Smuggling as a Material Critique of Borders

ABSTRACT By drawing on ethnographic and historical accounts of migrant smuggling and forgery from the smugglers’ perspectives, this essay shifts the focus from a state-centric understanding of smuggling as a criminal activity conducted by ‘greedy’ individuals and ‘mafia rings’, to a specific form of practice that operates through a series of concrete material techniques. It argues that smuggling recognises and reworks the material and technological features of borders which are vulnerable to reappropriation. These vulnerabilities inherent to the materialisation of abstract notions such as borders are understood and discussed as ‘reproducibility’, ‘repetition’, and ‘imitation’. Smuggling not only reconfigures the apparatus of borders to provide support for those who are denied access to mobility, but also can teach us something about a specific mode of critique that I call a material mode of critique. The material mode of critiquing borders goes beyond a discursive mode which mostly locates politicians, academics, and activists as the critics of border politics. This mode can open up new possibilities of thinking about and against borders.

On October 23, 2019, Phạm Thị Trà My texted her mother.'I'm sorry Mum.My journey abroad hasn't succeeded.Mum, I love you so much!I'm dying because I can't breathe … I'm from Nghẹn, Can Lộc, Hà Tĩnh, Vietnam'.Four hours later she was found dead, along with thirty-eight others, in a refrigerator trailer in Essex.Despite claims to the contrary from politicians and mainstream media sources, this was not her first attempt at crossing the border into the UK with the help of smugglers.A few days prior to her death, Phạm had managed to fly from France to the UK with a forged Chinese passport.Upon her arrival in the UK, she was arrested by the UK Border Force and deported back to France.She then travelled to Belgium in order to pursue another plan by way of boarding a trailer in Belgium.If she had not been deported in her first attempt at reaching the UK, she would not have needed to board a refrigerator trailer to try again.Similar to other deaths of those on the move who do not possess the right papers, Phạm's last words to her mother reveal the dark times we live in.Those who do not have the right papers 1 have to hide in cramped spaces inside cargos, trucks or vessels.Their place in the world has shrunk, and continues to shrink.In 2015, the Swedish Prime Minister claimed in a press conference that Sweden must close its borders and stop giving asylum in order to have 'breathing space' (Regeringen 2015).When states demand this breathing space and have the power to breathe expansively, there is no space left for people like Phạm.She is one of several thousand travellers without the right papers who have died trying to enter Europe since 1993. 2  Borders are selective killing machines (De León 2015).They do not merely operate through the policies of a specific nation-state.They also operate through global and transnational mechanisms, protocols and industries, extended in geographical and temporal reach, which make the act of travelling costly and deadly for some and highly profitable for others (Walia 2021;Weber and Pickering 2011).In practice, it has become impossible to enter the Global North for less privileged travellers from the Global South, or to make a claim for asylum without a smuggler's help.It is within this context, in which the ability to move and travel for the global poor has drastically reduced, that smuggling with all the risks involved has become an imperative social, political, and economic bypass which has grown as part and parcel of the state and its violent border politics (Keshavarz and Khosravi 2022).
Phạm Thị Trà's death in a cargo trailer, like the similar tragedies which preceded her, are repeated time and time again.These tragedies disrupt our assumptions about 'traveling and transportation as divergent modes of movement, each subject to different technical standards and material infrastructures (e.g., passenger versus cargo terminals, immigration versus trade law)' (Chu 2016, 407).Smuggling, by blending the boundaries between travelling and transportation, reminds us of the unequal access to mobility.While this blending can have fatal consequences, it also opens up the possibility for those deprived of mobility to be entitled to move temporarily.In fact, this has been the case for the majority of the travellers without the right papers across the world not only in recent decades but throughout history.
While the common mainstream portrayal of smuggling is as an exploitative practice, which benefits from the vulnerable conditions of those in desperate need of moving across borders, some scholars in the last two decades have challenged this depiction.They have argued that there is a direct link between smuggling and border policies, and they place a greater degree of blame for the increased danger to which travellers without the right papers are exposed upon border politics, than upon smugglers or travellers who use smuggling (Sanchez 2017;Khosravi 2010;Koser 2000).Alongside this growing scholarship challenging the binary of the 'predator smuggler' who needs to be apprehended and the 'vulnerable migrant' who needs to be saved, another emerging body of literature in anthropology, politics and international relations has focused on the materialities that regulate the processes of moving and migrating (Keshavarz 2019;Salter 2015;Walters 2015).
