Sometimes described as the “Second Suez,” the International North–South Transit Corridor (INSTC) is frequently referred to as the “sanction-proof corridor” in Iran’s state media. Russia, Iran, and India—the inaugural members of the INSTC—signed an agreement that set this infrastructural megaproject in motion on September 27, 2001.1 The member states, a group that now includes fourteen countries, envisage this project as a series of multimodal passages through the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, and Central Asia that merge along Iran’s southern shores before culminating in the deep-water port of Mumbai.2 Unlike China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative, which unfolds along an east–west axis in Afro-Eurasia, the North–South Transit Corridor is primarily meant to traverse geographies that have been historically sidelined by the Suez Canal and other maritime-centric shipping routes. The INSTC is planned in synchrony with other transnational transport corridors that aim to connect Central Asia to the Indian Ocean, namely the Ashgabat Agreement.3
Map of the INSTC. Source: Eurasian Development Bank.
Over the past two decades, international relations and regional studies scholars have paid attention to the transformative impact of the North–South Corridor on the geopolitical and economic contours of Eurasia. Despite this, there is surprisingly little about the human geography of this project. Similar to other projects of planetary integration through infrastructure, the North–South Corridor manufactures a geographical intimacy between the denizens of the polities involved. These spatial, economic, and cultural entanglements inform the human and social fabric of the INSTC, as well as myriad ancillary infrastructures that facilitate its construction, maintenance, and quotidian utilization. As a constellation of geographical imaginations and unfolding spatial experiences, these entwined linkages shape the North–South Corridor just as much as the physical and built architecture.
Notwithstanding the vast expanses traversed by this corridor, one significant site along the North–South Corridor’s maritime borders is the historically-strategic town of Khasab and the Musandam Peninsula, an exclave of Oman on the southern shore of the Strait of Hormuz. Musandam is heavily militarized and restricted due to geopolitical tensions in the strait. Despite these ongoing tensions, the fjords near Khasab and its surrounding archipelagos attract international tourists year-round. While there are multiple ports and pipelines in Oman that are officially incorporated into the INSTC, Khasab (which is not explicitly named as part of the INSTC) is a remarkably active port that engages in daily trade with Iran through maritime smuggling. The most notable items smuggled are livestock (mainly sheep and goats) and exotic animals, which are taken aboard speedboats from the Iranian side to Khasab and destined for sale in markets across the Arabian Peninsula (primarily in Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates).4 On the way back, electronics, appliances, energy drinks, cosmetics, medicine, and car parts are taken from Khasab into Iran.
Blockades and Corridors
In spite of decades of concerted efforts to operationalize the INSTC, three formidable obstacles have impeded progress along this ambitious corridor. Firstly, the enduring hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan have created a persistent climate of instability, hindering the implementation of rail and road networks within the challenging and rugged terrains of Caucasia. Secondly, the murky maritime jurisdiction of Caspian states following the dissolution of the Soviet Union has presented substantial challenges to the integration of a cohesive network of high-capacity commercial ports in this landlocked body of water. Lastly, the imposition of Western sanctions on Iran has made the acquisition of essential funding and technical expertise for transnational railroad and highway development an arduous and costly endeavor.
In the last five years, however, a series of geopolitical developments has inspired a strong will to accelerate the completion of the missing segments.5 After twenty-two years of negotiations, a “convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea” was signed between Iran, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Azerbaijan in 2018.6 Three years later, the outbreak of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War came to a halt with the signing of a ceasefire agreement that emphasized the unblocking of all economic and transport connections in the Aras Riparian Zone as a primary concern of both Armenia and Azerbaijan.7 More recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered a cascade of Western sanctions against Russia, which served to align the strategic interests of the Iranian and Russian ruling elite. As both nations grapple with mounting isolation, the INSTC has emerged as a lifeline for evading sanctions, facilitating unmonitored trade, and enabling civilian and military technology transfer. Most infamously, cheaply-made Iranian suicide drones find their way to Ukraine’s frontlines through the Caspian passages of the INSTC.8
Due to decades of Western sanctions against Iran, much of the trade initiating from, terminating in, or passing through the country is conducted surreptitiously.9 According to Gholamreza Mesbahi-Moghaddam, a senior conservative political figure, covert import and export transactions in Iran amounted to $80 billion in 2021.10 A considerable proportion of Iran’s economic relations with the outside world is therefore handled informally through proxies or dummy companies in neighboring countries.11 In this light, Iranian state actors rely on informal practices not only to advance their regional political agenda, but also to fulfill their biopolitical responsibilities.
