11. The Central Margins: Congo’s Transborder Economy and State-Making in the Borderlands
- Author:
- Timothy Raeymaekers
- Publication Date:
- 11-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)
- Abstract:
- Timothy Raeymaekers has spent eight years doing fieldwork in the Congolese-Ugandan borderlands, a region that often calls up images of isolation and remoteness, where predatory and armed men ravage, and where death arrives suddenly and unexpectedly. To most people, the eastern Congolese borderlands represent a perversion of economic development, where criminal gangs and looting militias rule on the ruins of state collapse. But rather than collapsed statehood and economic development-in-reverse, Raeymaekers in this DIIS Working Paper argues that the interdependencies and accumulation strategies developed during Congo's protracted crisis have gradually made this borderland a crucial pillar in the equilibrium forces between formal and informal, state and non state actors and regulations in this territorial periphery - which has subsequently become a central margin in today's regional processes of state formation.
- Topic:
- Migration, Non State Actors, State Formation, Borders, Trade, and Smuggling
- Political Geography:
- Uganda, Africa, and Democratic Republic of Congo