African Boundaries and the New Capitalist Frontier

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.