Timothy Raeymaekers

Introduction: Border, Frontier and the Geography of Rule at the Margins of the State

Imagine standing somewhere on the Khyber Pass: a rough mountain route harboring the bustling borderline between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). In Karkhana bazaar, which straddles the borderline between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Khyber Agency, tourists and UN agents haggle for cheap alcohol and cannabis resin in the market stalls. Bicycle transporters are carrying boxes of smuggled car parts and electric appliances into Peshawar, meeting their counterparts who are carrying drugs and weapons into the Pakistani FATA. Once in a while a U.S. helicopter hovers overhead, determined to seek and destroy fighting Taliban units, which are constantly crossing the border.1 Imagine now standing on the border in Goma, the Congolese twin town of Rwandan Gisenyi. On the Petite Barriere (“small checkpoint”), a long line of pedestrians crosses this merged city center, like ants on a sugar hill. Women carrying bags of foodstuffs are joined by smugglers transporting minerals from the Congolese mines of North and South Kivu. Their Rwandan counterparts bring petroleum and cement into Congo, along with construction materials and consumer goods from Mombasa and the Far East. Differences in the taxation laws of the two countries lead to widespread smuggling. Some goods are even unofficially reexported into Rwanda to avoid consumer taxes. The military on both sides watches these operations with a lazy eye, taking bribes and occasionally stopping traffic.2

Reshaping the state in its margins: The state, the market and the subaltern on a Central African frontier

In this article I explore the changing interface of states and markets in the borderland of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during the current phase of ‘post-conflict’ state reconstruction. The renewed centrality of the state in regional economic development in the aftermath of war raises some mixed reactions at the border, as various efforts to ‘bring the state back in’ invariably meet with entrenched forms of ‘informal’ integration in the realm of cross-border trade. In this article, I explain how these everyday forms of cross-border regulation have gradually come to encapsulate state rules and normativities through their encroachment on state legislation. Whereas the strong connectivities established in cross-border trade have been capable of overcoming the boundaries imposed by the state on a variety of political scales, they increasingly bring in the hegemony of the market through the back door of the border.