In this essay, by bringing together these two related but not yet connected strands of work, I shift the focus from the hegemonic understanding of smuggling as a criminal activity conducted by 'greedy' individuals and 'mafia rings', to a specific form of practice that operates through a series of concrete material techniques.I start my discussion from the notion of the ubiquity of borders which is prevalent in critical border studies, but argue for a need to focus on specificity of borders and their particular material and technical features and relations, as they shape and are shaped by different situations, geographies, histories and economies.This allows for attention to the materialities and things that facilitate, speed up, slow down or deny mobility: rendering borders as mechanisms that support an uneven and unequal mobility in the world today.This understanding of borders brings to the fore the ways in which smuggling works materially with the uneven supports of mobility.These consist of a range of techniques, from creating and forging specific papers, passports and supporting documents, to using vehicles, nodes and infrastructures of travel: 'exit and entry mechanisms' to borrow a smuggler's words.By using ethnographic and historical accounts by human smugglers as well as court materials from a case of smuggling in Sweden, I argue that smugglers recognise borders as configurations made out of materials that can be reconfigured for other purposes than they are conceived.These materialities are less about spectacular things like walls and surveillance cameras, and more about details, folds, layers, shapes, and the other mundane elements that form borders.I argue that this is possible due to the recognition of vulnerability generated by the materialisation of abstract notions such as borders.As such smuggling engages with the materialities of borders in an immanent and internal manner through reworking three specific characteristics of materiality: reproducibility, repetition and imitation.Smuggling, by reworking these three capacities of materialisation performs, what I call, a material mode of critique.Towards the end I discuss what a material mode of critique entails and what this can open up when thinking about and against borders.
By focusing on material vulnerabilities, I do not deny other vulnerabilities that the act of travelling without the right papers entails.Much of the literature on human smuggling has rightly discussed complex forms of violence imposed by different actors along the journey, including smugglers, which can differ based on gender, class, ethnicity, language, religion, age, and bodily abilities (Gallien and Weigand 2022;Keshavarz and Khosravi 2022;Zhang, Sanchez, and Achilli 2018).However, smuggling means something more than the crime defined by national and international law and policy discourse.My aim here is to ask a different set of questions about the practice, beyond the hegemonic criminalisation of smuggling, and to think about certain possibilities towards which smuggling may point when thinking about borders.As Warsan Shire, Somali-British poet puts it: You have to understand, that no one would put their children in a boat unless the sea is safer than the land.No one burns their palms, under trains, beneath carriages.No one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck, feeding on newspaper, unless the miles travelled means something more than journey.
Smuggling is discussed in this essay in terms of its support for the mobility of travellers without the right papers.Therein, it becomes a critical yet adaptive and imaginative practice, that gives new insight into how borders operate and how they can be transgressed materially.

Borders: Uneven Material Supports of Mobility
To move in the world, one requires different forms of support from physical capability and clothing items to documents, vehicles, roads, and infrastructure.A world dominated by made things cannot be navigated without other made things.Once a border is configured through various material elements, the body on its own is no longer enough to pass through: it requires specific material support in order to be authorised.Passports support the act of crossing as much as a vehicle or a road despite being different materialities with different capacities.Attempting to move with only one of these necessary supports can slow the process down or make it very difficult and costly or dangerous.
In critical border studies literature, borders are no longer understood as fixed mechanisms for preserving and controlling 'pre-existing' notions of nation or territory.Instead, borders are seen as mobile mechanisms that produce things like 'nation', 'territory', and 'citizens' through an active regulation of economy, mobility, and knowledge (Green 2012).To see borders as mobile phenomena breaks the binary of inclusion and exclusion and instead recognises borders as a series of configurations designed to manage different flows of movement.No border has ever been able to stop all movementperhaps no border has ever been designed to stop all movement -but they produce economic profit by slowing down, detaining, and deporting border transgressors.Borders do not merely exclude or include but also categorise different movements as legal, illegal, and sometimes partly legal, partly illegal in a way that ensures all categories contribute to the economies which maintain the borders.
However, to see borders as liquid and fluid phenomena runs the risk of stretching and projecting them to any place and time.As Mehdi Alioua points out, to understand such fluidity one needs to pay attention to 'interstices in which [borders] materialise [and] solidify over an instant in time' (Alioua 2017, 157).This requires an investigation of certain strategic sites and artefacts across different spaces and periods of time which support mobility.For instance, crossing borders with a 'powerful' passport, or with a visa stamped on a less powerful passport, legalises the bearer as a traveller, a tourist, a student, an expat, a businessman.Crossing without a passport; or with a forged one, or crossing by using an 'unseaworthy boat'; hiding inside or under a truck, among watermelon cargos which enable the traveller to remain invisible to thermal cameras, makes the individual a 'migrant', a 'refugee', an 'asylum seeker', and above all, an 'illegal' traveller.Helping a traveller without the right papers to cross a border makes one a smuggler, regardless of whether this is done by taking a family across a border in a car (Herkel 2016); guiding people across mountains by providing guides and maps (Guardian 2017); or taking people aboard a boat to save them from distress at sea (Tondo 2018).All the material supports involved in the act of moving and crossing determine who one is, how far one can travel, and with what speed one can move.
