AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	5. Afro-regions: The Dynamics of Cross-Border Regionalism in Africa
Paper ID	540
Author(s)	Ferrato, Giulia
Paper	View paper (PDF)
Abstract	The dynamism of border regions has been recently emphasized, with recognition of the importance of African border zones as increasingly productive sites' of wealth accumulation and identity construction. The paper intends to outline how informal regionalisation and cross-border practices with an increasing number of new non-state actors have contributed to reconfigure power relations and redefine the relationship between state and territory. An attempt will be made to explore the historical roots and background of intermediation and interconnection in the borderlands of the contemporary Democratic Republic of Congo. In a context of increasing globalisation and neoliberism, fragmentation of the territory, pluralization of sovereignty, interstitial privatisation of civil services, normalization of violence associated with long-term weakness or collapse of state institutions, intermediation has probably arisen not only as an important social and economic practice, but also as a fundamental source of social mobility and of labour and entrepreneurial behaviour. Intermediaries live the border experience, straddling between norms and spaces and maintaining an ambiguous relationship to the national authority as well as to local society. Their economic activities are all directed to produce and to accumulate wealth, through regional and interregional commercial networks. To pursue these aims, they have to regulate the circuits of exchanges and to create advantageous interconnections between subjects and places. On one hand, they exploit the commercial networks of global capital, but they are also involved in the process of reproduction and rearrangement of traditional patterns of social and cultural relations. These new actors are contributing to forge, as Ian Taylor has argued, an informal “regionalisation that may not be recognizable at first glance, but is surely as “real” in the DRC as any formal regionalism”. Furthermore, intermediaries have increasingly invested in spatial niches and in some sense they are producing new forms of neighbourhood which escape from the territorial logic of classification and census of the formal institutions. Wars have changed the nature of frontiers but also the economic competences and commercial routes of the intermediaries. The paper will also discuss the impact of this transformation on social relationships and space. Its main hypothesis is that these new actors may, in future, fulfil the function of interconnection between citizens and communities, instead of living at the margins of the law around interstitial and hidden spaces, available only for those who may have the capacity of interacting with global trade networks. The political transformations and territorial reconfiguration that have occurred between the sixties and the nineties in the DRC may help explain the archipelago dimension the country has assumed, with a multiplication of borders which do not correspond any longer with national lines.

Crossborder dynamics and the role of intermediaries in the political economy of DRC.