Scales of grey: The complex geography of transnational crossborder trade in the African Great Lakes region

This chapter treats the issue of smuggling from the perspective of the shadows. Three perspectives widely dominate the debate on smuggling, or what I describe as the tension between formal, informal and non (or counter-)formal trade across territorial borders. Some explain this tension as a sign of resistance against state capture: a withdrawal of economic activity into spaces of avoidance. Others observe the effects of state weakness and a gap in state capacity to capture creative entrepreneurship in the margins. A third perspective emphasises the ever-shifting boundary between formality and informality as a result of everyday practice: rather than reflecting the habitus of the dispossessed, or attempts to beat a failing state system, smuggling activities often appear at the heart of formal state projects. At stake here are the very terms of legitimate economic practice and the question what constitutes an intelligible frame of economic regulation. Building on this latter perspective, I argue in this chapter, we need to radically alter our understanding about the politicization of the boundary between what are legalistically referred to as formal, informal and non-formal transactions. This analysis involves attention to what those participants in cross-border smuggling networks consider as licit and legitimate and what not. And it considers the way smuggling is actively involved in the production of space. The focus of my chapter will be the African Great Lakes region and its rich history of transforming transboundary networks of trade.