Fringe Regionalism by Frank Mattheis & Luca Raineri & Alessandra Russo

Author:Frank Mattheis & Luca Raineri & Alessandra Russo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319974095
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

3.2 Markets and Infrastructures: Regions as Practiced Economies

Despite the geographically and socially peripheral status of fringe regionalisms, marginal borderlands can perform as infrastructures for crucial dynamics of interaction at the local and regional levels. This subsection looks at cross-border networks that thrive on the economic practices shaping the region. The economic practice of fringe regionalisms retains an ambivalent relationship with the state: on one hand it undermines and circumvents the state-controlled economy while on the other hand it benefits from the informal intersection of state and non-state actors.

In spite of the partitioning implicitly endorsed by the majority of contemporary regional security complexes, anthropologists and human geographers are keen to acknowledge that “the Sahara and the Sahel form a single space of movement which should be considered as a continuum, something that a territorial approach of states and geopolitics prevents us from understanding” (Retaillé and Walther 2010). Similarly, historians of the Sahara contend that the Sahara should be seen as “the second face of the Mediterranean” (Braudel 1979) and, as such, interpreted as a space of connection rather than a factor of insulation. “The Sahara was always a borderland, in the sense of a zone constituted by its multiple interactions with neighbouring worlds, without which it would be unable to survive” (McDougall 2012: 82). In the Sahara’s harsh desert environment, in fact, people ensure their survival by relying on their own mobility, not the productivity of the soil. From this perspective, the Sahara Desert amounts to a busy crossroads and central node of cross-border trade, in contrast to its perceived condition of marginality; in fact, the latter simply mirrors outsiders’ prejudices and views rather than a careful assessment of the situation on the ground. Shifting the analytical focus as closely as possible to the insiders’ perspective21 allows one to consider Saharan cities (Pliez 2011), stopover towns (Daniel 2014) and border markets (Scheele 2012) as connective nodes thriving on external inputs and making outer worlds live. As a consequence, an approach that focusing uniquely on bounded states and centralised planning fails to capture the most relevant aspects of Saharan regional dynamics.

The perspective of fringe regionalism suggests that significant patterns of more or less unauthorised flows of trade, smuggling and trafficking across the Sahara are less an anomaly requiring explanation than the rule demanding comprehension, a rule whose impact on regional dynamics must not be overlooked. The border market of In-Khalil provides a particularly illustrative example of these trends.22 In-Khalil is situated in the middle of the Sahara Desert, along the border dividing Algeria from Mali, just 15 km from the border post station of Bordji Badji Mokhtar. It is defined by the local people as “the capital of al-frud”, the illegal smuggling that has been the cornerstone of the nomadic economy for ages. The phrase “local people” is inaccurate, however, in that very few of those who have settled and set up businesses in In-Khalil were actually born there. The first sedentary house was built in 1993, when the nomad camp previously

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