel fuel from Iran. Apparently, the smugglers also had bribed the commander of the nearby gendarmerie station for safe passage. As I knew from various other smuggling incidents, though, bribing security forces before a smuggling campaign did not necessarily guarantee the smugglers’ safe passage—they were often intercepted and targeted by the security forces even after paying bribes.

Roughly half an hour after they had crossed the border into Turkey, the smugglers came within range of a patrolling group of soldiers and were fired upon. The convoy quickly dispersed, as the mounted smugglers fled in different directions to seek cover. All of the smugglers except Baran's cousin escaped; his cousin was shot and killed. In the ensuing weeks, Baran and his cousin's family brought a legal complaint against the gendarmeries who participated in the ambush, accusing them of murder. As part of my fieldwork, I was working as a law clerk in the office of the lawyer who represented them. The purpose of my visit to Baran was to review statements from the gendarmerie commander and the other soldiers involved in the ambush. The commander and the soldiers did not deny firing upon the smugglers, but they claimed they had confused the smugglers with guerrillas from the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), a pro-Kurdish armed organization that Turkish authorities deemed a terrorist group. In their official statements, the soldiers identified the ambush location as a “terror region” (terröre müzahir bölge), a region associated with high guerrilla (or what the soldiers called “terrorist”) activity.

Baran disagreed with the soldiers’ depiction of the ambush area as a “terror region,” which he preferred to call a guerrilla zone (qada gerîla in Kurdish or gerilla alanı in Turkish), an area that the PKK forces controlled. The area of guerrilla activity that Baran described was more than 20 km away from the inter-city road and the borderline into Mount Tendürek. Baran then explained that the smugglers used the guerrilla zones on Tendürek to transport contraband goods to the west of Van and to central and western Turkey. He added that “the soldiers would not intervene with the smugglers in that region; they do not lay an ambush in the guerrilla zone that easily.” Thus, as he explained, Kurdish smugglers preferred to use these zones whenever possible to circumvent security forces for a portion of their smuggling journeys.

During my 20 months of fieldwork (from 2012 to 2014) in Van, I met several smugglers who expressed that they also used the de facto guerrilla zones, many of which were located tens or hundreds of kilometers within the national territory, to bypass state authorities during their smuggling journeys. The PKK forces created and upheld these zones to facilitate travel by stealth, coordinate attacks on distant military targets, and maintain a dynamic stalemate with the military. In time, Kurdish smugglers identified these zones as free-passage corridors to circumvent state control, if not necessarily the state's aerial surveillance. In doing so, the smugglers protected themselves from the security forces’ ambushes, routinely demanded bribes, and avoided collaboration with the security forces against the guerrillas, including providing intelligence on guerrilla units or even participating in paramilitary groups armed by the state. I call these zones insurgent corridors—mountainous passages that state security forces avoided when raiding nomads (koçer), villagers, and smugglers unless the forces were acting as part of a broader military operation that involved multiple land forces and often had aerial support. I use the term insurgent to address both the guerrilla-controlled aspect of these zones and the emergent and contingent character of the zone itself—the shifting (rather than fixed) territorial control exerted within them. Because the guerrillas held these corridors through continuous, perhaps coordinated but nonetheless intermittent, confrontations with security forces, the specific locations and boundaries of the insurgent corridors (and, subsequently, their use by the Kurdish smugglers) often shifted.

Corridors are specific spatial arrangements that connect distant places, people, and objects with each other through narrow, limited, or volumetric (three-dimensional) spaces and that facilitate otherwise impossible or difficult mobilities (see also Smyer Yü and Dean, 2022). Rather than all-encompassing and exclusive territorial control over a particular area or bounded space, corridors rely on command over specific passages, strategic nodes in them, or circulation infrastructures, such as land, maritime, and air vehicles or pipelines and power lines (Carse et al., 2023; Schouten et al., 2019). The command of corridor mobilities involves facilitation and obstruction (or suspension) of circulation, the capacity to condense and thus slow down (rather than accelerate) these flows (Carse et al., 2023), and the capacity to re-channel these flows and make new connections (Dua, 2018, 2023; Dunn, 2023). In that sense, corridor-making refers to a specific form of space-making that relies on constructing, maintaining, and controlling particular circulation infrastructures, such as land roads, railroads, sea routes, seaports, or airports, and ensuring the flow of traffic through the use or threat of violence. Colonial empires, nation-states, and corporations used (maritime and land) corridor-making to create various regimes of extraction in distant destinations without establishing extensive territorial control and made sovereignty claims that are fragmented and overlapping rather than absolute and mutually exclusive (Benton, 2010; Beverley, 2020; Hansen, 2021). Rather than identifying corridor-making with states or corporations exclusively, other scholars have demonstrated that local communities and rebel groups may control certain corridors or specific nodes on them, such as roadblocks or checkpoints, to generate political and economic power (Hoffman et al., 2016; Schouten, 2019) and mimic the state's logic of exclusion and extraction (Galemba, 2018; Lombard, 2013; Reeves, 2014; Roitman, 2005).

