Smuggling ideologies

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SMUGGLING IDEOLOGIES
Theory and reality in African clandestine
economies
Kate Meagher
Introduction
In Africa, clandestine economies get an identity change about once every decade. From the
mid-1970s to the mid-1980s they were associated with economic distortions (May 1985; World
Bank 1981); from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s they were about indigenous en-
trepreneurship and regional integration from below (Egg & Igue 1993; MacGaey 1991; World
Bank 1989). From the late 1990s through much of the ‘noughties’ they have been linked with
corruption and criminalization of the state (Bayart et al. 1999; Reno 2000); from the late
‘noughties’ clandestine trade was all about real governance and more authentic forms of state
formation (Menkhaus 2006/7; Raeymaekers 2010). Recently, a more selective approach dis-
tinguishes ‘acceptable’ clandestine trade that creates employment for women and youth, from
criminal revenue streams for rebels and global terrorists (Van den Boogaard et al. 2021; Kodero
2020; Maguire and Haenlin 2016; Titeca 2019). With so many changes of character, it is
pertinent to ask whether these reflect shifts in the nature and eects of clandestine economies
themselves, or shifts in the way they are perceived by international researchers and development
practitioners.
A close empirical examination of African clandestine economies (or informal cross-border
trade, aka ‘smuggling’) reveals that they have always involved a variety of elements, ranging
from responses to economic distortions through indigenous entrepreneurship to criminaliza-
tion, depending on which countries or regions one is looking at, and when. In some countries,
such as Nigeria, clandestine trade has weakened industrialization eorts and undermined the
formal economy; in others, such as Benin or the Gambia which derive significant revenue from
operating as local import hubs, it is central to the organization of the formal economy (Bach
1999; Golub & Mbaye 2009; Igué 1977; Sall & Sallah 1994). In still other countries, such as
Sierra Leone or the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), clandestine economies are
bound up with rebels and rogue military forces that ravage the state and society, while in
contrasting cases, such as Senegal, clandestine trade has actually contributed to social stability
and processes of state formation (Babou 2002; Lindley 2009; Malcolmson 1996; Reno 2003;
Renton et al. 2007).
In this chapter, I will consider the role of ideological framing and international policy
objectives in shaping and reshaping our understanding of African clandestine economies,
30 DOI: 10.4324/9781003043645-3

focusing on the ongoing tension between criminalizing smuggling activities and portraying
them as developmental sources of state building and poverty alleviation. I argue that prevailing
development perspectives on African clandestine economies often obscure rather than clarify
the changing eects of illicit trade on governance and development in various African contexts.
To trace the gap between smuggling ideologies and smuggling realities, I will focus on informal
cross-border trading systems in West Africa during the 1990s and their role in underpinning
criminalization discourses, and on violent Eastern African cross-border trading complexes in the
2000s centred on the Great Lakes region, which have been central to hybrid governance
narratives of the constructive role of smuggling networks in African state formation. In both
cases, the liminality of smuggling and a tendency to pathologize or essentialize African realities
provide a palette for theorizing illicit trading activities around international notions of the ‘right’
kind of order, rather than around the national political and economic processes and popular
development aspirations.
African clandestine economies and model shopping
African clandestine trading systems have played havoc with conventional theories of states and
economies – they expanded rather than contracted in the face of liberal market reforms, and
became entwined with rather than replaced by the formal institutions of the state (Egg &
Herrera 1998; Hibou 1999; Meagher 2003; Nabuguzi 1994). By the late 1990s, the recognition
that smuggling was neither reined in by liberalization, nor transformed into a seedbed of liberal
entrepreneurship turned from disillusionment to alarm as African trading networks began to
seize the opportunities of liberalization and globalization to expand their clandestine reach into
the global economy (Dueld 2000; Meagher 2003). This set the stage for the rise of crim-
inalization perspectives, which defended the Weberian model of the rational-legal state by
pathologizing African clandestine trade as mechanisms of violent predation, ‘war economies’
and ‘shadow states’ (Bayart et al. 1999; Collier & Hoeer 2000; Reno 2000).
A decade later, these Afro-pessimist interpretations have given way to more sanguine views
of the developmental capacities of non-state forms of order. Weberian models of the bu-
reaucratic state have been overtaken by models based on Olson’s stationary bandit and Tillyan
notions of state formation as a violent process. In the process, the developmental implication of
Africa’s smuggling networks are being rehabilitated across the continent. What is going on?