The artist Mourad Kouri has exhibited a remade version of a transport box built into the back seat of a vehicle, which was used by four travellers without the right papers to travel from Bulgaria to Denmark in 2014: a journey that lasted for twenty-six hours, including a pause every four hours.The box amounts to 0.3312 m3 of space (figure 1).In a world which celebrates mobility, a traveller without the right papers is only permitted less than 0.3312 m3 of space -which comes with a price tag of €3000 and the impending possibility of death by suffocation or the threat of deportation in case of detection.Kouri's re-materialisation based on narratives told by one of the travellers, the smuggler, and the mechanic who made the original box, points to the fact that we live in a world where material supports of mobility shrink the space of travelling for some bodies and expand it for others.Those who have access to better material supports of mobility can comfortably and spaciously navigate the world to the degree that they fail to pay attention to the unequal and discriminative distribution of these supports, and thus do not sense the borders.As Sara Ahmed puts it: 'If we are hit by something, we become conscious of something' (Ahmed 2017, 138).In contrast, individuals who have lost access to such support, or have never had access to them, are forced to devise their own replacements like the one documented by Kouri.They might forge documentation, cross through inhospitable landscapes, or board vessels and vehicles unfit for long journeys.While these replacements do not guarantee a permanent access, they provide temporary support which is pragmatic, urgent, and meaningful in the moment and place where they are required.The material supports are shaped by border politics, and they in turn shape borders and their subjects through their role in acts of moving, crossing, and transgressing.The use of technologies and materials in shaping borders must not simply be examined as instruments conducting the ideologically-driven tasks of border politics: borders cannot be realised, nor can they operate, without being materialised.
Amir Heidari was a well-known smuggler in Sweden who has openly spoken about his activities as a political project for decades.He was sentenced to several years' imprisonment and was finally deported from Sweden in 2011. 3When I met him in 2014 for the first time, he described his position within the context of uneven access to mobility, by pointing out to the role of the state in its monopoly over the access mechanisms: 'I saw myself as the lawyer of refugees outside of Sweden.I ran my own migration board where those left without a visa and passport could be granted one that could guarantee them safe escape and arrival'.For him, the ability to move today is no longer a matter of survival, as he viewed it in the early days of his activities, but is an essential right.'If the mobility is regulated by states', he told me in January 2019, when I managed to meet him again via a video call, 'this directly means the promotion of a market where different capacities for movement can be bought and sold […] the state wants to monopolise this market and to put it frankly, I was interfering with that'.
Amir carried out his method of interfering with the borders of different states by organising a collective that involved people in different countries facilitating transit and residence on the route to a destination.He explained to me that there are different borders in a clandestine journey to be crossed, and there are different steps in a journey.There are multiple exit and entry mechanisms, and you need different techniques for each step.Sometimes you cannot forge a passport or visa, but you can forge supporting documents for the issuance of these, and of course this differs between people and countries; police stations and airports: each situation requires its own solution and negotiation.
The complexity of the logistics of smuggling that Amir points to is not confined to the act of smuggling itself.Any act of travelling requires very complex logistics and material support.Legalised travellers do not sense this complexity if things go as planned.They instead enjoy a legal and economic status which prevents them from being hit by the multiple requirements for movement.Legalised travellers pay different services, for example travel agencies and insurance companies, to take care of the logistics and support movement with ease.Amir similarly delivered essential services which organised a far more complex movement process.Despite frequent reports of deaths caused by smuggling and stories of abuse faced by travellers without the right papers, ethnographic work shows that smuggling often involves a series of 'complex mechanisms of protection crafted within migrant and refugee communities as attempts to reduce the vulnerabilities known to be inherent to clandestine journeys' (Sanchez 2017, 10).While smuggling can involve instances of violence, abandonment, and coercion, it can also be a mutually beneficial trade between the travellers and smugglers, or a way of socialising or economic gain for those who are in transit (Khosravi 2010;Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008;van Liempt 2007).It can be an act of social protection and assistance beyond an economic enterprise (Maher 2018).It can act as an empowering service for marginalised groups such as women, borderlands people, and ethnic minorities (Galemba 2017;Bruns and Miggelbrink 2011;Han 2017).It can be a collective and solidarity-based service jointly organised by female members of a community (Sanchez 2014).The functions of smuggling outlined in these works show that the continuing reliance upon smuggling is an indication of both increasingly harsh border controls, and the success smuggling has in providing the missing support.

Vulnerable by Materialisation: Reproducibility, Repetition, and Imitation
In an atmosphere of mobility securitisation shaped by an advancement in surveillance technologies, border industries and state authorities alike promote a vision that remains unchallenged: that all of the world can be bordered, and borders around the world can successfully operate in an interactive, smooth, fast, and connected fashion.Despite this vision, the latest technologies of identification at borders such as fingerprints, biometrics, and iris pattern scanning frequently misrecognise people of colour, women, and people with disabilities (Magnet 2011).In their risk management and design, different forms of simulators predict likely scenarios of breach and transgression.However, border industries and state authorities forget that by inventing the ship, one invents the shipwreck too (Virilio 2007).What enables smugglers to carry out their work despite extensive digitalisation and securitisation is the ontological condition of materials: things that are made can be remade.The vulnerability of the material condition is an inherent part of border making and not a consequence of malfunction which can be solved with better technologies.This is to say that borders, as material supports that configure mobility, can always be reworked, redirected, and even taken apart to provide mobilities previously unimagined.No one knows this more than a smuggler.Amir told me: The activities made by humans for and inside the state can be reproduced outside of the state … If there are millions of passports issued to human beings all around the world, this means that all these people are dependent on such documents and at the same time are activators and agents.They can use them for others than they themselves.