Understanding sovereignty as space-making that operates in the register of the geopolitical and topographical rather than the biopolitical (Von Bieberstein and Evren, in this issue; Simpson, 2011), I define corridor sovereignty as a unique type of sovereignty that relies on the monopolization of corridor-(re)making and the corridor traffic. The monopolization of the corridor traffic refers to the claim and exercise of exclusive authority to determine who can join the corridor traffic, what can be moved through it, and who may experience delays or redirection in the traffic. This monopolization of corridor traffic leads to a specific type of extraction that I call corridor extraction, which is based on the violent capture of the value that is carried or generated by corridor traffic. The monopolization and extraction of corridor traffic often rely on the fixed territorial control of either the corridor space or strategic nodes on it, which establish the capacities to stop, delay, tax, and restrict the movement of people, animals, and goods (Carse et al., 2023; Schouten et al., 2019).

When Kurdish smugglers passed through areas under the control of state security forces, they encountered corridor extraction in which the security forces captured value through the use of violence or threat thereof. The security forces’ extraction of smuggler corridors generated value in the form of bribes, contraband items, or intelligence on the guerrillas. By facilitating contraband commerce of those who had joined the state's paramilitary force, the village guards or those who worked in state officers’ own smuggling ventures, the security forces also extracted (paramilitary or smuggling service) labor from the smugglers (see also Balta, 2007; Erdinç, 2004). For this corridor extraction, the security forces often intercepted Kurdish smugglers who were not associated with the paramilitary forces and occasionally opened fire on them to kill, maim, or wound.² The Turkish government justified these killings by accusing Kurdish smugglers of providing the PKK forces with logistical support, including carrying food and other much-needed equipment to PKK bases in mountainous areas and providing financial contributions to the organization. The authorities also alleged that the PKK guerrillas had been taxing smugglers and conducting their own smuggling operations in collaboration with them. However, Baran and other smuggler interlocutors offered a different account. Rather than monopolizing and extracting value from the corridor traffic, the guerrillas remotely monitored the smugglers’ passage across the areas under their control without intercepting them.

This article takes insurgent corridors and the ways that Kurdish smugglers used them as free passages to conceptualize a distinct form of corridor sovereignty. In the case of insurgent corridors, the guerrillas’ corridor sovereignty, namely, the corridor-making and its monopolization, did not lead to a monopolization of the corridor traffic and thus corridor extraction. Contrary to other cases of corridor sovereignty exercised by states or rebel groups (Benton, 2010; Carse et al., 2023; Schouten et al., 2019), the PKK-upheld corridors did not immediately result in the violent capture of value that was generated or transported by the corridor traffic. In this way, the insurgent corridors complicate corridor sovereignty by decoupling it from corridor extraction and thereby differentiating the monopolization of corridor-making from the monopolization of corridor traffic. The PKK guerrillas did not establish permanent territorial control of strategic nodes on insurgent corridors and engaged with the smuggling traffic only remotely and indirectly to facilitate and re-channel it. The remote engagement allowed the guerrillas to avoid monopolization and extraction of corridor traffic while retaining the corridor sovereignty that they achieved by monopolizing corridor-(re)making and use of violence in corridor space.

The guerrillas refrained from monopolizing the corridor traffic as part of the post-nationalist and autonomist political vision, which began to be articulated in the 1990s but was officially embraced by the PKK in the 2000s. This vision aimed to safeguard people from the state's regime of violence and dispossession while avoiding the replication of the nation-state sovereignty and associated forms of exclusion and extraction. According to this political perspective, both violence and law-making were set to be fully democratized and organized through local assemblies (Akkaya and Jongerden, 2012). Yet, because the existing political conditions in different parts of Kurdistan presented challenges in the immediate and simultaneous realization of such vision, the PKK conceptualized “self-defense” as a way to retain the monopolization of violence and space-making (as exemplified by insurgent corridors) and as a necessary yet temporary practice in the context of state violence (Üstündağ, 2016). Although the PKK guerrillas retained corridor sovereignty, they abstained from monopolizing the corridor traffic to not mimic the state's biopolitical management of mobilities and livelihoods. Rather than considering it a future political promise, the PKK already practiced its vision of grassroots democracy by leaving the smuggling traffic and the traffic-based livelihoods to be organized locally by the smugglers themselves. In doing so, the PKK asserted political legitimacy on the ground.

The insurgent corridor sovereignty that the PKK exercised generated what I call countersovereignty—the practice of disrupting and undermining state sovereignty while rejecting state sovereignty as a political model. In conceptualizing countersovereignty, I build upon Glen Coulthard's (2014) depiction of indigenous land and road blockades in a North American context as “disruptive countersovereignty.” Coulthard has emphasized how these blockades contest settler colonial state's rule and proclaim an alternative relationship with the land, one based on interdependence and reciprocity (2014: 118; see also Bosworth and Chua, 2023; Mann, 2016). The countersovereignty exercised in Kurdish insurgent corridors challenged Turkish state sovereignty and its colonial claims on the Kurdish homeland as well as projected an alternative form of sovereignty that monopolized corridor-making and violence without necessarily engaging in and reproducing corridor extraction.³ Rather than establishing a different and rival (Kurdish) state sovereignty or sharing the Turkish state's sovereignty claims, the insurgent corridors politically rejected the nation-state model and associated sovereignty claims, undermining the very territorial (and geopolitical) conditions for making such claims.