Have African clandestine economies changed the way they operate, or have researchers de-
veloped better approaches to understanding their impact on development, or is something else
afoot?
Two main processes seem to be at work here, one practical and the other theoretical. On the
one hand, a recognition of the poor performance and high cost of conventional approaches to
state-building are encouraging a search for alternative means of restoring order in hard-to-
govern regions of the continent (Menkhaus 2006/7; Reno 2004; see also Meagher 2012). As
Thomas Bierschenk (2010:2) points out, decades of detailed anthropological work on informal
and non-state forms of organization have revealed that ‘political order is possible without the
state,’ leading to a rethink of imported Weberian models of the rational bureaucratic state,
increasingly regarded as an unnecessary luxury for Africa’s fragile regions. On the other hand,
emerging theoretical perspectives that focus on the notion of ‘hybrid governance’ suggest that
violence and rival forms of order and authority may be part of more authentic processes of state-
formation rather than symptoms of criminality and state failure (Boege et al. 2009a; Hagmann &
Peclard 2010; MacGinty 2010; Menkhaus 2008; Vlassenroot & Raeymaekers 2008). Non-state
forms of order not only oer better value for money, but a new theoretical packaging suggests
Smuggling ideologies
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they may be acceptable and even preferable paths to development (Boege et al. 2009a:14).
Similar to Keebit von Benda-Beckman’s notion of ‘forum shopping,’ prevailing development
thinking seems to have gone shopping for new models of African clandestine trade to fit
changing political and developmental objectives (Benda-Beckmann 1981).
In the process, thinking about clandestine economies has shifted away from Weberian
models of economic and political institutions, to a realization that the opposite of rational
bureaucratic order is not disorder and corruption, but informal forms of order. The image of a
‘shadow economy’ regulated by a ‘shadow state’ is giving way to the recognition of a range of
indigenous institutions that create local forms of order in the shadow of the state. This has been
facilitated by an improved institutional understanding of informal forms of order, and a reali-
zation that they can be enlisted to create a measure of stability at lower cost. As James Ferguson
(2006:208) argues in his provocative book Global Shadows, engaging with informal systems of
order and authority means that ‘capital investment can be institutionalized in a way that makes it
possible to cut out the “overhead” of a national-level societal project and to provide political
order “flexibly” on an as-needed basis, to restricted and delimited non-national spaces.’ This
‘aha moment’ has been followed by an explosion of interest in arguments by Charles Tilly and
Mancur Olson that violence and protection rackets are not necessarily signs of criminality and
regulatory collapse but harbingers of new, more locally-embedded forms of order (Olson 1993;
Tilly 1985). While Tilly (1985:170) stresses the interdependence among war making, state
making and organized crime, Olson (1993:569) critiques the denigration of predatory states,
arguing that ‘the metaphor of predation obscures the great superiority of stationary banditry
over anarchy and the advances on civilization that have resulted from it.’
While Tilly expressed reservations about the extension of his theories from early modern
Europe to contemporary developing countries (Tilly 1985:185–186), recent research on cross-
border trade and informal markets has revealed greater confidence in the applicability of these
ideas to twenty-first century Africa. Contemporary studies of clandestine trade in the DRC,
Uganda, Somalia and various parts of West Africa have all drawn explicitly on the work of Tilly
or Olson to suggest that large-scale smuggling activities and violent forms of regulation are not
instances of African regulatory pathologies, but represent the replacement of imported and
unworkable ideal types with more embedded systems of order and state formation (Boege et al.
2009b:601; Chalfin 2010; Menkhaus 2006/7; Raeymaekers 2010; Reno 2009; Titeca 2011:61).
In addition to bringing new scholars of African clandestine trade to the fore, some more
established proponents of criminalization perspectives have shifted gear. William Reno initially
associated ‘illicit economies’ with corrupt ‘Shadow States’ using corruption and violent pre-
dation to dismantle rational bureaucracies (Reno 1997, 2000, 2006). In subsequent work, Reno
has turned to Tillyian and Olsonian notions of violence as an alternative source of order, and
uses them to show how violence and war economies in contemporary West Africa can lead to
‘indigenous … as opposed to internationally scripted transitions’ (Reno 2009:317). He high-
lights the shift from predation to peaceful economic competition in West African contexts, as
networks of violence and plunder built up during conflict are transformed into legitimate
political and business relationships, leading to the claim that ‘These developments represent the
emergence of new forms of governance outside the framework of imported notions of reform
and state-building’ (Reno 2009:313).
