Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands is a theoretically ambitious ethnography that intervenes in multiple bodies of scholarship, including the anthropology of law, state ethnography, and border and sovereignty studies. Set in Wan (Van), a predominantly Kurdish border province in eastern Turkey, the book examines how Kurdish lawyers, smugglers, and their families navigate and strategically engage the legal system in the context of criminalized cross-border mobility. The book is more than a courtroom ethnography. Bozçalı traces smuggling trials across multiple sites, including border villages, military checkpoints, lawyers’ offices, political meetings, and forensic investigations that are marked by histories of colonial domination as well as resistance.

The book begins with the observation that nation–state borders function as instruments of colonial division and domination of the Kurdish population. The Introduction and Chapter 1 provide a well-documented ethnographic and historical account of the entanglement between smuggling economies and counterinsurgency operations. Anti-smuggling operations are seen as extensions of counterinsurgency warfare, as smugglers have long been treated as terrorists or insurgent supporters, even when this association remains officially unspoken. Bozçalı then describes how smuggling expanded dramatically during the counterinsurgency war of the 1990s, following forced village evacuations, the destruction of agrarian livelihoods, and the militarization of rural highlands. Against this backdrop, Chapter 2 presents the argument that the judiciary has been structured to protect the state and security forces through what Bozçalı describes as a colonial and racialized legal strategy in cases involving smuggling or slain smugglers. He terms this strategy the “cunning of law,” that is, the imposition of substantive inequality under the guise of procedural equality.

The cunning of law is the legal terrain within which Kurdish lawyers operate and engage in “vernacular counterforensics” to document rights violations by legal authorities. Chapters 3 and 4 address how these lawyers, often trained in Kurdish human rights organizations or raised in border villages, develop tactical, procedural, and evidentiary maneuvers to engage the legal system, a practice Bozçalı conceptualizes as “sly legality.” Sly legality refers to forms of evasive engagement with the legal system through which subjugated or colonized communities neither reject courts outright nor seek liberal recognition or redress through conventional human rights frameworks. These practices rather disrupt the state’s ability to enforce borders, impose substantive injustice, or sustain claims of procedural neutrality.

One of the strengths of these conceptual interventions comes from the fact that sly legality and vernacular counterforensics are neither inevitable nor compulsory strategies. Kurdish lawyers, smugglers, and their families continuously make political and moral decisions regarding their positioning vis-à-vis the Kurdish freedom movement, local kinship networks, and state forces. These chapters are dense with ethnographic examples of technolegal arrangements that enable evasive engagement. One notable example concerns the chemical fixation of contraband oil, which led to judicial rulings that declare contraband oil non-illegal. Such rulings differ from acquittals in smuggling trials. Rather than establishing innocence, they render the tracing of illegal cross-border mobilities impossible, impeding the courts’ capacity to enforce borders and undermining sovereign claims. In a similar vein, Chapter 4, “Counterforensics,” provides a discussion of slain smuggler cases, in which lawyers, with the help of the families of slain smugglers, mobilize technoscientific expertise and legal tactics to find evidence that would challenge the perpetrators’ impunity. Even though most of the time perpetrators remain unidentified, complainants and their lawyers nevertheless “document the legal authorities’ efforts to keep the perpetrators unidentified and thus protect them from prosecution” (p. 127).

The final chapter focuses on Kurdish borderland communities that justify smuggling by evading collaboration with counterinsurgency forces. This situates evasive legal engagement within a broader political context, as borderland communities seek to distance themselves from suspicion and accusations of collaboration. This observation is critical for understanding what binds lawyers, traders, smuggler-carriers, and their families within a shared symbolic and political universe. Noncollaborating smugglers, no less than lawyers, pursue sly legality through court-based practices of noncollaboration, or specific modes of interacting with legal authorities designed to corrode the operative logics and procedures of the state. The book tells the story of a political community of noncollaborators who interrupt sovereign power both inside and outside the courtroom through technolegal tactics of disruptive borderwork and vernacular counterforensics.

The fieldwork for the book was conducted between 2012 and 2014, just before a series of radical political transformations took place in Turkey, including the collapse of the peace process, renewed counterinsurgency campaigns, a coup attempt, and the transition to a presidential system. In the Conclusion, Bozçalı mentions that his interlocutors report that from the late 2010s onward, courts became increasingly careless about concealing their protection of state violence, paradoxically making judicial complicity easier to document. He further draws attention to continuities in how the legal system normalizes state violence across both liberal moments and more overtly repressive moments of the regime. One question the book raises, but does not fully resolve, concerns whether sly legality continues to carry the same political force under these altered conditions. As legal institutions increasingly abandon proceduralism and evidentiary rigor, the efficacy of evidence as a political tool may require rethinking, particularly its capacity to interrupt state violence, border enforcement, and claims to legal neutrality.

Overall, Smuggling Law significantly complicates prevailing understandings of law, borders, and political action. By introducing the concepts of sly legality and vernacular counterforensics, the book offers powerful analytical tools for scholars working on colonial domination, racialized governance, and legal violence. It will be of particular interest to readers in anthropology, sociolegal studies, border studies, and science and technology, as well as those following Kurdish politics and state violence. The extensive endnotes further enhance the book’s value as a resource on the histories of the Kurdish freedom movement, human rights advocacy, and border governance in Turkey. Finally, Bozçalı addresses the ethical challenges of conducting ethnographic research in a criminalized and militarized context with care. By refraining from disclosing sensitive information about smuggling networks or techniques beyond what is already present in court files or publicly articulated by legal authorities, he mitigates potential risks to research participants while maintaining ethnographic rigor.