The insurgent corridor countersovereignty entailed a distinct form of political refusal insofar as it avoided mimicking the state's biopolitical logics of monopolization and the extraction of corridor traffic and related livelihoods.⁴ Political refusal has been defined as a distinct act that is based on the denial of sovereign subjugation by not taking actors who claim sovereign superiority as legitimate interlocutors and by rejecting any engagement with them, including negotiation and even contestation (McGranahan, 2016; Prasse-Freeman, 2022; Simpson, 2014). Although the PKK guerillas contested the Turkish state sovereignty to create the insurgent corridors, they also pursued an act of refusal by avoiding the biopolitical management of circulation and circulation-based livelihoods. The guerrillas’ political refusal relied on the denial of not only the sovereign superiority of the Turkish state but also the nation-state sovereignty as a political model.

The PKK and counterinsurgency in Turkey's Kurdistan

Following the end of World War I, Kurdistan, the historical homeland of the Kurds, was divided among the non-Kurdish nation-states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Shortly after its establishment in 1923, the Turkish Republic denied Kurdish political autonomy and cultural rights and imposed centralization and Turkification policies on the region. Under these policies, republican authorities undermined Kurdish economic autonomy and “de-developed” Kurdish lands while criminalizing trade across Kurdish communities that were now under the jurisdiction of different nation-states (Yadirgi, 2017). Against this background of state borders and the militarization of borderlands, smuggling emerged as a key dynamic that facilitated economic, social, and political exchanges across the Kurdish communities.

The denial and suppression of Kurdish autonomy was also met with armed resistance. The Turkish state suppressed several rebellions in Turkey's Kurdistan during the 1920s and 1930s. During the 1970s, following a period of relative silence, Kurdish liberation politics re-emerged with the rise of leftist-revolutionary politics and led to the foundation of several Kurdish revolutionary organizations. Although the military coup of 1980 destroyed most of the Kurdish and Turkish revolutionary organizations in Turkey, the PKK survived this period. After a few years of training and arming guerrillas, securing bases in Iraqi Kurdistan, and revitalizing its support network within Turkey, the PKK launched guerrilla warfare against the Turkish state in 1984. During the late 1980s and 1990s, the PKK garnered popular support and arguably was the largest military challenge to the Turkish Republic.

The PKK initiated an armed struggle with simultaneous attacks on two districts, Şemdinli and Eruh, in the Kurdish highlands. The location of these dual attacks underlined the guerrilla commanders’ initial plan of securing bases in the Kurdish highlands, particularly the mountains cutting across the provinces of Hakkâri/Colemêrg, Van/Wan, Siirt, Bitlis, Mush, Diyarbakir/Amed, and Şırnak (which became a province of its own in 1990). During the 1990s, the guerrillas expanded their presence in Kurdish mountains, including Ararat and Tendürek, that connected borderlands across Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan's autonomous region Nakhchivan, and Armenia as well as the highlands of Dersim/Tunceli, Erzincan, and Sivas. Through constant guerrilla warfare, the PKK began to dominate certain parts of the highlands, restrict Turkish military access to these areas by land, and establish temporary and seasonal guerrilla bases, although the Turkish authorities (through aerial surveillance) monitored these bases.

The guerrillas’ decision to establish themselves in the Kurdish mountains was a strategic move. The rugged terrain, with narrow canyons, rocky landscapes, and deep caves, provided the perfect cover for their insurgency and allowed them to move quickly and stealthily and to orchestrate attacks on distant military targets (see also Gordillo, 2018, 2023; Otero-Bahamon et al., 2022; White, 2023). The mountain creeks and subterranean water reservoirs provided much-needed water and enabled journeys of several days with minimal food. A former guerilla once told me that they could walk for days with just a handful of salt, which they ate to avoid drops in blood pressure. The guerillas engagement with the Kurdish highlands thus generated a strong and recalcitrant armed resistance. What lied at the heart of this armed resistance was the guerrillas’ use of Kurdish highlands as three-dimensional volumes rather than two-dimensional zones (Billé, 2020; Elden, 2013).

In the 1990s, the Turkish government responded to the PKK presence in Kurdistan, especially in the highlands, by waging a counterinsurgency campaign. As part of its counterinsurgency, the Turkish government aimed to create a military force that could match the guerrillas’ effective use of rugged terrain by mimicking the guerillas’ activities (Açıksöz, 2019). The plan involved creating and expanding special force units and recruiting paramilitary forces from Kurdish communities and former PKK members who knew the rugged terrain and the guerrillas’ fighting tactics well (Işık, 2021; Jongerden, 2007). The military began to navigate the mountains and search for guerrillas rather than station troops in bases to defend those bases.

