Blood for bread: Necro‐labor, nonsovereign bodies, and the state of exception in Rojhelat

Abstract

As members of a stateless nation that is geopolitically divided across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, Kurds are known mainly in the West as excellent fighters and political revolutionaries. Amid the devastation of war and political unrest, most Kurds struggle for economic survival. This is especially true for Eastern Kurds living under Iranian rule. They have seen their lands confiscated, their resources plundered, and their access to capital and educational mobility severely restricted. Moreover, under the rule of the Iranian Persian‐Shi'i necropolitics, Kurds have been culturally and economically subjected to a regime of internal colonialism that has eroded their capacity for economic survival. Building on the literature on sovereignty and violence, this article investigates the nexus between precarity, spatiality, and necropolitics as embodied in the practice of Kurdish cross‐border labor, or kolberi. I argue that the Iranian state deploys the discourse of a securitized borderland as a weapon to inflict a permanent state of exception on Rojhelat, condemning Kurds to the status of living dead through the imposition of precarious necro‐labor practice. Furthermore, this study articulates the border as an archive where registers of state necropolitics are deposited, preserved, and revealed in the lives of kolbers.