Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below

by Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi Pluto Press 7/20/2022, paperback SKU: 9780745341613   Stories of smuggling as acts of resistance and decolonization. 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 illegalized 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 about 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 et