The state's counterinsurgency also aimed to de-populate rural Kurdistan and thereby undermine the guerrillas’ logistical base. Under this policy, the military first imposed food embargos on mountain villages, built road checkpoints to limit transporting food in and out of the villages, and declared no-go zones. The government then started to forcibly evacuate and destroy Kurdish villages, which displaced more than three million villagers from rural Kurdistan (Jongerden, 2007). The government also built military stations and watch towers that were equipped with long-range thermal imagers, while the security forces imposed permanent and temporary road checkpoints, restricted inter-city road traffic, and enforced curfews in Kurdish cities and towns (Özcan, 2021).

By the end of the 1990s, the counterinsurgency undermined guerrilla warfare and re-established state surveillance and military presence across the official road networks. However, the guerrilla presence persisted across the highlands and borderlands. PKK forces continued to control certain parts of the highlands and kept the Turkish military away from these areas, even though state security forces monitored the guerrilla zones. The guerrillas established these zones by coordinating multiple simultaneous raids on different military targets. When a military operation fought a guerrilla group, the group would initially clash with the military forces, then withdraw to higher and inner (or, by using caves, deeper) lands, and coordinate with other guerrilla groups in other zones to raid military or gendarmerie bases. These raids forced the military to pause operations or divide its forces to support other military bases in repelling the guerrilla raids.

Through their multiple and spatially coordinated attacks, the guerrillas achieved a stalemate with the military. Yet, it was dynamic because it depended on repeated guerrilla attacks as the state security forces sought to re-establish control in the zones. For this reason, the boundaries of guerrilla zones were never fully clear and known. As these boundaries shifted, the guerrilla zones remained emergent as insurgent spatialities. Occasionally, the Turkish military pushed these insurgent zones away and narrowed their spatial scope. At other times, the guerrilla activity pushed the Turkish military back to expand the guerrilla-controlled zones.

In this way, the insurgent zones in Turkey's Kurdistan were not liberated areas that were stable or fixed territories. The guerrillas monitored these zones and could intercept those who entered and traversed the zones, but they did not necessarily command all (human) mobilities across or within the zones’ boundaries. The guerrillas did not impose permanent checkpoints or roadblocks; they did not engage in the defense of a particular line or area. If needed, guerrilla forces could withdraw and shift the geographical location of the overall guerrilla zone. The mobile character of the guerrilla-controlled zones relied on and resulted in shifting corridor spatiality. Rather than maintaining territorial control of a bounded space, the guerrillas established dynamic corridors, passages, and short-cuts covered over rugged lands or through forests. Through these corridors of insurgency, the guerrillas moved stealthily and quickly, avoided military defeat, and inflicted multiple coordinated attacks.

The shifting corridor spatiality of the guerrilla presence was also illustrated in how PKK forces avoided the use of hand-sketched or printed paper maps because paper maps might be taken (or easily copied) by the military and used as intelligence against the guerillas. Instead, they relied on oral maps, which I first heard of from former guerrillas. Apparently, the guerrilla groups often had several guerrillas who could recognize specific passages and shelter areas by recognizing (or reading) the specific marks on the terrain and landscape. These guide-guerrillas could detect these marks by memorizing them during their previous marches or memorizing other guerrillas’ oral descriptions of them. Aside from being a security risk, the paper maps were not dynamic enough to reflect the constant changes in the specific passages, the very insurgent character of the insurgent (guerrilla) corridors.

The guerrillas established and held the highland corridors for their own stealth and quick mobility during the dynamic stalemate with the Turkish military. Yet, others, such as smugglers or nomads, who also resided or traversed the Kurdish highlands, used these corridors to circumvent state surveillance and control. Thus, the insurgent corridors occasionally functioned as, or gave rise to parallel, smuggling corridors.

Smuggling corridors in Kurdistan

Since the division of Kurdistan, Kurdish smugglers maintained political, social, and economic relations across Kurdish communities in different states. During periods of heightened oppression and violence, the smugglers had a crucial role in facilitating cross-border circulations of state-banned, pro-Kurdish political ideas and literature, including literary and musical works in the Kurdish language. They also helped Kurdish fugitives to cross borders and escape state persecution. During rebellions, the smuggling networks provided weapons, ammunition, and other important logistical necessities to Kurdish militants (Çelik, 2020).

