Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below

This book explores the complex and multifaceted world of smuggling, challenging the negative stereotypes and revealing its productive, subversive, and sociopolitical aspects. It examines the illegal movement of people and goods across borders, highlighting how smuggling engages with ethics, materialities, visualities, histories, and colonial power relations. The book spans a global range of locations and approaches, from personal reflections to cultural analysis, providing insights into how people navigate global inequalities and the challenges of poverty and immobility.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 208 pages
Publication date: 20 July 2022
Publisher: Pluto Press

This captivating book offers a fresh perspective on the often-maligned world of smuggling, challenging the simplistic and negative narratives perpetuated by the media and authorities. By delving into the experiences of smugglers themselves, it reveals the multifaceted nature of this practice, showcasing how it can be productive, subversive, and deeply sociopolitical. Through the lens of tracing the illegalized movement of people and goods across borders, Seeing Like a Smuggle reveals smuggling as a contradiction within the nation-state system, and in a dialectical relation with the national order of things. It raises thought-provoking questions about how smuggling engages and unsettles the ethics, materialities, visualities, histories, and colonial power relations that shape borders and bordering.

Spanning a wide range of approaches, from personal reflections and ethnographies to historical accounts, cultural analysis, and visual essays, the book explores the global landscape, covering destinations such as Colombia, Ethiopia, Singapore, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, and Kurdistan, among others. It sheds light on how individuals navigate the complexities of global inequalities and the limitations imposed by poverty and immobility.

By offering a nuanced and empathetic understanding of smuggling, this book provides valuable insights into the complex web of social, political, and economic relations that are often overlooked in the mainstream discourse. It challenges readers to think critically about the boundaries and hierarchies that shape our world and encourages us to explore alternative perspectives and approaches to addressing the challenges we face in our interconnected global society.

Weight: 228g
Dimension: 138 x 216 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780745341613