Abstract
Kolberi constitutes a form of cross-border labor prevalent in the western regions of Iran, wherein individuals engage in the transportation of various goods across borders to generate income. Despite the fact that government institutions and the border guard police consider Kolberi illegal, a large number of border residents are engaged in this job. A part of this group is made up of adolescents, on whom this research is focused. The researchers adopt a Cultural Criminology approach to understand how adolescents get involved in Kolberi. To gather information, the research employed a combination of interviews, document analysis, and virtual data, while thematic analysis was utilized to examine the findings. Our findings reveal that the dialectical interaction between the political economy of border, border culture, and the adolescent Kolbers’ subculture contribute to the formation of adolescents Kolberi and the reproduction of Kolberi within the border community. In this way, adolescents Kolberi is an illustrative exemplar of the development of cultural criminology of border.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The first feature film of Bahman Ghobadi, an Iranian Kurdish director, which was made in 2000 and won awards such as the Golden Camera of the Cannes Film Festival.
To study the research of this unit, check out the following site:
https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/border-criminologies/border-criminologies.
The inception of Cultural Criminology can be traced back to the seminal work “Cultural Criminology” authored by Jeff Ferrell and Clinton Sanders, which marked its initial introduction into the academic landscape (Ferrell & Sanders, 1995). The emergence of this branch of criminology is rooted in the concerns of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Carrabine, 2016).
Critical criminology represents a distinct paradigm within the field, positing that the roots of crime lie in the inequalities and contradictions of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and other governing factors prevalent in diverse societies. The primary objective of critical criminology is to explore the intricate relationship between crime and the social, cultural, political, and economic conditions that shape society. Critical criminologists engage in critical analyses of conventional criminological principles, as well as the policies and practices adopted within the criminal justice system (DeKeseredy, 2010).
A special card issued by the government to some border residents.
References
Allahvardi, F. (2014). Cultural Criminology’s approach to youth criminal justice, Ph.D. Thesis, Department of criminal law and criminology, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran.
Barker, C. (2011). Cultural studies: Theory and practice. Fourth Edition. SAGE Publications Ltd.
Bevier, L. (2015). The meaning of cultural criminology: A theoretical and methodological lineage. Journal of Theoretical & Philosophical Criminology, 7(2), 34–48.
Boedeker, J. (2012). Cross-border trade and identity in the Afghan-Iranian border region. In Bruns, Bettina, Miggelbrink, Judith (Eds.). Subverting borders: Doing Research on Smuggling and Small-Scale Trade. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Brisman, A., & South, N. (2014). Green cultural criminology: Constructions of environmental harm, consumerism, and resistance to ecocide (1st Edition). Routledge.
Bruns, B., & Miggelbrink, J. (2012). Subverting borders: Doing research on smuggling and small-scale trade (Introduction). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Carrabine, E. (2016). Changing fortunes: Criminology and the sociological condition. Sociology, 50(5), 847–862.
Daneshmehr, H., Karimi, A., & Hedayat, O. (2019). The lifeworld of border dwellers and customs policies (a study on Kolberis of Marivan City). Iranian Journal of Social Studies, 13(2), 55–79.
De Certeau, M. (2012). The practice of everyday life. Berkley. University of California.
De Genova, N., Mezzadra, S., & Pickles, J. (2015). New keywords: Migration and borders. Journal of Cultural Studies, 29(1), 55–87.
DeKeseredy, W. S. (2010). Contemporary critical criminology (1st ed.). Routledge.
Ferrell, J. (1997). Youth, crime, and cultural space. Journal of Social Justice, 24/4(70), 21–38.
Ferrell (1999). Cultural criminology. Annual Review of Sociology, 25, 395–418.
Ferrell, J., & Sanders, C. R. (Eds.). (1995). Cultural criminology. Northeastern University.
Fethoullah-Zadeh, S. (2018). Analysis of the Kolberi phenomenon based on critical criminology. Master’s thesis, Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Allameh Tabatabaei University, Tehran, Iran.
Firouzabadi, S. A., Raghfar, H., & Ahmadi, H. (2020). Border trade policies and their role in the educational life of border youth. Journal of Examining Iran’s Social Issues, 10(2), 29–54.