In the 1990s and onwards, the material, financial, and logistical scope of Kurdish smuggling economies has significantly expanded because of the state's counterinsurgency against the PKK. In addition to establishing military bases, checkpoints, watchtowers, and security zones as well as forcing village evacuations and the displacement of more than three million people, the counterinsurgency destroyed the existing agriculture and livestock economies. The conflict-inflicted social and economic conditions have compelled an increasing number of urban and rural people to engage in smuggling as a primary means of livelihood. Along with banned items, such as guns and heroin, everyday consumer items, such as oil, tea, tobacco, and sugar, were also increasingly smuggled during this period. As the Turkish economy deteriorated because of corruption and increasing war expenses, the succeeding governments increased sales tax on ordinary items to fund internal and external borrowing (Doğan, 1998). The rising sales tax, high inflation, and recurring devaluation of Turkish currency increased the difference in these goods’ prices between Turkey and its neighbors and, consequently, enabled smuggling-based arbitrage. As of the early 2000s, each year, a billion packages of cigarettes, half a billion gallons of oil, and a few hundred tons of tea and sugar were smuggled into Turkey through its Kurdish-populated borderlands. State officials estimated that 300 million liters of contraband oil entered Turkey through the Van borderlands (TGNA, 2005). Since the 1980s, Van borders had become an important route for irregular migrants—Kurdish smugglers charged fees to help the migrants navigate the rugged borderlands—and the scope of human smuggling significantly expanded in 2011 with the outbreak of the Syrian civil war and recently with the Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan since 2021 (Augustova and Suber, 2023).

Smuggling activities in the Van borderlands operated on a particular geographical trajectory. Contraband goods were first smuggled by pack animals from Kurdish villages on the Iranian side to the villages on the Turkish side of the border, where they were stored. They were transported by motor vehicles (cars, small trucks, minibuses, or tractor-trailers) to Kurdish city centers first and then to Turkey's central and western cities via inter-city roads. The contraband goods, especially oil and cigarettes, were mostly consumed outside of the Kurdish region. The city-based traders collected these goods from the border villagers and organized their transportation to and storage and marketing in the cities. While border villagers and other carrier smugglers, such as drivers who transported contraband goods across the land–road network, often risked being caught, imprisoned, shot, and even killed, city-based trader–smugglers mainly risked financial loss but obtained most of the smuggling revenue.

During the counterinsurgency, state security forces established an extensive network of road checkpoints across inter-city roads. At these checkpoints, the security forces surveilled traffic, checked drivers’ and passengers’ id cards, and searched their vehicles. The security forces also heavily monitored the rugged border passages that the smugglers used to transport contraband cargo across the borders. Kurdish smugglers could bribe soldiers for passage without being intercepted or to cross road checkpoints without being caught or having their contraband confiscated. Yet, as there were tens of different checkpoints, arranging free passage through bribery was a significant financial burden. Even if smugglers had paid such bribes, security forces might still target them, just as Baran's convoy was ambushed despite having bribed the soldiers. In addition to bribes, the security forces could demand intelligence or paramilitary services against Kurdish guerillas.

Besides bribing the state officers, Kurdish smugglers would use a “joker” car, a vehicle that would drive several minutes ahead of a vehicle that carried the contraband cargo or migrants to signal any road control or ambush. When the joker car encountered a road control, the vehicle with contraband stopped and waited until the road control was lifted or until soldiers left the road checkpoint. The other alternative was to use village roads to bypass the controls. Village roads were a common way of circumventing road checkpoints, but these roads were poorly maintained and were difficult to traverse with motor vehicles because of ice, snow, or mud in certain seasons. Moreover, state security forces could still monitor some of these roads and conduct stings on smuggler convoys who used them. Waiting until soldiers abandoned the checkpoints or taking longer detours significantly delayed the smuggling journeys and led to state's extraction of time from the smugglers.

In addition, residents of the villages along the roads could also impose tolls on the smugglers (see also Özcan, 2014). Kurdish villagers’ tolls relied on historically entrenched practices of Kurdish nomadic mobility and tribal territoriality in which semi-nomadic tribes claimed passage rights in exchange for a payment from the tribes who resided along their routes. Although the residing tribes did not challenge the passage rights in principle, they often re-negotiated the payment and blamed the nomads for allowing their herds to over-consume the herbage; in return, nomads frequently accused the residents of theft (Van Bruinessen, 1992). Reflecting these fragile negotiations and disputes between the nomads and villagers, the arrangements between smugglers and villagers were often disputed and led to re-negotiations.

Given the state surveillance and extraction, the safest option for smugglers was the guerrilla-controlled insurgent zones. These corridors allowed smugglers to transport contraband for tens of kilometers to circumvent the roadblocks. The insurgent zones stretched across the Kurdish highlands, and the smugglers often carried contraband goods with mules and horses over this rugged terrain. In some cases, smugglers transported contraband by first using vehicles, then loaded the goods onto pack animals through an insurgent corridor, and then, after circumventing road checkpoints, reloaded the cargo onto land vehicles for delivery to destinations in central or western Turkey. In other cases, smugglers would use pick-up trucks, mini-trucks, or minivans equipped with winter tires. While navigating this terrain, they often turned off the vehicles’ lights and used night vision goggles, which they obtained from arms markets in Iraq, Iran, or former Soviet countries. In this way, insurgent corridors protected the smugglers from extraction by state officials or villagers who resided on smuggling routes.

In many cases, the corridors provided not only an opportunity to bypass the state's and villagers’ extraction but also the shortest possible route. Thus, the guerilla corridors not only undermined the state's extraction of time from smugglers; but in certain cases, they also enabled the smugglers to save time. As the guerillas traversed the highlands quickly and stealthily, they marked, and sometimes created, shorter routes by moving rocks and wood blocks around and by building makeshift bridges across small creeks. These shorter routes also maintained an opacity from or inaccessibility to state forces. In that sense, the PKK's insurgent corridors resembled forest roads that FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerillas built to accommodate local people's mobility alongside their own logistical needs, which simultaneously rendered the forested lands accessible to themselves and inaccessible to state forces (Otero-Bahamon et al., 2022).