As many scholars have shown, informality is neither the exclusive domain of states nor of individual citizens and non-state actors.12 Informality is a mode of spatial and economic production that exists at all levels of private and public life. Rather than being an anachronism or aberration, informal exchange relations are deeply entangled with global capitalism and trade.13 In Iran, too, informal exchange relations form a hybrid space through which a multitude of actors conduct everyday commerce and trade activities.14 Besides the benefits that the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) integrated into the INSTC’s larger framework offer the Iranian government in terms of circumventing sanctions and as a backdoor to the international economy, common citizens differentially engage with the porosity that the corridor and its “zones of exception” promise.15
From populous urban centers to marginalized border communities, Iranians rely on the revenue and material mobility enabled by cross-border informal exchange. Millions require the services of smugglers to meet their physiological, political, and technological needs, that is, to acquire necessities that are rendered inaccessible either due to foreign sanctions or governmental prohibitions. Operating on principles of arbitrage, individual and small-scale border transgressors play logistical roles otherwise fulfilled by transnational corporations. In this sense, regional smugglers are the quintessential embodiment of what AbdouMaliq Simone calls “people as infrastructure.”16
To avoid the many pitfalls of reading accounts of border transgression as mere acts of criminality, it is crucial to clarify that, in the words of Jesse Ribot and Nancy Lee Peluso, “criminality is a matter of perspective, one that depends on the actor’s relationship to the law or other form of rules or sanctioned conventional practices.”17 It is also imperative that informality is not seen as an exclusively liberating practice, as, according to Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahrahm Khosravi, smuggling can “produce new, or reproduce existing, structures of patriarchy, race, and class.”18 It is neither intellectually nor politically generative to read informal traders’ everyday struggles as a tragic pursuit of survival, nor to romanticize their actions as what Hernando De Soto would call “heroic entrepreneurship.”19 Instead, these actors engage in multi-scaled processes of placemaking as a means of navigating top-down development and mitigating precarity and dispossession in myriad ways. If infrastructure space is demonstrably weaponized by the most powerful people in the world, then following infrastructural projects is an effective method to render visible the complex power relations that regiment the planet.
Development Plans in Musandam
I arrived in Khasab just after sunset on a Saturday in early January 2024. From the moment I landed, it was clear something unusual was happening. The airport was devoid of commercial activity. A military refueling truck approached our plane while four attack helicopters sat on the tarmac, and armed soldiers were everywhere. Outside, five columns of armored vehicles patrolled the streets between the airport and the town center. Later, while dining with friends at a local Pakistani restaurant, I learned the cause of the heightened military presence: the Sultan and Prime Minister of Oman, Haitham bin Tariq al Said, would be visiting Khasab for the first time since taking power.
The next morning, we rushed to the shoreline to see the Sultan’s royal yacht. Though his visit lasted only five or six hours, news quickly spread about significant investments pledged by the central government. That evening, official announcements revealed four major infrastructure projects aimed at leveraging Khasab’s strategic location and unique ecology: a new airport on the nearby mountain to overcome the challenges of the current valley airfield; a free trade zone and industrial area next to the dredged port; a vast national park for ecotourism, covering nearly two-thirds of the Musandam governorate; and a new highway system connecting Musandam to mainland Oman, addressing local concerns about economic disparities with the UAE.
Construction of new cultural, trade, and industrial zones adjacent to the port.
Construction of new cultural, trade, and industrial zones adjacent to the port.
Construction of new cultural, trade, and industrial zones adjacent to the port.
Construction of new cultural, trade, and industrial zones adjacent to the port.
Construction of new cultural, trade, and industrial zones adjacent to the port.