This greater appreciation of local institutional process, warts and all, is certainly to be
welcomed. The bizarre twist in this theoretical rehabilitation of African clandestine economies,
however, is that they tend to be applied to contexts in which cross-border trading activities are
empirically more violent and criminal than those conventionally cited to support the older
criminalization narratives. Examples of the criminalization of African states and economies in
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the late 1990s tended to be drawn from relatively peaceful informal business systems in West
and West Central Africa (Egg & Herrera 1998; Flynn 1997; Grégoire 1992; Gregoire & Labazee
1993; Igue & Soule 1992; Meagher 2003). By contrast, contemporary ‘hybrid governance’
views of clandestine trade as transformative tend to be drawn from contemporary cross-border
trading complexes in Eastern Africa, where violence and criminality have made cross-border
trade increasingly inimical to popular welfare (Amnesty International 2005; Eichstaedt 2011;
Global Witness 2009; Human Rights Watch 2005). Examining why largely peaceful informal
commercial networks were represented as criminal, and largely violent smuggling systems are
being represented as sources of stability and political transformation raises important questions
about the ways in which prevailing interpretations of African clandestine trade are shaped by
ideological agendas rather than by empirical realities.
The criminalization of smuggling in West Africa
Many of the most iconic cases of the criminalizing influence of cross-border trade have been
drawn from West African clandestine trading systems, as exemplified in the work of Bayart et al.
(1999), Janet Roitman (2004) and Mark Dueld (2000; 2001). Likewise, Daniel Bach’s (1999)
research on informal trade and regional dis-integration draws heavily on West African examples
which dominate the Francophone literature (Egg & Herrera 1998; Igue & Soule 1992), and
William Reno’s (1997, 2000, 2006) model of the shadow state rested heavily on research in
Sierra Leone and Nigeria.
Similar research on clandestine trading networks in Zaire/DR Congo was occasionally
featured in criminalization narratives of the 1990s (Reno 1998; Bayart et al. 1999), but was
much less prominent, owing in large part to the limited global presence of Congolese trading
networks. As recognized by Janet MacGaey and Remi-Bazenuissa-Ganga (2000), Congolese
trading networks of the 1980s and 1990s lacked the institutionalized corporate organization of
their West African counterparts, confining them to relatively low-level international trading
activities. By contrast, West Africa’s dynamic smuggling networks used liberalization for a
dramatic expansion of their engagement with the global economy, raising alarm in the inter-
national community by their ability to bypass formal regulatory structures and subvert the
intentions of economic reforms (Meagher 2003). Yet a closer look at the evidence shows that,
despite the perceived threat in international policy circles, the vast majority of West African
smuggling activities were neither criminal nor violent. They were dominated by trade in legal
commodities through illegal channels, and were much less involved with war, illegal goods, or
the creation of peripheral centres of power in the ‘borderlands.’
War economies vs empirical evidence in West Africa
Criminalization perspectives of the late 1990s routinely linked the highly organized clandestine
trading systems of West Africa to ‘violent modes of accumulation’ based on war, criminality,
and trade in illegal goods. The core actors of cross-border trading networks were frequently
represented as ‘warlords,’ ‘mafia entities,’ and ‘rebels’ or armed youth, whether the indigenous
commercial groups at the heart of these networks had anything to do with war or not (Dueld
2000; Reno 1998; Reno 2000; Roitman 2004). Reno (2000:434) states bluntly that ‘this
commerce accompanies armed conflict, and plays an important role in provoking and
prolonging much of the warfare in Africa.’
In other cases, the link between transnational smuggling networks and violence has been
made by dismissing any meaningful distinction between violent and peaceful modes of
Smuggling ideologies
33

clandestine trade. Roland Marchal and Christine Messiant (2003:100) express exasperation with
the tendency of commentators on war economies to create an impression of clandestine trade as
a ‘belligerent factor by definition.’ David Keen’s (1996) notion of war as ‘the pursuit of eco-
nomics by other means’ has been used widely to merge the notion of clandestine trading
networks with war economies, even where there is no evidence of war or violence. Reno
(2006:31) contends that smuggling networks ‘fuse the exercise of political power to violent
predation in informal and clandestine markets … well before these places come to international
attention as conflict zones.’ Similarly, Mark Dueld (2000:79–80) claims that
Given the general characteristics of transborder trade, it is possible to argue that there
is a similarity between peace economies and war economies … Even when violence is
not visible, similar processes of exclusion and oppression can be in operations but at a
lower key … War and peace are relative rather than absolute conditions.