While the FARC guerillas constructed forest roads to interconnect the state-neglected and otherwise non-connected forested areas, the PKK corridors laid parallel to the state circulation infrastructures and in this way allowed itinerants to bypass the state's infrastructures (Otero-Bahamon et al., 2022). Occasionally, the insurgent corridors also expanded into inter-city road networks and road checkpoints that the Turkish military could not attend to or operate because of guerrilla activity. For example, in the summer of 2012, when I first arrived in Van for my fieldwork, the conflict seemed to have evolved into a full-scale war between the Turkish military and Kurdish guerrilla forces, especially in certain border areas. The guerrilla activity mainly centered around Şemdinli/Şemzînan District of Hakkâri Province, which is located between Iran and Iraq and is connected to the mainland of Turkey by two narrow mountain passages, the Haruna and Şapatan passages. In June 2012, the Kurdish guerrillas began a new military campaign to block the Turkish military's land access to Şemdinli district by taking control of these two passages. At the peak of the clashes, the PKK guerrillas took control of the Şapatan but failed to control the other. A few weeks later, the Turkish military managed to take back the Şapatan passage. Eventually, the guerrilla forces withdrew from the town center to their mountain bases and held their position along southern Şemdinli.

During that guerrilla campaign, which lasted until the end of September 2012, I observed that most of the main, permanent checkpoints in Van and Hakkâri Provinces were either unattended or partially active during the day. Guerrilla activity had managed to significantly push back the Turkish military presence alongside the borderlands in Kurdistan. This push facilitated smuggling activities in the region. As I later learned from my interlocutors from different border towns in Van and Hakkâri, Kurdish smugglers had taken advantage of the guerrilla operation in the rugged border passages and official land–road network. Since almost all of the road checkpoints were unattended during the day and night, the smugglers managed to quickly transport contraband cargo from the borderland region to central Turkey without interference. If the checkpoints had been staffed, the smugglers would have needed to bribe soldiers, use a joker car, and/or take village roads to circumvent the checkpoints; they might have had to unload and reload their cargo between land vehicles and pack animals. Following the guerrillas’ withdrawal, however, the road checkpoints on the main inter-city roads of Van and Hakkâri Provinces gradually re-appeared. As the checkpoints came back, the smugglers stopped using these roads if they did not have a joker car or began using village roads to bypass the checkpoints. Because of the dynamic character of the stalemate and the constant push and pull between the guerrillas and the military, the smugglers needed the most up-to-date information about the stalemate and where the insurgent zones actually were. As long as they correctly located the insurgent corridors, my smuggler interlocutors expressed that these corridors mostly bypassed the state violence and extraction without coming across or being intercepted by the guerrillas. While I first heard about the use of insurgent zones as smuggling corridors from smugglers, late into my fieldwork, in the summer of 2013, I met a former guerrilla, whom I call Kawa, through a mutual friend. As we discussed my research on Kurdish smuggling economies and the state's criminalization of them and spent time in villages and the rugged lands near the border, he shared his experiences of navigating the Kurdish highlands as a guerrilla. Our conversations provided me with the guerillas’ point of view of the smugglers’ use of the free-passage corridors, which I turn to in the next section.

The post-nation-state politics and countersovereignty

Kawa was originally from a village near the Turkish–Iraqi border and, when he was a young boy, had participated in smuggling convoys with his father and older brothers. At the age of 19, in the 2000s, he joined the guerrilla ranks. After spending a year and a half in their ranks, he was wounded in a landmine explosion and left. He returned to his hometown where he was arrested and spent several years in prison. As a guerrilla fighter, Kawa had been stationed in different regions and would regularly cross guerrilla zones, which covered a rugged area of more than 20,000 square miles from the western regions of Van to the border regions in the Hakkâri Province and Qandil Mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan, by foot. On these walks, he stated that they would occasionally come across nomads and smugglers. Unless the nomads, villagers, or smugglers wanted to visit or speak to them, the guerrillas would simply watch them from a distance and let them pass: “We wanted to be sure that they were not the special forces in disguise of smugglers or nomads, for our own protection.” My conversations with Kawa resonated with those I had with my smuggler interlocutors. While the smugglers traversed guerrilla zones, the guerrillas did not attempt to monopolize and extract the smuggling traffic, and most of the time they avoided direct contact with the smugglers or tried to remain hidden from them.

As Kawa explained, avoiding contact was a security measure, as the guerrillas suspected that smuggler convoys might be a potential decoy of the security forces. Yet, their refraining from monopolizing and extracting the corridor traffic was adopted under the Kurdish movement's broader political vision of not imitating nation-state sovereignty. Kawa explained that they cared to protect and facilitate the smuggling traffic from state violence and extraction while respecting the autonomy of local livelihoods; otherwise, they would have reproduced another nation-state.

