Outsmarting sanctions

Abstract In 2012 the UN Security Council and the European Union bolstered US economic sanctions on Iran, disembedding the country's economy from financial markets. Since then, the sanctions have radically devalued Iran's currency, leading Iranians to seek a viable standard of value elsewhere. They have done so through ghachagh (fugitive) configurations of exchange, in which they practice a cross‐border trade in “fictitious commodities” (money, land, and labor). In some cases their efforts culminate in the purchase of a “passport apartment” in Turkey, where nonnational homebuyers are expedited to citizenship. Sanctions might have dysregulated Iranians’ money, yet in aiming to isolate Iran's economy, they had the opposite effect: they pulled Iran, more than ever, into a regionally networked economy. Here, cross‐border traffic emerges as a form of experimentation in mitigating sanctions. In this context, fugitive exchange rewrites the fictions of fictitious commodities, transforming the very terms of value, mobility, and security.