Many of the criminalization narratives also focus attention on illegal goods as the core com-
modities involved in smuggling networks. Reno (2000:433), Bach (1999:12), Bayart et al.
(1999) and others represent African clandestine economies as a nexus of drug smuggling, piracy,
blood diamonds, arms, and human tracking. Janet Roitman (2004:155) gives a similarly
nefarious list of smuggled goods in the Chad Basin. Mark Dueld (2001:156) concedes that
African smuggling networks are not necessarily associated with war and illegal goods, but
contends that the same networks used for trading medicine and manufactured goods are used
for money laundering and arms trading, without providing any supporting evidence for this
claim.
Closer empirical examination reveals that the bulk of cross-border trade in West Africa is
made up of legal goods, has little to do with conflict, and is centred on a dynamic of currency
conversion rather than money laundering (Chalfin 2010; Egg & Herrera 1998; Egg & Igue
1993; Igue & Soule 1992; Meagher 1997, 2003). Numerous studies have documented that the
driving force behind the expansion of cross-border trade in West Africa has not been war or the
lure of high value minerals, but fiscal and monetary disparities created by the patchwork of
Francophone and Anglophone colonies across the region. In particular, disparities in tari and
subsidy regimes in neighbouring countries, and the existence of the internationally convertible
CFA Francs side-by-side with the inconvertible currencies of most Anglophone economies
have animated cross-border trade (Herrera 1997; Igué 1977; Meagher 2003). A wealth of
detailed empirical research conducted by Francophone as well as Anglophone researchers in
Nigeria and neighbouring countries has shown that the commodities involved in West African
smuggling networks throughout the 1980s and 1990s were dominated by legal goods such as
agricultural goods, textiles, cigarettes, used cars, pharmaceuticals, electronics, and other man-
ufactured consumer goods (Egg & Herrera 1998; Meagher 1997; Meagher 2003; Moussa et al.
2010). While drug and diamond smuggling have increased in the region, they are not carried
out by the main cross-border trading groups and remain peripheral in terms of value. West
Africa is only a transit point for drugs, and diamonds have played a relatively minor role in the
value of the region’s clandestine trade (Meagher 2003; Reyskens 2012). Even at the height of
West African drug smuggling in the mid-2000s, the total value of West African drug smuggling
has been estimated at $2 billion, which is less than 2% of West African clandestine economies
(African Economic Development Institute 2013).
The largest cross-border trading complex in West/West Central Africa, centred around
Nigeria, is almost entirely made up of states that are not at war, including Nigeria, Benin, Togo,
Niger, Cameroun and Chad. Only one of these states, Chad – the most economically peripheral
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– could be defined as a ‘conflict state’ in the heyday of West African clandestine trade. Nigeria,
the hub of this clandestine trading complex, hosts the largest informal economy in West Africa.
Nigeria’s informal economy is estimated at about 60% of GDP in a country that accounts for
60.5% of West Africa’s GDP (Economic Commission for Africa 2007; Meagher 2010). This
puts Nigeria’s clandestine economy alone at about 40% of West African GDP. Transit and re-
export trade in Benin and Togo have been put at about 75% of their GDP, most of it informal
and based on legal goods (Golub 2010:24).
Beyond the Nigerian cross-border trading complex, the next major centre of cross-border
trading networks is in the Senegambian region, where again, the core activities revolve around
consumer goods and peaceful trading activities (Babou 2002; Diouf 2013; Ebin 1993; Lambert
1989; Sall and Sallah 1994). The World Bank puts Senegal’s informal economy at 60% of the
country’s $14 billion GDP, or about 2% of West African GDP (Golub & Mbaye 2009; World
Bank n.d.). The Mouride trading networks that dominate Senegal’s clandestine economy en-
courage a strict moral code of piety, frugality and hard work, and their expanding involvement
in cross-border trade since the 1970s has underpinned one of the most stable democratic states
in Africa. The long-standing conflict in the Senegalese region of Casamance has been so low
key that some have dubbed its combatants ‘part-time rebels,’ and it has little role in Senegal’s
clandestine trading activities (Evans 2003; Foucher 2003). Indeed, Martin Evans (2003) argues
that the term ‘war economy’ is inappropriate to the Casamance conflict.
