Bozçalı, Fırat

My research interests lie at the intersection of political and legal anthropology, political economy, transnational flows, and science and technology studies, with a focus on the modern Middle East. My forthcoming book, Smuggling Law (Stanford University Press, November 2025) examines how Kurdish smugglers and their lawyers negotiate and rework the official borders of commodity markets through techno-legal practices that range from official paperwork to expert witness processes. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Wan/Van, a predominantly Kurdish-populated province on the Turkish-Iranian border, the book combines a focus on materiality, the dynamics of national and global capitalism, and local regimes of political and moral values. Through this lens, my work shows how techno-legal processes enable unexpected political agencies and subjectivities to unfold. My next major research project explores the criminalization of social media use and the making of digital (legal) evidence in social media-related trials in Turkey.