The perspective that made things can be remade is nothing new.Adolfo Kiminsky, the well-known French forger, who for thirty years combined his technical skills and political commitments to deliver services for the French Resistance during the World War II and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FNL) during the Algerian struggle for decolonisation, attests to this.In an exchange with one of the representatives of FNL, Kiminsky argued that there is nothing that is impossible to forge and 'anything that's been conceived and made by one man can naturally be reproduced by another.'His lifelong career in forging different passports showed this even included the Swiss passport, which in 1957 was 'unlike that of any other passport in the world' due to 'the texture of the cover, ultra-light boards that were both rigid and very supple with relief watermarks', which made it known for being seemingly impossible to forge (Kaminsky 2016, 131).
Despite foregrounding a heterogenous understanding of the vulnerability of technical world and built environment in risk analyses promoted by Science and Technology Studies (Hommels, Mesman, and Bijker 2014), it seems that in the context of borders, vulnerability is denied or concealed by those who think they are the only designers and maintainers of the borders.At the core of smuggling lies not only an important acknowledgement of this vulnerability but also a mobilisation of three specific features brought by materialisation of borders in a direction against which the supports are conceived to operate: reproducibility, repetition, and imitation.

Reproducibility
In prosecution documents from 2006 concerning Amir Heidari's court case in Sweden, there are several pages that show Photoshop files of the forged passports which were stored on a computer found in his apartment.Multiple markings from the file analyst can be found specifying how many Photoshop layers exist in each file (Figure 2).
In Photoshop, and many other raster graphic editor programs, the process of editing or creating an image or design is carried out through layering.A new design is created by assembling and collaging different layers of lines, filters, effects, colours, shapes, texts, etc.What looks like a solid, flat poster or graphic is in fact a combination and organisation of many layers and elements that can be changed, recoloured, reshaped, and reordered to produce new designs.
The same procedure is followed to rework existing images.One must strategically break the image down into different layers and elements in order to be able to alter different elements of the image.All of the first pages of the forged passports documented in the prosecution documents are illustrative of this process.One passport marked by the analyst is shown to have been broken digitally into seventeen layers, including image, name, signature, birth date, place of birth, etc.Another contains twenty-five such layers.The deconstruction of the first page of the passport into several layers is used here to show evidence of a criminal activity.While a passport is generally thought of as a representation of a solid single identity, in fact it is a configuration of various elements masterfully placed next to each other.Amir simply reverseengineered the existing identity production process in order to create new identities (Figure 3).
As Matthew Longo has argued, modern borders 'cannot merely be "tall"'with great walls, soaring drones, and high towers -'they must also be "wide" and "layered"' (Longo 2017, 56).This is reflected in the layers of the  Photoshop file of a forged passport.Layers of borders are not always as spectacular as walls and drones.They can be sneaky, mundane, and scattered amongst documents, digital files, devices, and passages.These layers, placeholders, details, and folds are even more significant than the image of imposing walls.Smugglers do not care for the spectacle of walls but instead look for the details which form borders.
What enables these small-scale, inconspicuous incarnations of borders to function is their capacity to be reproduced.They produce authenticity through reproducibility.However, this also signals the reproducibility of authenticity.The playful and practical reorganisation of the layers that construct an identity shows that the notions of originality and authenticity, as a major concern of bordering practices, are always produced relationally and materially.One only needs to recognise the visual and material elements that render one thing original and another fake.It is through material reproduction that technological borders produce authenticity for border crossers. 4 The digital files in Amir's case also represent something beyond the traditional understanding of forgery.If new identification practices are designed through digital techniques and generate the inevitable reproducibility that mechanical and digital forms provide, then forgery, fakery, and copying are no longer 'an individual skill but a generalised condition of all made things' (Deseriis 2017, 92).Thus, any material supports of mobility that deal with authenticity, originality, and identification become potentially reproducible.
If we are to consider reproducibility as a feature of authenticity, this means that authenticity can be constantly interrogated, negotiated, and remade.The ability to alter an object through reproduction opens up the purportedly closed domain of authenticity to actors beyond the state.If an artefact, site, or space can be copied, mocked up, prototyped or modelled due to its materiality, this means that others besides those perceived as the original makers can claim knowledge over how they function and do not function.George Leonidas Leslie, one of the great bank robbers of American history, provides a good example.Leslie was a graduate of architecture, who instead of being interested in designing new buildings was much more interested in how existing buildings could be penetrated through the blind spots of architectural details unknown to the owners or original designers.Leslie and his affiliates would build replica models of existing banks in order to rehearse their robberies.He managed to rob the banks of nineteenth-century America by making copies of them (Manaugh 2016).

