Global Horizons Junior Fellow, SCAS.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East and North African Studies,
Northwestern University

ABSTRACT:
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 international 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 “nuclear.” With a growing and young population’s increasing demand for consumer goods, sanctions have produced new configurations of exchange—characterized by not only “nuclear rials,” but also “silver apartments” that grant its buyers residency in Turkey.

‘Smart’ sanctions might have nuclearized Iranians’ money, but their goal to isolate Iran’s national economy globally had the opposite effect: it pulled Iran, more than ever, into a regionally networked economy. This talk draws the contours of this economy across Turkey and Iran. In bringing into the same analytical frame the cross-border traffic in money, land and labor as experiments in mitigating the impacts of sanctions, it illustrates how those experiments that re-write the fictions of fictitious commodities transform the very terms and forms of value, mobility and security under sanctions.