The only parts of West Africa where classical war economies have predominated during the
latter part of the twentieth century are in Liberia/Sierra Leone and in Chad, areas largely
peripheral to West Africa’s major cross-border trading systems. None of West Africa’s major
indigenous globalized trading networks, including the Hausa, Igbo, and Mourides, are based in
these areas, though Lebanese networks have been more active. Clandestine economies in
Liberia and Sierra Leone involved instrumental arrangements with foreign networks and militias
rather than institutionalized commercial networks based on local commercial norms and values.
Moreover, the entire combined economies of the Liberia and Sierra Leone is less than half of
the clandestine share of Senegal’s economy, and less than one percent of the GDP of the West
African region (Global Finance Magazine 2011a; Global Finance Magazine 2011b; Smillie et al.
2000). The same is true of Guinea Bissau, dubbed Africa’s first ‘narco state.’ While drug
tracking is estimated at twice the country’s gross domestic product, this still amounts to less
than 2% of clandestine trade in the West African region (Madeira et al. 2011; Reyskens 2012;
United Nations Oce on Drugs and Crime 2011).
A pluralization of regulatory authority?
Criminalization narratives of West African informal economies have sought to understand not
only how clandestine economies restructure flows of goods and resources, but how they re-
organize the sources and sites of power in the process of shifting it outside formal regulatory
structures of the state. Notions of a criminalized ‘shadow state’ saw power largely exercised
through networks of ‘front men’ including corrupt ocials, strong men and armed youth,
sometimes engaging with global corporate linkages operating outside legal regulations (Bayart
et al. 1999; Chabal & Daloz 1999; Hibou 2004; Reno 2000; Reno 2004). Using an ethno-
graphy of clandestine trading networks, Janet Roitman (2004) mapped the regulatory trans-
formations taking place, which were said to generate new sites of power operating at the
borders rather than in capital cities.
While initiating important debates on the regulatory restructuring eected by large clan-
destine economies, these representation of clandestine power networks are sorely in need of a
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reality check. Those familiar with the structure of smuggling activities in the countries of the
‘Chad Basin’ know that prior to 2010, Hausa-Fulani commercial groups rather than military or
rebel groups have been the central players, and the regulatory centre of these networks is not at
the borders, but in the inland commercial capitals of informal trade, such as Kano in Nigeria,
and Maradi in Niger (Hashim & Meagher 1999; Grégoire 1992). The same is true of the
Mouride trading networks, which are not intertwined with the military or with rebels, and have
their informal organizational capital in the inland city of Touba, not at the borders (Babou
2002; Malcolmson 1996). Not only are these main West African trading networks not geo-
graphically peripheral, they are not socially or politically peripheral either. Both the Nigerian
and the Senegalese trading networks hail from major national power-holding groups within
their respective societies. The Hausa-Fulani block have been at the centre of state power for
much of Nigeria’s post-colonial history, and the Mourides have had close relations with systems
of power in Senegal since colonial times (Beck 2001; Dahou & Fouchard 2009; Diouf 2013).
Far from creating new sites of power, these networks have played a key role in consolidating
state power through socio-political linkages with and dependence on supportive relations with
the state.
The key point here is that West African smuggling networks have been represented as
criminal, violent and disruptive of constituted authority when the evidence suggests that in
most of West Africa they were predominantly peaceful commercial systems that reinforced state
power. What is intriguing is that now that the pendulum is swinging back toward a more
positive view of African smuggling networks, attention is shifting away from largely peaceful
West African networks to focus on much more violent, militarized and politically disruptive
smuggling networks operating in Eastern Africa. In short, what was peaceful was represented as
violent and disruptive, and what is violent and disruptive is now being represented as
developmental.
The ideological rehabilitation of smuggling in Eastern Africa
Since the mid-2000s, Eastern Africa has displaced West Africa as the epicentre of empirical
research and theoretical debates on clandestine cross-border trade. In the Eastern African
context, I will concentrate on the largest clandestine trading complex operating in the Great
Lakes region, involving the DR Congo, Uganda, Sudan and Rwanda, along with Kenya and
Tanzania as key entry ports.