Repetition
Reproduction is not only about producing identical artefacts, it also entails a repetition of their accompanying standardised rituals and performances.Biometric reading machines used in different checkpoints across the world might be produced by different companies and have different interfaces and designs but they follow almost identical protocols and standards that operate through repetitive processes.This makes their use easy and efficient, but also subject to alteration.As Jacques Derrida (1988) argues in his discussion of 'iterability', repetition is tied to alterity.No act of repetition in practice is the same: the structure of structure is iteration; i.e. alteration.Repetition by concealing the process of repetitions produces 'boundary, fixity and surface' (Butler 1993) and generates political and social norms.To reveal the process of repetition as the basis of how norms work is also to expose the fact that repetition inevitably leads to alteration.
This becomes evident, as smugglers demonstrate, when observing the procedures and rituals of borders.There is a vulnerability to the rhythm of mobility: the patterns which emerge reveal moments of infiltration.By observing border procedures, performances, and routines, one can spot moments where security is less heavy, or fences, walls, digital barriers or guards which do not function properly.In the words of one smuggler active in facilitating mobility between West Africa and Central Europe, whom I met in 2015, their work is to 'police the police' (Keshavarz 2019, 110), that is to constantly watch for the latest updates on different checkpoints and airports.Knowing, for example, which airports have access to what biometric data can determine who can cross, and with which look-a-like-passport. One aspect of smuggling is therefore about learning the repeated procedures of mobility, through observing border operations.
The standardised practices within the border industry have made the scale of mobility so expansive that it becomes easy to hide within these processes.With the increase in circulation of goods and bodies there simply is no capability to check everything.Smuggling through containers is a good example.What makes smuggling via containers distinct is that it harnesses the established global supply chain system: Once the illegal container enters the logistics pipeline it becomes almost invisible amidst all the others circumventing the globe.So although the design of the shipping container as a sealed unit means that it can be moved with much greater ease than break-bulk cargo, it also means that it offers the perfect space in which to conceal illegal practices (Martin 2016, 85).
Repetition, as one of the foundational features of practices; products; and systems of control and flow, has created a particular environment which is both vulnerable and symbiotic (Boyce 2018), in which iterative patterns of control are confronted with incentive bypasses.The Document Analysis Unit at the Swedish National Forensic Centre, like any other state-run laboratory dealing with technical investigation of crime, has an extensive archive of exposed techniques of bypass that are studied carefully to be considered in designing new mechanisms of border control (Figure 4).The symbiosis between control and transgression is something that has been shown in social studies of smuggling (Achilli 2019) which is also evident at the material and technical level.

Imitation
Every made thing in the world has its own material and visual limit.Every materially made thing in the world appears as a thing with an inside and outside, with clear boundaries.The outside is often what concerns designers, consumers, and the market.The inside is to the concern of technicians and engineers.Smugglers are not fooled by this distinction.The inside, the 'how' of an artefact, matters as much as the outside and the appearance of it.Focusing on only the surface layer would be misleading.For instance, while many figures of speech describing border crossings invoke metaphors of walls and doors, with their features of height, thickness, and locks, a smuggler prefers to ignore the spectacle of walls and doors.From a design perspective, a door is made to persuade the users that it is the only way to cross through a wall, to get from one space to another.Materially speaking, doors are the most fortified part of a wall, with security features such as locks and impenetrable materials.The security is focused around doors, while the nearby wall might be as hollow as air (Manaugh 2016).Smugglers see walls as porous and doors as typically the wrong channel to pass through.Shahram Khosravi recounts his encounter with a smuggler in his work on the auto-ethnography of borders ( 2010): Once in a restaurant in Cantt Station [in Karachi] I was drinking doudpati with a wellknown dal lal, a middle-aged man from a prominent Baluchi clan.I told him about my desperate situation and that I was pessimistic about being able to leave Pakistan.He smiled and said in heavily accented Farsi: 'My son, the world's door cannot be closed' (dar-e donya ra nemishe bast) (42).
The visibility of borders is not only about appearance, but also its interior structure: the invisible parts and how they operate.The visibility of the border, designed and managed by the state and high-tech companies, 'black box' its details and operations.Smugglers render the relevant invisible parts of borders visible enough, for those in need, to support their navigation.To make the internal, invisible part of a border visible is to harness potentialities of materials for the situation in which they are used.The practice of 'larding' used in book smuggling is an interesting example of this: a banned book is hidden inside another licit and accepted book.This is not a practice exclusive to books.Some indigenous communities in Mexico and Central America smuggled their gods past the colonial and Christian inquisition by disguising them as Catholic saints (Harvey 2016).Smuggling often involves the act of hiding something illicit -be this a body or an artefact -inside something licit.At the heart of this act lies the recognition of what is classified as an accepted moving actor, and its potential to offer an internal space for temporary inhabitation.
