'This conceptually vivid book refreshes our vision' - Ruth Wilson Gilmore

The word smuggler often unleashes a simplified, negative image painted by the media and the authorities. Such state-centric perspectives hide many social, political and economic relations generated by smuggling. This book looks at the practice through the eyes of the smugglers, revealing how their work can be productive, subversive and deeply sociopolitical.

By tracing the illegalised movement of people and goods across borders, Seeing Like a Smuggler shows smuggling as a contradiction within the nation-state system, and in a dialectical relation with the national order of things. It raises questions on how smuggling engages and unsettles the ethics, materialities, visualities, histories and the colonial power relations that form borders and bordering.

Covering a wide spectrum of approaches from personal reflections and ethnographies to historical accounts, cultural analysis and visual essays, the book spans the globe from Colombia to Ethiopia, Singapore to Guatemala, Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and from Kurdistan to Bangladesh, to show how people deal with global inequalities and the restrictions of poverty and immobility.

Series PrefaceAcknowledgementsAbout the Cover ImageIntroduction: To See Like a Smuggler - Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi1. Smuggling as a Collective Enterprise: Ethiopian/Wollo Migration to Saudi Arabia - Tekalign Ayalew Mengiste2. Aurelian Dreams: Gold Smuggling and Mobilities across Colonial and Contemporary Asia - Nichola Khan3. The Border Merchant - Aliyeh Ataei4. Smugglers and the State Effect at the Mexico-Guatemala Border - Rebecca B. Galemba5. Kolbari: Workers Not Smugglers - Amin Parsa6. From the Smuggling of Goods to the Smuggling of Drugs in La Guajira, Colombia - Javier Guerrero-C7. Contesting Common Sense: Smuggling across the India-Bangladesh Border - Debdatta Chowdhury8 The Bus Economy: A 90-day Gateway across Zimbabwe-South Africa - Kennedy Chikerema9. Illicit Design Sensibilities: The Material and Infrastructural Potentialities of Drug Smuggling - Craig Martin10. A Partial Offering: In and Out of Smuggling - Simon HarveyAfterword: Seeing Freedom - Nandita SharmaBibliographyNotes on ContributorsIndex