1
Recent studies of clandestine cross-border trade in Eastern Africa
emphasize the cooperative relations among smugglers, military actors, state ocials and popular
forces, who have created practical regulatory solutions to the problems of governance created
by state predation and collapse. Negotiations among these actors in the Uganda-DRC-Sudan
border regions are seen as a source of ‘practical norms’ that fill the gap between the legal and the
possible in dicult circumstances, leading to a shift of regulatory authority from the decrepit
structures of weak or collapsing states to ‘military-commercial networks’ that restore order and
reconnect the region with the global economy (Raeymaekers 2010; Titeca 2012; Titeca & de
Herdt 2010). In other words, violent clandestine trading networks are being reimagined as ‘law
makers’ rather than ‘law breakers.’ A closer look at smuggling networks in the region raises
questions about the optimistic interpretation of the transformations underway, calling for a
more detailed consideration of their association with violence, the role of licit versus illicit
goods, and their impact on regulatory authority.
Smuggling in Eastern Africa has a long history dating back to pre-colonial times, involving
trading networks that link the Eastern DRC to the global economy through ports in Kenya and
Tanzania, via Uganda, as well as interaction with networks in neighbouring Sudan, Rwanda
Kate Meagher
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and Burundi (Meagher 1990; Titeca 2012; Vlassenroot et al. 2012). Since the late 1980s,
however, these trading systems have been transformed by constant waves of conflict in the
region. Unlike West Africa, violent conflict aecting virtually all of the countries in this cross-
border trading complex has raged for much of the last three decades, including the war in
southern Sudan, the First and Second Congo War, the Rwandan genocide, the conflict in
Burundi, and the Ugandan civil war and enduring low-intensity conflict of the LRA and other
rebel groups in northern Uganda.
In the process, clandestine trade has been reshaped by military activity, rebel incursions, and
waves of refugees moving back and forth across borders, leading to a significant militarization of
previously largely commercial cross-border trading networks. In contrast to West Africa’s
smuggling networks, military forces and rebel militias are central players in clandestine
economies of the Great Lakes. In the DRC, Timothy Raeymaekers and Koen Vlassenroot have
documented the collaboration of cross-border traders with local rebel groups (Raeymaekers
2010; Vlassenroot and Raeymaekers 2008). On the Ugandan side, a number of scholars have
noted that many of those involved in clandestine trade are rebels, former rebels or soldiers
(Titeca 2006; Titeca & de Herdt 2010; Vlassenroot et al. 2012). Titeca (2012:52–53) and others
have detailed the increasing involvement of the Ugandan military and state ocials in cross-
border trading activities in northern Uganda from the late 1980s, leading to a genuine ‘military-
commercial nexus’ that has intervened significantly in the regulation of clandestine trade,
collaborating with Congolese rebels across the border to ensure access to the product of Ituri
gold fields (Human Rights Watch 2005; Titeca 2011; Vlassenroot et al. 2012). Vlassenroot et al.
(2012:5) state that ‘during the Congolese wars, these networks’ mode of exploitation and
commercialization became entirely militarized.’ The involvement of Rwandan ocials and the
military in the cross-border mineral trade in Eastern Congo is well documented, making the
conflict in Eastern Congo a ‘self-financing war’ (Jackson 2002:24). The Sudanese branch of this
trading complex is equally militarized, with rebels and soldiers displacing local commercial
groups in cross-border trading activities (Shomerus & Titeca 2012; Walraet 2008).
Militarization has been accompanied by the replacement of commercial relations with in-
creasingly violent forms of regulation. While cross-border trading relations in West Africa were
regulated by institutionalized commercial practices and reputation-based sanctions, Eastern
African clandestine trade is dominated by ‘violent modes of accumulation.’ In the DRC,
militarized trading monopolies have marginalized independent traders, and have developed
coercive and often violent relations with society (Human Rights Watch 2005; Jackson 2002;
Meagher 2012; Raeymaekers 2010). Accounts from DRC and Uganda speak of forced labour,
violent treatment of uncooperative local ocials, and the manipulation of ethnic antagonisms
for the violent restructuring of production and trading networks (Titeca and de Herdt 2010;
Vlassenroot et al. 2012).
