This chapter analyses the system of revenue-sharing between official and unofficial authorities on the Congo-Uganda border. Trying to move beyond reductionist conceptualisations of such practices as either mere corruption or anti-state resistance, it disentangles the struggle over cross-border economic gains across a range of spatial scales. Such gains are never un-regulated, nor occur outside the law. Rather, the transformation of regulations on the border is driven by a particular set of market relations that gradually absorb the state into its nodes of interaction. The result of these shifting power relations at the African border is not a complete withdrawal of state institutions from the economic domain, but rather a differentiated engagement of economic actors with various scales of authority that remain nonetheless intricately entwined.
African Boundaries and the New Capitalist Frontier
Raeymaekers T.
2012
Abstract
This chapter analyses the system of revenue-sharing between official and unofficial authorities on the Congo-Uganda border. Trying to move beyond reductionist conceptualisations of such practices as either mere corruption or anti-state resistance, it disentangles the struggle over cross-border economic gains across a range of spatial scales. Such gains are never un-regulated, nor occur outside the law. Rather, the transformation of regulations on the border is driven by a particular set of market relations that gradually absorb the state into its nodes of interaction. The result of these shifting power relations at the African border is not a complete withdrawal of state institutions from the economic domain, but rather a differentiated engagement of economic actors with various scales of authority that remain nonetheless intricately entwined.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
