Firat Bozcali

Topics of Interest:
Trade Networks, Smuggling, Il/legality, Anthropology of State, Politics of Oil, Morality & Ethics, Materiality Studies, Science & Technology Studies 

Countries/Regions of Interest:
Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria

List of Publications

Articles & Book Reviews:
Bozçalı, F. 2014, “Hukuki-Maddi bir kategori olarak sınır: Türkiye-Iran sınırında kaçakçılık, mahkeme süreçleri ve sınırın ‘resmi’ temsilleri [Border as a Legal-Material Category: Smuggling in the Turkish-Iranian Border, Legal Processes, and Everyday Construction of the ‘Official’ Borders]” Toplum ve Bilim Vol. 131: 135-162.

Bertaux, S. & Bozçalı, F. 2013, “Curbing Marriages of Convenience? Female Labor Migrants, Patriarchal Domination, and the 2003 Biopolitical Securitization of Turkish Citizenship” In X. Guillaume & J. Huysmans (Eds.) Citizenship and Security: The Constitution of Political Being Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge.

Bozçalı, F. 2012, “Review of Bazaar and the State in Iran: The Politics of the Tehran Marketplace by Arang Keshavarzian,” Arab Studies Journal, vol. XX no. 1, Spring 2012.

Bozçalı, F. 2011, “The Illegal Oil Trade Along Turkey’s Borders,” Middle East Report Number 261 Vol. 41 No. 4: 24-29.

Bozcali, F. 2008, “Review of Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence by Aliza Marcus,” Arab Studies Journal, vol. XV no. 2 /vol. XVI no. 1, Fall 2007/Spring 2008.

Bozçalı, V. F. 2008, “Türkiye'nin Kürt Sorunu: 1999-2007 [Turkey’s Kurdish Question: 1999-2007]”, Birikim 225: 9-19.

Bozçalı, V. F. 2006, “Poulantzas’ın D/devrimi [Poulantzas’s R/revolution]”, Birikim 205-206: 140-147.

Book Translations:
Chatterjee, P. 2006, Mağdurların Siyaseti:Halk Siyaseti üzerine Düşünceler  [Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World]. (Trans. V. F. Bozçalı) İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları.

Fırat received his Bachelor of Arts degrees in Political Science and International Relations and Sociology at Boğaziçi University, in Istanbul, Turkey.

In 2007, he started the Masters of Arts program in Near Eastern Studies at Hagop Kevorkian Center, New York University. For his master’s degree, he studied the oil trade that was conducted via trucks and tractor-trailers carrying humanitarian aid cargos from Turkey to Iraqi Kurdish region and central-Iraq, during the 1990s. In his masters thesis, The Oil Pipeline on Wheels (OPW): Rethinking State-Formation in the Iraqi-Turkish Border Zones, he examined how this oil trade supplied the state and state-like agents (such as Iraqi Kurdish parties) with various sources in providing social services from security to development in Iraqi Kurdistan, central-Iraq, and Turkey.

In 2009, he started the doctoral program in Anthropology at Stanford University. During his doctoral studies, he has pursued his research interests on trade and smuggling to further explore the ways in which governmental binaries such as formal/informal, official/unofficial, legal/illegal, licit/illicit and private/public are produced and experienced in and by various modern technologies of power. He conducted 20-months long dissertational fieldwork in Van, a predominantly-Kurdish populated province of Turkey by the Iranian border. Looking at the different kinds of smuggling cases in Turkish courts, he unpacked how territorial borders as well as boundaries of national markets have been negotiated and reworked.