The key goods involved in these Eastern African trading networks also show a strong leaning
toward illicit rather than legal commodities. While manufactured consumer goods play a role,
the driving force behind the trade is conflict minerals and arms. In Uganda, Titeca (2012:2)
notes that ‘[t]he export of manufactured goods to Congo and the import of gold remain the
basis of the cross-border contraband trade …’ Plundering Congolese gold and timber are key
incentives to cross-border trade in Uganda, where gold now plays a prominent role in the
country’s ocial exports, despite the fact the Uganda has virtually no gold mines (Human
Rights Watch 2005). In Rwanda, a range of conflict minerals, including tin, tantalum and
tungsten ores, are central incentives to continued cross-border trade with the DRC. By the late
noughties, tin ore rose to become Rwanda’s largest export by value, (Garrett & Mitchell
2009:39; UNCTAD 2010:10). The return trade for these conflict minerals includes arms as well
Smuggling ideologies
37

as manufactured goods (Human Rights Watch 2005; Renton et al. 2007; Titeca 2012). In
short, conflict minerals and arms play a central role in Eastern African clandestine trade, in
contrast to the central role of legal goods and convertible currency in West Africa.
Finally, the notion that these militarized smuggling networks are becoming new sources of
legitimate authority in their respective regions is not supported by the evidence. Raeymaekers
maintains that militarized trading networks in Eastern DRC are engaging in ‘state-like func-
tions,’ owing to their increasing involvement in taxation and the provision of a range of in-
frastructure and social services, including roads, health centres, schools and electricity. Titeca
(2012) notes similar activities on the part of cross-border traders in northern Uganda. However,
the assertion that this creates local legitimacy clashes with evidence that relations between
militarized trading networks and local people are highly coercive, based on forced labour, fear
and violence. Stephen Jackson (2002:35) argues that smuggling networks, once accepted as
legitimate sources of popular livelihoods and accumulation, are widely regarded by local po-
pulations to have been ‘criminalized’ by the process of militarization. Indigenous regulatory
systems have increasingly been replaced by illegitimate authority based on violence and military
might, riding roughshod over local political, social and commercial governance norms (Tegera
& Johnson 2007; Tull 2003).
In the context of violent reallocation of power and resource control, Eastern African
clandestine economies seem to be shifting regulatory authority away from the state. In contrast
to the situation in West Africa, the groups involved in Eastern African cross-border trading
activities are peripheral rather than central to national constellations of power. In Eastern DRC,
the Nande and Banyarwanda communities at the helm of the main militarized trading networks
in the region are peripheral groups in the post-independence national power equation, which
has been dominated by the more politically central Lunda, Luba and BaKongo (Tegera &
Johnson 2007; Turner 2007). Even within Eastern DRC, the Nande historically have been
economically rather than politically influential, and the framing of the Banyarwanda as foreign
migrants has made their political standing inherently precarious and dependent on patronage
from the centre (Renton et al. 2007; Turner 2007). Both groups have forced their way onto the
national political agenda by using spoilers’ tactics of violent control of resources in the border
regions, leveraging international support to punch above their weight in national politics.
Similarly, the Lugbara who dominate smuggling networks in northern Uganda are marginal to
the national commercial and political equation in Uganda, (Meagher 1990; Titeca 2009;
Titeca 2012).
Moreover, these claims to power from the periphery are dependent in all of these cases on
influential external players who use peripheral local groups as proxies for strategies of illicit
access to local markets and resources. Neighbouring countries and international political and
economic interests are heavily implicated in backing East Africa’s militarized cross-border
traders in the violent reassignment of property rights and access to global markets (Global
Witness 2009; Human Rights Watch 2005; United Nations 2012). Far from supporting more
authentic processes of state formation, these smuggling networks are contributing to the hol-
lowing out of the state, both politically and materially, as they seize unaccountable regulatory
control over local populations and divert resources from the state coers into private pockets
and circuits of international capital, undermining public accountability and national resource
control.
In a further ironic twist, as African clandestine economies become associated with positive
transformations, even the peaceful clandestine economies of West Africa are taking a violent
turn in the face of chaotic governance, rising poverty and expanding unemployment. Since the
Kate Meagher
38

late noughties, illegal oil bunkering linked to militarized networks of former Niger Delta
militias represents an expanding share of the Nigerian clandestine economy, and the violent
Islamic group known as Boko Haram has relied increasingly on the clandestine fish and pepper
trade from the Chad Basin, with increasing involvement of the Nigerian military (Salkida 2020;
Wallis 2012). Similarly, the Mourides networks of Senegal became increasingly politicized
under the former President Wade, weakening their stabilizing and legitimating influence on
governance (Beck 2001; Babou 2013). This makes a shift in the political economy literature
toward an increasingly positive interpretation of clandestine economies even more puzzling
(Golub & Mbaye 2009; Reno 2009).