Construction of new cultural, trade, and industrial zones adjacent to the port.
Construction of new cultural, trade, and industrial zones adjacent to the port.
Construction of new cultural, trade, and industrial zones adjacent to the port.
Construction of new cultural, trade, and industrial zones adjacent to the port.
Over the next two days, the extraordinary fanfare gave way to an eerie silence. The military equipment was loaded onto cargo planes and ferries destined for bases in mainland Oman; the soldiers returned to their barracks; and local businesses and fishermen resumed their quotidian activities. Despite the general population’s excitement and happiness about the royal visit, one group could not conceal their discontent. Anyone whose occupation directly or indirectly involved international trade—including longshoremen, truck drivers, restaurant owners, and warehouse operators—was rendered temporarily jobless, as the state had shut down the international sector of the port for the occasion. On top of security, this decision was made to limit the unsavory animal odors in the port emanating from livestock smuggled from Iran.
After a ten-day hiatus, the port reopened to incoming watercrafts. Khasab’s ghostly ambiance was replaced by the sound of revving speedboats and innumerous trucks transporting sheep between the harbor and barns on the other end of the city. “The pumping heart of the city,” as the governor refers to the port, had come back to life. On the first day, the hundreds of speedboats that deliver smuggled livestock were clogging supply chains on the Iranian side of the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time, a gigantic luxury cruise liner appeared on the horizon to flood the city with thousands of European tourists for a few hours’ visit.
In the following weeks, I spent most of my time in cafes and restaurants frequented by people who fulfill infrastructural roles in the smuggling networks of the Strait of Hormuz. In my conversations with these workers, I learned about some of the material realities behind this line of work. A brief story from a jasho (sailor smuggler) with a former career in the US-trained Afghan Army, who had moved from Central Asia to the Hormuz region after the re-ascendency of Taliban to power, is exemplary of how access to spaces of trade is negotiated by individuals in the face of substantial risk:
The main risks in this trade are the golfs [Iranian coast guard gunboats]. Bribing them usually solves the problem, but not always. Sometimes they shoot to kill … They used to accept USD and any currencies other than Iranian Riyal, but now they only accept gold coins. Sometimes, when you don’t have what they are looking for, the only option is to go faster. I recently mounted an extra engine … When they shoot, we go faster. When it comes to this line of business, whoever is the fastest is the winner. Now I can go faster than them … We were the Afghan ground forces and now we are the Iranian Navy!20
The Formalization of Ancient Trade Networks
The story of development in Musandam is nonlinear. The trajectory of “progress” in Khasab is a careful balance of mobility and blockades. The greater Hormuz region, which includes Musandam, is not unlike many geographies that undergo rapid neoliberal development in that it is where excessive militarization and trade meet, and where geoeconomic and geopolitical calculations play equal roles in transforming ancient trade networks. Khasab and surrounding villages such as Kumzar and Bukha have played a pivotal role in maritime trade for centuries. Their strategic location at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, coupled with privileged access to freshwater and nutritional sources in an otherwise arid and water-scarce region, has been instrumental in their thriving.
The inhabitants of these areas have prospered through extensive interactions with both local and non-local actors. Historically, the sea-oriented morphology of these towns, where nearly every household had direct access to the water, underscored the importance of a decentralized model of maritime trade in every aspect of urban life. In the past two decades, however, Khasab has undergone massive transformations that radically re-structured its historically decentralized (one could argue, “free”) trade arrangements. In 2009, a large-scale, modern deep-water port was constructed at the mouth of the city. According to some of the veteran merchants of the city, one of the undisclosed objectives of establishing this port was to formalize the long-standing informal trade relations that have come to define Khasab. The soil accumulated through the dredging of the port was used to expand the city’s shoreline well over two kilometers into the Strait to establish a free economic zone. With this development, not a single household was able to maintain their direct access to the sea, ensuring that every passage was now subject to the port’s centralized authority.