The PKK's post-nation-state and autonomist political vision was systematically articulated by its imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan in his prison writings and defense texts, which were submitted to Turkish and international courts in the early 2000s. Denying the nation-state model and sovereignty based on a particular ethnicity or national territory, Öcalan framed a political vision based on a self-governance that would be exercised through locally and regionally organized assemblies (Akkaya and Jongerden, 2012). The broader Kurdish Freedom Movement, a loose network of various political organizations, adopted this political vision. In the background of Turkish state oppression, for example, Kurdish communities organized village and neighborhood councils, which were established as local civil society organizations but were designed to operate as de facto self-governance bodies. As an armed organization fighting in Turkey's Kurdistan, the PKK repositioned itself as protecting and facilitating self-governance rather than seizing or mimicking state power.

In its initial years, however, the PKK adopted a national liberation agenda that aimed to achieve a socialist and untied Kurdish statehood, and it even performed some nation-state governance practices. In 1986, for example, the PKK imposed forced conscription and taxation. Yet, these practices were heavily criticized by the PKK's support base, and the guerillas deserted them even before the PKK officially ended these policies in the early 1990s (O’Connor, 2021). The PKK also operated ad hoc local courts and achieved the monopoly of violence in insurgent zones. Yet, by learning from the guerrillas’ on-the-ground interaction with the local communities, the PKK also framed the monopolization of law-making and violence as necessary and temporary measures in the context of state oppression; they projected the full delegation of these powers to local councils rather than assert itself as a new (Kurdish or socialist) state (Üstündağ, 2016). The PKK's vision of women's freedom also emerged throughout the ongoing struggle. The women in the guerrilla ranks challenged not only patriarchal hierarchies in Kurdish society but also male guerillas who attempted to dominate the military leadership and determine guerillas’ interaction with local communities (Çağlayan, 2020; Üstündağ, 2023). Accordingly, a separate women's army and women-led organizations were established in the mid-1990s. The gender equality developed in the PKK also spread across the broader Kurdish movement and was adopted in various institutions and actors ranging from village and neighborhood councils to political parties and municipalities. In this sense, the post-nation-state and autonomist political vision was formulated on the basis of the challenges the guerrillas experienced. The guerillas’ care about maintaining local support by building alliances with local groups, including nomads and smugglers, and respecting the autonomy of these groups’ own organization further demonstrated that they did not take the terrain and its topographical features (i.e., rugged character) to necessarily favor their armed struggle and so constantly worked to keep the highlands from turning into “hostile terrain” for the PKK (Gordillo, 2023).

The PKK's avoidance of monopolizing and extracting the smuggling traffic in insurgent corridors did not mean that the PKK did not receive financial support from smugglers at all. Various members of the Kurdish borderland communities, including smugglers, supported the guerilla’s struggle and contributed to it financially. The PKK also engaged in other forms of value extraction, such as forcibly confiscating military equipment and ammunition from the state security forces. With these activities and the donations collected in different parts of Kurdistan and from the Kurdish diaspora, the PKK financed its armed forces which allowed it to uphold insurgent corridors. Yet, as the guerrillas did not monopolize the corridor traffic, the individual smugglers could use insurgent corridors regardless of whether they had donated to the PKK. Still, collecting donations to provide safe passages and protection may seem similar to a nation-state's collecting taxes to provide public services. Nation-states often justify taxation by provisioning certain public services elsewhere. However, the PKK justified its exercise of corridor sovereignty, monopolization of violence, and collecting donations to finance its armed forces not through the provision of particular services, such as providing safe passages. Instead, the PKK framed their practices as temporary measures that were necessary for achieving a post-nationalist, autonomist political project of democratizing violence and law-making. Post-nation-state politics, in other words, both led to and justified the rise of insurgent corridors in which corridor-making and violence in corridor space monopolized without extracting the corridor traffic.

In the context of post-nation-state politics, I theorize the sovereignty exercised in insurgent corridors as a form of countersovereignty in which the PKK guerrillas not only territorially contested the Turkish state sovereignty but also performed a form of (corridor) sovereignty that refused state sovereignty and its related biopolitical logics of extraction and exclusion. By monopolizing corridor-(re)making without exclusive control of the corridor traffic, guerillas performed “the ability to control and exert jurisdiction over itinerant merchants, traders, [and smugglers] … without a (necessary) claim of [state] sovereignty or incorporation” (Dua, 2019: 483). In this way, the insurgent corridor countersovereignty adopted a distinct form of political refusal. Although political refusal has been understood as a distinct political act that rejects any engagement with the actors who claimed sovereign superiority (McGranahan, 2016; Prasse-Freeman, 2022; Simpson, 2014), the countersovereignty exercised in insurgent corridors constituted a political denial of nation-state sovereignty and related forms of biopolitical governance, including the exclusive authority to decide what counts as legitimate livelihoods and mobilities.

