Political Settlements and the Margins: Smuggling in North Africa

While its conception of the role of informal institutions in development has been one of the critical theoretical innovations of political settlement analysis, there has been a remarkable scarcity of applications of these frameworks to informal and illegal economies. This presentation outlines the advantages, insights and challenges in applying political settlement analysis to one illegal economy: cross-border trade in North Africa. Tracing its institutional regulation and resulting rent streams, it argues that most smuggling activities in the region do not, as commonly suggested, undermine states in the region, but instead have long been a part of the distribution of rents and resources on which current political structures rely. The empirical basis for this argument relies on a political ethnography of smuggling in Tunisia and Morocco including over 14 months of fieldwork and over 200 interviews with smugglers, street level bureaucrats and borderland communities, recently published in the book "Smugglers and States – Negotiating the Maghreb at its Margins".