Stories from both Iranian and Omani seafarers indicate that, prior to the construction of the port, and even in the first years after its inauguration, merchants arriving on international vessels were allowed to enter the city without the need to pass through visa or passport control. This facilitated free trade, making Khasab an incredibly cosmopolitan and lively site of cultural and financial exchange. During this period, the economic heart of Khasab was an ancient marketplace known as the Iranian souq. Over time, however, the operationalization of the port coincided with stricter border regimes, ultimately leading to the souq’s downfall. This large open-air market, once home to some of the region’s most prosperous currency exchangers, livestock traders, merchants, and other transnational enterprises, has now become desolate. The formerly bustling import-export businesses seem to have halted their activities overnight, leaving their office furniture abandoned and the once thriving marketplace in a state of decay.
Abandoned stores of the old Iranian souq.
Abandoned stores of the old Iranian souq.
Abandoned stores of the old Iranian souq.
Abandoned stores of the old Iranian souq.
While everyone agreed that the Iranian souq’s demise had to do with the Omani state’s trade formalization schemes, their accounts differ in terms of which historical event drove the final nail into its coffin. Most people who worked at the souq identified the accusations of money-laundering and drug-related offenses that were leveled against merchants between 2015 and 2017, which instigated a series of police raids, as the pivotal moment.21 Some blamed the strict mobility regimes of the port and new border practices that no longer allowed Iranian sailors to enter the city on short-term business stays.22 Others pointed to lingering Covid-related measures that restricted the arrival of international vessels to the hours between sunrise and sunset. I also heard that, in 2018, border regimes were amended to forbid Iranian sailors and merchants from entering Khasab at all after local women organized a protest in front of the governor’s office, voicing their dissatisfaction with the predatory behavior of Iranian visitors and their own husbands, who, buoyed by new fortunes from trade with the Iranians, were gambling and purchasing unsanctioned services from visitors from the neighboring UAE.23
Whatever the “true” cause of the downfall, it is clear that a campaign of criminalizing informal commerce and border transgression followed the completion of the official port facilities.24 Every narrative that I encountered attributed the closure to singular or sequential incidents (in contradistinction to intentional planning or top-down development decisions). That is why, when storage depots in a segment of the port that is frequented by maritime smugglers burned to the ground in the early hours of a February morning, I knew it would have long-term implications for the layout and operations of the port as a whole. It felt somewhat uncanny that, in a matter of days after this costly fire, the port was closed by the local authorities to all incoming traffic under the suspicion that a sheep smuggled from Iran was filled with opioids.
These two seemingly interconnected events swiftly changed the architecture of the port. Massive cranes were mobilized to install new X-ray machines in the port’s customs area. Construction workers were also hurried to the northern perimeter of the jetty to build a five-meter-tall wall where the only gap between fortified fences previously allowed locals to walk along the waterfront and gaze into the inner workings of the port. Following this closure, Khasab’s harbormaster reflected on the profound changes that had taken place, including the recent transfer of the port authority to the Chinese Hong Kong-based company Hutchison Ports.25 He spoke with a mix of nostalgia and resignation about the old ways of trade that once defined Khasab’s economic and cultural landscape. He acknowledged the necessity of modernization and increased security, but lamented the loss of the vibrant, open market atmosphere. His insights highlighted the tension between what he called “progress and preservation,” illustrating the complex dynamics at play in Khasab’s maritime traditions and economic practices, and most importantly, in the town’s evolving relationships with the transnational seafarers and informal traders that have frequented it for centuries.26
The inauguration event was held in St. Petersburg on September 27, 2000. Following the agreement’s ratification, it came into force in 2002. See Evgeny Y. Vinokurov, Arman Ahunbaev, and Alexander I. Zaboev, “International North–South Transport Corridor: Boosting Russia’s ‘pivot to the South’ and Trans-Eurasian Connectivity,” Russian Journal of Economics (Moskva) 8, no. 2 (2022): 159–73, 160.
The fourteen member states are India, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Belarus, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Oman, Ukraine, and Syria; Bulgaria as an observer state.
The Ashgabat Agreement is a multimodal transport agreement among the governments of Kazakhstan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Oman, and India.
I initially came across this information while doing participant observation during preliminary fieldwork in Khasab in December 2021. It was later corroborated in a semi-structured interview with an Iranian merchant responsible for the livestock trade’s logistical organization.