Fotouhi, S., & Fazeli, N. (2019). The lived experiences of the border residents of Nodshe City from the phenomenon of the border. Journal of Iranian Cultural Research, 12(2), 133–152.
Hayward, K. (2004). Space - the final frontier: Criminology, the city and the spatial dynamics of exclusion. In J. Ferrell, K. Hayward, W. Morrison & M. Presdee (Eds.). Cultural Criminology unleashed (1st ed). Routledge.
Hayward, K. (2012). Using cultural geography to think differently about space and crime. In Steve Hall & Simon Winlow (Eds.). New Directions in Criminological Theory. 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
Hayward, K., & Young, J. (2007). Cultural criminology. In Maguire, Mike; Morgan, Rod; Reiner, Robert (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. 4th Edition. Oxford University Press.
Heymen, J. M. (2012). Culture theory and US-Mexico border. In H. Donnan, & T. Wilson (Eds.), A companion to border studies. Wiley.
Johnson, C., et al. (2011). Intervention on rethinking ‘the border’ in border studies. Political Geography, 30(2), 61–69.
Kurki, T. (2014). Borders from the cultural point of view: An introduction to writing at borders. Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 6, 1055–1070. Writing at Borders.
Laidler, K. J., & Lee, M. (2015). Border trading and policing of everyday life in Hong Kong. In S. Pickering, & J. Ham (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook on Crime and International Migration (1st ed.). Routledge.
Newman, D. (2006). Boundaries. In J. M. Agnew, & G. Toal (Eds.), A companion to political geography (3rd Ed.). Blackwell Publishing.
Polanyi, K. (1992). The economy as instituted process. In M. Granovetter, & R. Swedberg (Eds.), The Sociology of Economic Life. Westview.
Polese, A. (2012). Who has the right to forbid and who to trade? Making sense of illegality on the polish-ukrainian border. In B. Bruns, & J. Miggelbrink (Eds.), Subverting Borders: Doing Research on Smuggling and Small-Scale Trade. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Presdee, M. (2004). Cultural criminology: The long and winding road. Journal of Theoretical Criminology, 8(3), 275–285.
Provine, D. M., & Zatz, M. S. (2015). Borders, crime and justice. In S. Pickering, & J. Ham. The Routledge Handbook on Crime and International Migration (1st Ed.). Routledge.
Soleimani, K., & Mohammadpour, A. (2020). Life and labor on the internal colonial edge: Political economy of Kolberi in Rojhelat. The British Journal of Sociology, 71(4), 741–760.
Spyrou, S., & Christou, M. (2014). Introduction. In S. Spyrou, & M. Christou (Eds.), Children and borders. Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Spyrou, S., & Christou, M. (2016). Children and youth at the border: Agency, identity, and belonging. In T. Skelton, K. Nairn, & P. Kraftl (Eds.). Space, place, and environment (Vol. 3). Springer.
Summary of the results of the Winter 2023 labor force census plan. Iran Statistics Center. https://amar.org.ir/Portals/0/News/1402/nirooye%20kar-1401-12.pdf?ver=1MmTze872ZtM4OFnTDElUg%3d%3d
Wilson, T., & Donnan, H. (2012). Borders and border studies. In T. Wilson, & H. Donnan (Eds). A companion to border studies. Wiley.
Wood, L., Aitken, S., & Swanson, K. (2016). Young people’s rights to recreate spaces and reimagine borders. In T. Skelton, K. Nairn, P. Kraftl. Space, place, and environment (Vol. 3). Springer.
Zare-Shahabadi, A., & Mohammadi, A. (2021). Understanding the phenomenon of Kolberi in Baneh city. Journal of Applied sociology, 32(1), 135-154
Zokaei, M. S. (2014). Young youth, city, and everyday life (1st Ed.). Tisa Publishing.
Zokaei, M. S., & Noori, A. (2015). Life in borderlands: A phenomenological study of the border residents of Nosoud city. Journal of Cultural Sociology, 6(4), 105- 128.
Funding
No funding was received for this work.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Karimi, A., Salimi, R. Adolescents Kolberi in Iran’s Western Borderlands: a Case for Cultural Criminology of Border. Asian J Criminol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-024-09421-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-024-09421-5