This paper focuses on daily activities of cross-border traders and “smugglers” in the Kurdish border town of Yuksekova to explore how border is experienced, defined and understood in everyday lives of the inhabitants of the town. Located at the juncture of Iranian, Iraqi and Turkish borders, Yuksekova has always been a crossroads of border-trade, and since the mid-1980s, the town has become a significant center of the war between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (the PKK). Throughout these years rural Yuksekova had been heavily militarized and mostly depopulated, and all these shattered the local economy, which historically relied on animal husbandry. During the 1990s, the urban population of Yuksekova tripled, without any “legal” employment opportunity, which made border trade and smuggling the most important source of income for many people in the town. On March 23, 2013, three months after the Turkish State and Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK, initiated “the peace process,” the PKK declared a unilateral ceasefire and started withdrawing its guerrilla forces. Following the ceasefire and the withdrawal, temporary road check-points were deployed and high-security military bases (kalekol) were constructed across the region. The construction of new military stations brought an abrupt halt to the border crossing and smuggling activities, and shattered the local economy of Yuksekova. Focusing on the practices and stories of border-crossing and smuggling before and during “the peace process”, this paper traces the effects of changing security measures on the everyday socio-economic interactions in the border town of Yuksekova. Drawing on the data collected during an 18-month ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and daily conversations with people from various socio-economic backgrounds, this paper explores the ways in which borders have become an unsettling part of everyday politico-economic struggles in Yuksekova. In so doing, this paper argues that the nation-state borders, particularly in heavily militarized borderlands like Turkey’s Kurdistan, are experienced not just as cartographic lines that denote the limits of sovereign nation-states. In the places where it is difficult to pinpoint where the border zone ends, borders are experienced as a ubiquitous reality that stretches across the region through the movement of bodies and goods and the surveillance of the high-tech military bases, check-points and drones. Through the various opposing registers on legality and legitimacy of border-crossing and smuggling, borders permeate the sensibilities of everyday life and actively shape contours of socio-political contradictions, future expectations and despair in Yuksekova