As of 2023, the Astara-Rasht railroad, Sadakhlo-Yerevan highway, and semi-completed Chabahar port are the main missing links.
As an internationally-ratified treaty, this document delimits each sovereign state’s territorial waters and paves the way for the spirit of collaboration necessary for infrastructural development. See “Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea,” Office of the President of Russia.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (which has long been subcontracted by Armenia to patrol its borders with Iran) was designated as the guarantor overseeing the transition toward an era of higher mobility in these borderlands. See “Statement by President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, and President of the Russian Federation,” November 10, 2030, ➝.
The high priority given to INSTC in Russian-Iranian relations is clear in the utilization of Anzali-Astarkhan ports to transport military cargo (primarily low-cost battle drones and ammunitions) destined for use against Ukrainian civil infrastructures in early 2023. The announcement of a $1.3B Russian interstate loan to Iran for the construction of the Rasht-Astara railway is another example. See Nicola P. Contessi, “The Great Railway Game,” Reconnecting Asia, October 15, 2021, ➝.
Iranian officials describe their efforts to dodge U.S. sanctions as a “resistance economy.” The exact architecture, scale, and details of Iran’s sanction-evading finance system are largely unknown. See “Iran’s Return to FATF Blacklist Restricts its Exports,” TCA Regional News, October 27, 2020.
He initially made this claim in a live debate on social media in January 2021. See Ian Talley, “Clandestine Finance System Helped Iran Withstand Sanctions Crush, Documents Show,” The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2022, ➝.
In his investigative work, Wall Street Journal investigator Ian Talley concludes that at the center of Iran’s sanctions circumvention program is a series of proxy organizations that help Iranian banks plug into the global financial system using middle-man entities overseas. For more on the innerworkings of Iran’s sanction circumvention, see Talley, “Clandestine Finance System Helped Iran Withstand Sanctions Crush.”
See Ananya Roy, “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35, no. 2 (2011): 233; also see Colin McFarlane and Michael Waibel, “Introduction: the Informal-Formal Divide in Context,” Urban Informalities: Reflections on the Formal and Informal; and Asef Bayat, “Un-Civil Society: The Politics of the ‘Informal People,’” Third World Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1997): 60.
Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi, eds. Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below (Pluto Press, 2022), 2.
I borrow this concept from Oren Yiftachel who uses it to describe the spaces “between the ‘lightness’ of legality/approval/safety, and the ‘darkness’ of eviction/destruction/death.” See Oren Yiftachel, “Critical Theory and ‘Gray Space’: Mobilization of the Colonized,” City 13, nos. 2-3 (2009): 246–63, 251.
For a complete discussion on the role of SEZs as alternative gateways to the international economy see Hassan Hakimian, “Iran’s Free Trade Zones: Back Doors to the International Economy?” Iranian Studies 44, no. 6 (2011): 851–74.
Simone argues that the networked actions and sensibilities of citizens can form alternative infrastructural systems in response to chains of precarity. In other words, people are not passive recipients of infrastructure but actively shape it through their social and cultural practices, identity-based performances, and illicit or differentially-sanctioned interactions with the built environment. See AbdouMaliq Simone. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg,” Public Culture 16, no. 3 (2004): 407.
Jesse C. Ribot and Nancy Lee Peluso, “A Theory of Access,” Rural Sociology 68, no. 2 (2003): 164.
Keshavarz and Khosravi, Seeing Like a Smuggler, 12.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 41
Field notes from a conversation on January 27, 2024.
Field notes from conversations between January 19 and February 28, 2024.
Field notes from conversations between January 19 and February 28, 2024.
Field notes from a conversation on January 28, 2024.
Perhaps the most iconic indicator of these shifts can be seen in the construction of a massive penitentiary and police training complex concurrent with the operationalization of the port between 2013-2016.
Field notes from a conversation on February 15, 2024.
Field notes from a conversation on February 15, 2024.
New Silk Roads is a project by e-flux Architecture in collaboration with the Critical Media Lab at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW and Noema Magazine (2024), and Aformal Academy with the support of Design Trust and Digital Earth (2020).
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