These acts of disguise also involve hiding one's identity performatively through imitation of the normative body.Here bodies can mean physical appearance, as well as the performative elements that make a body legible.A look-a-like passport enables a person who is not its legalised bearer to cross, not only because they look like the photo in the passport, but also because they manage to perform that person as imagined by the border guard (Keshavarz 2019).Or consider the compartments smugglers build into cars for hiding travellers without the right papers.They are built into the types of cars that are deemed to be regular vehicles for crossing by legalised and trusted travellers around a specific border.The state uses high tech devices to know the unknown in order to control it if necessary.These repetitive acts of investigation over time establish norms of what types of bodies and things are rendered as known and which ones as unknown.Imitation inhabits such a normative condition by using the known as a model for the unknown.The unknown performs the known in order to pass.A recognition of the inside-outside dynamic is necessary; a simultaneous recognition of the materiality of the inside, and the visual performance of the outside.Imitation happens not through one of these dimensions, but at the intersection of the two: the binary understanding of inside/outside and known/unknown as two separate categories is disrupted.This is basically what materialisation provides.As Herbert Simon (1969) points out, any artefact is an 'interface' between an inner environment and outer environment in a mutual way.This is why material supports of mobility can be reconfigured to provide an unanticipated relation if smuggling manages to bring these two environments into negotiation.

Reconfiguring the Border
At the core of smuggling lies a simultaneous recognition of the internal and external structures of the material world and its potential for reproduction, repetition, and imitation.Smugglers treat borders not as obstacles to be crossed but as possible moments and situations to circumvent, break apart, work around, and reassemble.This can be thought as an 'art of citing without quotation marks' in the words of Walter Benjamin (2002), as smugglers constantly reproduce, repeat, and imitate what has been previously configured as inaccessible for some in order to create new constellations of access.This ability for reconfiguration is a material form of knowledge.Theorising from the perspective of the material practices of smuggling, or in other words 'seeing like a smuggler', (Keshavarz and Khosravi 2022) enables us to ask an important question: 'what kind of knowledge is needed to recognise borders as borders?' (Green 2012, 580).More importantly, it enables us to inquire into how this knowledge is defined, who practices authority over it, and the terms of engagement with borders.For smugglers, there is less concern with what a border is, and more focus upon how a border operates.Thus, borders become sites of contestation over the authority of knowledge, in a material, visual, and technical fashion.
Academic and activist approaches in migration studies such as 'autonomy of migration' have previously challenged the assumption that states have dominance over the knowledge of borders and mobility by bringing the knowledge of travellers into focus, arguing that it is the act of movement that makes states react in a certain way (Casas, Cobarrubias, and Pickles 2010; Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008).Some have critiqued this approach for its romanticised analysis, which fails to pay attention to the differences people on the move have and embody (Sharma 2009).Moreover, this approach tends to ignore other actors such as smugglers, and produces binaries by focusing on people on the move and states as two opposing and homogenous categories.In practice, however, the processes of moving; being slowed down or pushed back; and getting stuck, consist of many stages which include multiple state and non-state actors and services.Travellers without the right papers get advice and support from different individuals and groups in order to make their many decisions on their migratory journeys.In addition, they often need to rely upon more experienced facilitators, for instance when in need of a document or vehicle, which is a more material form of knowledge.There are many different forms of individual and collective knowledge, shared and negotiated between many actors during the process of a journey.These depend on gender, class, ethnic background, and age, as well as the context of time and place.It is these collective and heterogeneous forms of sharing knowledge that explain why many travellers without the right papers often do not see themselves as 'smuggled', with its implication of victimhood, but 'as actively staking claims to reciprocity and obligation from people they knew to access passage' (Maher 2018, 39).This is perhaps why travellers without the right papers along different migratory routes call their facilitators terms other than 'smuggler', such as intermediator, handler, friend, way finder, broker, and merchant (Keshavarz and Khosravi 2022).
Moreover, the actors involved in migratory movements do not just include human beings, but also different artefacts and techniques, as I have shown so far.One of the smugglers I interviewed a few years ago complained that: '[authorities] are constantly after us.We are not alone.Boats, trucks, airplanes, terminals, trains, printers, pressers, laminates, graphic software, and many other things collaborate with us.Without them we cannot be smugglers'.These vehicles, infrastructures, devices, and materials can be seen as instruments facilitating smuggling.In truth however, it is their different material, visual, and technical capacities for rearrangement which actively determine the scale, speed, place, and time of smuggling.Without the use of existing objects and everyday practices, smuggling would not be possible.The typical portrayal of a forger is one of a master genius using their skills for 'wrong' reasons.The reality is that the ingenuity of smugglers resides not so much in some magical and singular skill of copying, but in the ability to reconfigure existing objects, technologies, and materials in a way that generates new, unanticipated relations.To hide inside something, or to imitate the exterior of another thing, requires strategic reconfigurations of a situation involving bodies, objects, environments, and temporalities.Clive Dilnot (2014), a design scholar, has argued that: the prime condition of the artificial is not that things are, but that things could be otherwise.In the artificial there is no absolute 'what-is', which means that there is no law … the artificial does not know law but only instance and possibility.What matters in the artificial is the configuration that things take (191).
The ability of smugglers to reconfigure things is not only critical for those who have been the subject of the uneven and discriminatory material supports of mobility.It can be recognised as a specific form of critique of borders.This is not a critique that addresses the world as a whole and demolishes its opponent entirely.Rather, it is a form of immanent critique that acts upon and within the artefactual and material world: a material critique of borders.