Yet, the insurgent corridors did not necessarily enable livelihoods that were fully alternative to or outside of existing capitalist relations. Given market price differences and arbitrage profits, smuggling economies were part of such relations. Additionally, the Kurdish smuggling economies were not free from inequality insofar as the profits and risks were unevenly distributed among carrier–smugglers and city-based trader–smugglers. While the PKK's corridors protected irregular migrants from state extraction, the migrants remained vulnerable to smugglers’ abuse and exploitation.

Moreover, the insurgent corridors still relied on the guerrillas’ ability to coordinate multiple raids and establish a dynamic stalemate through their volumetric (or three-dimensional) use of rugged terrain, forests, and deep caves. Since the late 2010s, the Turkish government has attempted to undermine this dynamic stalemate and restore its territorial control in the Kurdish highlands by building fortified military stations and hydroelectric dams. The fortified stations were built with bullet-proof windows, steel doors, blast blocks, and remote-controlled weapons to resist guerrilla attacks for weeks and to render the need to send support forces obsolete.⁵ Without the need to support forces and repel guerrilla attacks on the stations, the military could continue land operations into guerrilla zones and contain the highlands. The hydroelectric dams were also emblematic tools for undermining the guerrillas’ volumetric use of the landscape because the dams destroyed the mountainous landscapes by filling deep valleys and caves with water so to restrict the stealth and mobility of rebel forces (see also Oğuz, 2021).⁶ From 2013 to 2015, the Turkish government took advantage of the ceasefire during peace talks with the PKK and accelerated the construction of fortified stations and hydroelectric dams in Kurdistan. When the government ended the talks and resumed the counterinsurgency operations in the summer of 2015, the fortified stations proved resistant against heavy guerrilla raids, while the completed dams began flooding the caves and paths that the guerilla forces used. Although the Turkish military seemed to expand its territorial control and reduced the scope of guerrilla zones in Turkey's Kurdistan, the PKK kept its forces in the highlands and retained its capacity to raid military targets. In September 2016 and May 2017, for example, PKK guerrillas clashed with the security forces on Tendürek, the same area that Baran had identified as a guerrilla zone several years before (Bianet, 2016, 2017). In August 2022, the Turkish Interior Ministry (2022) reported that it had killed two guerrillas and claimed that it had cleared the area from the guerrilla activity. While the future of the insurgent corridors (including the ones across Tendürek) remained undetermined against the background of the ongoing counterinsurgency, this article has documented and reflected upon the Kurdish smugglers’ use of the corridors as free passages during the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Conclusion

The insurgent corridors and countersovereignty exercised in them provided key insights into anthropological theorization of sovereignty and extraction. Corridors (insurgent or not) as a particular spatial form suggest that we consider sovereignty as space-making and better understand its relationship to extraction beyond the nation-state territoriality, the notion of a territory as a bounded space with fixed boundaries and all-encompassing exclusive control of mobilities within and across these boundaries. Building upon the work of Carl Schmitt (2005), Giorgio Agamben (1998), and Achille Mbembe (2003), the anthropological scholarship has examined sovereignty as exclusive authority to suspend the rights and legal protections of certain population groups as well as a capacity tentatively exercised through corporeal violence by states and other actors (Hansen and Stepputat, 2006). In this biopolitical understanding of sovereignty (Simpson, 2011), its spatial aspects received little analytical attention, with the exception of studies examining securitization of borderlands and relocation of border enforcements beyond states' territorial borders and waters (Andersson, 2014; Kahn, 2019). The case of corridors challenges the identification of state sovereignty with nation-state territoriality and shows how limited territorial control in the corridor space could also produce limited, overlapping, or fragmented sovereignties that still facilitate value extraction (Benton, 2010; Beverley, 2020; Hansen, 2021) or turn the corridor traffic itself into a site of extraction (Schouten, 2019). Corridors thus posit space-making as a new analytic to examine sovereignty and extraction that rely on spatial arrangements and territorial forms that are different from both the nation-state territory and its complete absence.

The insurgent corridors further complicate the spatiality of sovereignty in showing that sovereign space-making, such as the monopolization of corridor-making, does not necessarily lead to the exercise of exclusive authority to determine the legitimate use of space by various actors. The insurgent corridor sovereignty (or what I prefer to call “countersovereignty”) became possible because the monopolization of corridor-making came to be delinked from the monopolization of corridor traffic and thus from corridor extraction. In that sense, the insurgent corridors show us that there is no necessary relation between sovereignty and extraction, and space-making is a key analytic for examining the forms of sovereignty that facilitate or undermine specific extractive practices.

Finally, insurgent corridors constituted a distinct articulation of political refusal based on the rejection of engaging with actors who claim sovereign superiority as well as the state sovereignty model and associated forms of biopolitical governance. This distinct political refusal lies at the heart of my conceptualization of countersovereignty, in which state sovereignty is not only contested but also rejected as a political model. Beyond the specific case of insurgent corridors in Kurdistan, countersovereignty political refusal may help scholars to examine and explicate other practices that also reject mimicking nation-state sovereignty and related regimes of exclusion and extraction in other contexts.