Partners in crime: smuggling economies (Kaçak/Qaçax) and human-animal collaborations in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands

When is a horse not just a pack animal but a criminal accomplice? When is a lamb more than just livestock, but a form of contraband or a witness in court? Pursuing these questions in Van, a Kurdish-majority province of Turkey bordering Iran, this article examines how human-animal collaborations facilitated Kurdish smuggling economies, or what locals called qaçax. I conceptualize qaçax and kaçak (the Turkish word from which it originated), as the inexhaustible capacity to escape control. As the state’s counterinsurgency against Kurdish guerillas established an extensive regime of surveillance and control in the Van borderlands, pack animals enabled smuggling convoys to evade state control and survive deadly anti-smuggling ambushes. Smugglers (and smuggler animals) also collaborated to elude the legal evidentiary processes and undermine allegations of smuggling brought against them. Rather than viewing animals as mere objects of legal knowledge, as existing studies have tended to do, the human-animal collaboration in court shows how the animals actually co-produce such knowledge. The smugglers’ evasion of criminal charges in court further troubles the categories of illegality and informality that are frequently associated with smuggling, and permits us to think of smuggling economies beyond binaries of legal-illegal, formal-informal, human-nonhuman or living-nonliving.