Towards a Material Mode of Critique
The material mode of critique inherent in the act of smuggling is not an act of negation, but an affirmative engagement with the materialities of the world.One way of engagement with the materialities of the world is the capacity to adopt.Smugglers too are quick to adapt to changing situations of borders, find new cracks and openings, and see borders as 'multiple patterns of exit and entry from and to different points and nodes of a journey' as Amir Heidari identifies.The process of materialisation allows for an appropriation of materials by any number of non-state actors.Constant promises of technological advancement to secure the most impenetrable borders with digital and biometric technologies attempt to displace the materialities of borders and disguise the vulnerability of these materials, through propagating a sense of immateriality by ubiquitous computing and contactless borders.Smuggling exposes the material world of bordering to allow for another type of engagement.This engagement enables us to think of borders not as lines designed by states to protect their citizens and promote a sense of security, but as mechanisms that occlude the contested nature of acts of moving, crossing, and transgressing.As a material mode of critique, smuggling takes this struggle back to the domain of materialities, and destabilises the self-claimed state monopoly over movement.Material critique is a form of engagement with the vulnerabilities brought about by the materialisation of abstract notions.In exposing the vulnerabilities of border materialities, smuggling not only provides necessary supports, but also shows the limits of governance.By opening up a seemingly restricted situation, smuggling challenges certain commonplace ways of understanding borders.As such smuggling exposes the limits of our epistemologies as any act of critique does.
Besides an engagement with the material world which reconfigures it in a way that both exposes its vulnerabilities and reappropriates these for new possibilities, a material mode of critique is made possible due to its entanglement with the system it unsettles.It is a practice that simultaneously submits to borders and subverts them.Scholars have argued previously that smuggling inevitably depends upon, and reaffirms, the very borders which it seeks to subvert (van Schendel and Abraham 2005).Many historical and contemporary accounts have similarly shown that state bordering practices and smuggling are co-dependent, as many imperial states like the British Empire (Harvey 2016;Farooqui 2005) and contemporary modern states, like the United States (Andreas 2013), were formed through the smuggling of labour, products, and technologies.The important point, though, is that they expose different things.State borders and smuggling hide different relations and are beneficial to different groups with different material conditions.
Compared to other perspectives such as critical theory, which assumes distance from the abstract notion of power, bestowing power with the grand position of domination and mastery (Chamayou 2013), a material mode of critique inhabits the system it obstructs.In accordance with Wendy Brown's (2009) take on critique, smuggling shows us that critique cannot be merely an act of rejection or dismissal.She writes: critique, whether immanent, transcendent, genealogical, or in yet some other form, is always a rereading and as such a reaffirmation of that which it engages.It does not, it cannot, reject or demean its object.Rather, as an act of reclamation, critique takes over the object for a different project than that to which it is currently tethered (16).
Smuggling shows us that any critical engagement with unequal material conditions needs to be practiced materially, and within those recognisably similar material conditions.Rather than engaging with a transcendental form of critique, smuggling is concerned with an earthly form of negotiation, in a particular place, at a specific moment, with certain materials and for a certain individual.For that reason, smuggling cannot be a universal act.It is always, necessarily, a limited practice.Smuggling will never abolish borders because its existence is enabled and legitimised by borders.But its power as a critical mode relies upon its ability to demonstrate, time and again, that borders are subject to change, transgression, and disappearance.Smuggling reclaims the knowledge that has been accumulated by the state, returning this to a social field where travellers without the right papers are able to partially redefine and renegotiate their relationship to borders.
Amir reminded me in 2015: 'if your friends [activists and academics] are disappointed about the current border politics, recommend them to meet a smuggler.Smugglers never give up because for us, what matters is not borders but moving'.This remark attests that smuggling not only reconfigures borders practically, visually, materially, and performatively, but can also reconfigure our conception of borders.The foregrounding of movement, rather than restrictions, unsettles the relationship between mobility and borders which is forced upon us by the modern, colonial, and post-colonial projects of nationstate building, which tell us that 'mobility is border crossing', as if 'borders came first and mobility second' (Ludden 2003(Ludden , 1062)).The ethos of smuggling relies on taking mobility for granted by refusing to engage with an a priori notion of borders.However, it is important to remember that while smuggling mobilises borders as sites of collaboration and negotiation, it equally casts borders as sites of power, exploitation, and violence.Like other practices of power enmeshed with bordering, smuggling limits certain choices and imposes certain vulnerabilities.But simultaneously it 'leads to other spaces wherein people prove able to negotiate their position with smugglers' (Biner 2018, 107).Smuggling as a material critique does not produce a binary of the enemy and the friend; the powerful and the weak; or the victim and the predator.Similar to Keller Easterling's (2014) notion of 'extrastatecrafts', material modes of critique like smuggling work towards 'countless mirrorings of power in a world where no one is innocent' (225).
Smuggling as a material mode of critique offers a partial agency and autonomy to travellers without the right papers which is not simply about resisting the power structures that maintain the uneven material supports of mobility.It is more of a modality of action that while being a product of borders, it is about more than borders and bordering.In this sense, the capacity for agency 'is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms'.(Mahmood 2005, 15).As a material mode of critique that unsettles the system in which it is part of, smuggling redistributes the material supports of mobility which in the long run suggests that borders cannot be only defined and respected on state's terms.In this sense, smuggling could rather be seen as 'quiet encroachment of everyday life' (Bayat 2013) where travellers without the right papers reclaim life choices from which they are denied legally with the support of the material knowledge of smugglers.
