Emrah Yildiz (Incoming Fellow 2024-25)

Assistant Professor of Anthropology and MENA Studies, Northwestern University

As Global Horizons Junior Fellow at SCAS during the 2024-2025 academic year, Dr Yildiz will be
working on his second monograph, Outsmarting ‘Smart’ Sanctions: Currency, Mobility and Security
between Iran and Turkey. This study, through an ethnography of the traffic in money and land
between Iran and Turkey, investigates the relationship between economic sanctions and cross-border
trade. The book will explicate how equivalence, conversion and currency emerge in the interaction
between sanctions as a technology of governance and contraband trade as a technique of its mitigation
and circumvention. […]

Since the 2012 sanctions dis-embedded the Iranian economy from global markets, contraband commerce
has become highly contested in Iran. Iranians have come to regard sanctions as enforced by both inter-
national powers and their own state officials, who criminalized certain kinds of cross-border trade but not
others. Although Iranian state actors distinguish between traders—praised for contributing to the economy—
and traitors—denounced for undermining its integrity—what blurs the line between them is their shared
struggle with a devaluing currency that some Iranians call not a “soft currency” but a “nuclear” one.

With a growing and young population’s ever- increasing demand for consumer goods, sanctions have
produced new configurations of exchange—characterized by not only nuclear rials but also golden apart-
ments in Turkey.  Sanctions might have nuclearized Iranians’ money, but their goal to globally isolate Iran’s
national economy had the opposite effect: it pulled Iran, more than ever, into a regionally networked economy.
Outsmarting ‘Smart’ Sanctions traces this economy across Turkey and Iran. In bringing into the same analy-
tical frame cross-border movements of money and land as experiments in mitigating the impacts of sanctions,
this project traces how those movements themselves transform the very terms and forms of value, mobility
and security under sanctions. Such an ethnography of a moving object like sanctions and the search for a
store of wealth in the face of chronic insecurity reintroduces into the interdisciplinary field of sanctions a
conceptualization of monetary value that is, like traffic, spatially and materially improvised across contingent
divides of class, nationality and geography.