Conclusion
The question raised by this chapter is whether prevailing theories about the developmental
implications of smuggling networks are driven more by empirical realities or by international
policy agendas. The cases of West African smuggling complexes in the 1990s, and Eastern
African smuggling networks from the late noughties suggest that ideological agendas from
above play a greater role in the way we think about appropriate forms of order and disorder
than empirical processes from below, particularly in African contexts. The vast majority of West
African smuggling activity prior to 2000 was dominated by legal goods, had little to do with war
economies, and in many cases tended to reinforce rather than undermine state power. Yet
smuggling was widely represented as criminal networks based on violence and war that were
inimical to state building.
By contrast, smuggling networks between East Africa and the DRC have been more widely
associated with war economies, conflict minerals, arms trading, and state instability. New de-
velopment ideologies, however, now deploy economic and political models drawn from Tilly
and Olson to represent these violent networks as the beginnings of more authentic processes of
African state formation. It is perhaps no accident that these ideologies help to legitimate pro-
cesses that diuse power and resource control away from the state, and facilitate eorts by local
strongmen to assert contractual control over labour and property rights in the service of direct
economic linkages with the global economy.
This raises two key questions about the broader trajectory of research on clandestine
economies. The first is about models, and the second is about motives. Regarding models, the
use of the Tillyan and stationery bandit models in explaining the developmental implications of
contemporary smuggling networks demands closer scrutiny. As Anna Leander (2004) and
Charles Tilly (1985) have pointed out, the dominance of external resource flows prominent in
many developing country contexts undermine the very dynamics of centralization and civil
accountability that turns war making into state making. Likewise, Brenda Chalfin (2010:234)
argues that the pluralisation and externalization of regulatory authority retools rather than
weakens African states, but acknowledges that the shift ‘comes at the expense of accountability
and the formulation of clear lines of authority in relation to the public …’ New models of how
smuggling aects state formation need to be attentive to the implications of existing interna-
tional conditions on processes of civil accountability.
Regarding motives, it is worth asking why Weberian ideal types of the modern state have
been so unceremoniously dropped in favour of new models of engagement with informal order
and authority. The answer seems to lie in a growing sense that the international economy can
work with informal institutions, which has liberated worried ideologues from their dependence
on states as the key agents for maintaining order in the developing world. Roitman (2004:205)
was one of the first to point out that, although clandestine trading systems rested on
Smuggling ideologies
39

“nonliberal” forms of order, ‘the regimes of exchange and non-state-based forms of economic
regulatory authority that prevail in the Chad Basin are not averse to free-market principles …’
Similarly, research on Somalia by Reno (2003) and Menkhaus (2006/7) found that per-
ipheral orders built on clandestine economic networks could, in the right combination of
circumstances, be compatible with order, peace-building and global economic integration. This
new political economy of clandestine trade seems to oer a solution to vexing development
problems by providing mechanisms of stability and market integration that bypass un-
cooperative states with a growing range of more pliable local regulatory forces. As Reno
(2003:40) explains, informal local actors and regulatory systems:
oer at least the possibility of … successful integration into the world economy on the
basis of transnational family and clan cultural networks rather than the centralizing
administrative projects that scholars of early modern European state-building describe
(and which the World Bank and other ocials increasingly prescribe).
This leaves us with a few nagging questions about how ideologies of appropriate order influ-
ence the way smuggling is theorized. Do new forms of order and authority emerging from
clandestine trading networks in border regions really give rise to more authentic forms of state
formation à la Tilly and Olson, or does their appeal lie in their capacity to bypass the state and
respond to global market incentives? The contemporary role of smuggling networks in terrorist
financing suggests that a responsiveness to free market principles may not always ensure con-
structive or compliant forms of order. This raises the further question of who decides which
types of clandestine networks foster more legitimate forms of governance and which types are
oppressive or criminal? Answering these questions in the interest of progressive economic
transformation requires greater attention to whose priorities of order and authority are being
promoted in the way that we theorize clandestine trade.
Note
1 Somalia is also a regionally important player in clandestine trade which fits the East African pattern, but
will be excluded for reasons of space.
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