My aim with this essay has been to highlight how smuggling can be a productive force in helping us to think about the materiality of borders and the possibility of their reversal.I am not interested in romanticising smuggling, or positing it as a solution to current violence of borders.Nor am I idealising the practice for the sake of my theorisation.Like any other practice shaped by borders, smuggling involves many actors with different intentions, aspirations, and gains that give shape to different consequences for the lives of travellers without the right papers who encounter them.My work with smugglers and forgers has compelled me to recognise what these particular activities can teach us, through their engagement with the materiality of borders, and through their ambiguous relationship with power and exploitation, facilitation and support.Smuggling shows the vulnerability of the materialisation of borders.It reworks that vulnerability, redirects it, redistributes it, and suggests that borders are always already open and subject to change.As such, smuggling reveals that what is most important in the struggle against borders is the space for negotiation of knowledge and enacting the right to mobility.Whilst the processes of technologising, bureaucratising, and rationalising borders work to leave no room for challenge about what a border is and how it operates, travellers without the right papers and smugglers constantly prove that there is, and should be, space for negotiation over the act of mobility.As one traveller in Turkey puts it: 'One may count on the smuggler's rationality more than the state's rationality.If you ask me why, I would say it's because the smuggler's arbitrariness is negotiable but the state's is not' (Biner 2018, 89).
In 1952, Frantz Fanon, referring to the conditions that led to the anti-French colonial war in Southeast Asia, wrote 'it is not because [they] discovered a culture of their own that they revolted.Quite simply it was because it became impossible for them to breathe in more than one sense of the word' (Fanon 1952(Fanon [2008], 201)], 201).Phạm Thị Trà's inability to breathe in the back of a refrigerator trailer reminds us how many of those who are not entitled to move freely are historical subjects of coloniality that has reorganised the world into national borders and nation-states.As a result of the colonial administration of mobility (Ben Slimane 2009), modern borders have not just regulated the mobility and shrunk the physical space of travel for the poor and the racial Other: they have also reduced the space of negotiation of the right to movement to one which is controlled by the states.
Smuggling expands this space of negotiation by providing material supplements to circumvent the inequality of mobility.This reminds us that the question of borders today may not be the binary of open borders and the sovereign right to close its borders.Instead, one may focus on how the space of negotiation for mobility -where different interests, bodies, values, and ideas intersect -has been dominated and defined on state terms in the form of borders.The task is to unsettle that definition through other modes of material critique that go beyond smuggling.These modes of material critique may help us to widen the horizon for imagining other forms of mobility politics that are not defined by borders and bordering.

Notes
1.There is a deliberate decision here to choose this term instead of the conflating use of the terms migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.The categorisation of certain travellers, who according to border politics are named asylum seekers, refugees, irregular migrants, economic migrants, 'illegals', etc., has different legal and political consequences.This categorisation is part of a wider politics of criminalisation of racialised people on the move that allow the states to both manage and expel them legally and politically.The use of the term, 'travellers without the right papers' thus aims to avoid the essentialisation of heterogenous groups of people on the move and resist the language of borders that constantly indexes and categorises them.The term 'right' here refers to two meanings of the term ironically: (i) being right in relation to the legal framework in which those papers are assessed; (ii) right in its political meaning in current international politics and geopolitics.For a full discussion on what the use of this term entails see Keshavarz 2019. 2. From January 1, 1993, to May 5, 2023, the

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.0.3312 m3, Mourad Kouri, 2017.Steel.Reproduction of a four-person transport box built into the floor of a vehicle for irregular passage from Bulgaria to Denmark.Photo courtesy of Mourad Kouri.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. A printout of information page of a forged passport created in Adobe Photoshop.The analyst has noted that the page has been broken to 16 layers.Swedish Police Archive.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3.A snapshot of the slide show shown in the court to explain how the forger has broken the passport into layers using Adobe Photoshop.Swedish Police Archive.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. Part of the archive of bypass techniques at the Document Analysis Unit at the Swedish National Forensic Centre, 2016.Photo courtesy of Alexander Mahmoud.
network United Against Refugee Deaths has documented 57,760 deaths that occurred as a result of European border politics.These deaths have happened both inside and at the shores of Europe or as a consequence of deportation.For the latest list of names, causes of death, and dates, see: http://www.unitedagainstrefugeedeaths.eu. 3. I have written about him previously.See for example: Keshavarz 2019.4.This has been historically denied within Western thought.As South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes: 'The idea of the original is closely linked to that of truth [in Western thought].Truth is a cultural technique that counteracts change using exclusion and transcendence.' Han argues that, in contrast, 'Chinese culture uses a different technique that operates using inclusion and immanence.Solely within this other cultural technique is it possible to work freely and reproductively with copying and reproductions' (2017, 29).