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

Abstract

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.