5. Discusión
5.2 Futuras líneas de investigación
This chapter began by describing a common notion of a general ‘porosity’ in North Africa’s borders, where smugglers of licit goods, smugglers of drugs and arms, or terrorists all slipped through the same spaces, under the radar of the state. As this chapter has demonstrated, this is not an accurate description of how most smuggling activity looks in the region. Instead, what has emerged from this mapping is that smuggling in North Africa is a densely regulated activity. Informal institutions at border crossings, meeting points along the border, police checkpoints and markets serve to structure, normalise and control the trade. They are able to affect the number of goods that come into the country illegally through physical bottle-necks like turn-styles, through regulations on the size of the vessels in which goods may be transported, and time limits on when goods can be traded. Most smugglers trading through Ras Jedir and Melilla are not spending their days evading their police – they are spending their days standing in line.
Crucially, they can differentiate between different types of good. As the sections above have demonstrated, across the three diverse borderlands studied here, different regulatory nodes exist for different goods. A pattern emerges that separates most licit goods from illicit goods: the path that contraband tomatoes – or textiles or TV sets for that matter – would take across the region’s borders, is not available to terrorists aiming to smuggle weapons, or to networks smuggling narcotics. Returning foreign fighters or those on travel blacklists would have serious difficulties passing through these nodes – and even face difficulties outside of them. This is not to say that the smuggling of illicit goods does not occur in the region – it certainly does. But its origins do not lie in a general, unregulated porosity of the region’s borderlands, which can be used by smugglers of gasoline and guns alike. Instead, we must note that the porosity of North Africa’s borders, even where illegal trade occurs, is regulated, and, in its regulation, segmented.
122 As this chapter has highlighted, the regulation of smuggling at these nodes is not just structured through petty corruption, but through institutions, the systematisation of which – organising an interaction based upon commonly understood and coordinated rules of the game – differentiates them from individualised instances of corruption.
Despite their normalisation and visibility, the institutions regulating illegal cross-border trade must be classified as informal, as they remain in direct contradiction to the formal law – communicated through the ‘officially sanctioned channels’ (Helmke and Levitsky 2004). And while state actors play a crucial role in their maintenance, they do not do so in an official capacity, differentiating them from the hybrid institutions that will feature more prominently in the following chapter.46 And yet, these institutions reveal some features that are in contrast with common characterisations of informal institutions in modern mainstream institutional scholarship, as described in Chapter 2. Two points, in particular, stand out.
First, they provide an example of informal institutions that are capable of providing impersonal regulation. As discussed in Chapter 2, one of the traditional theoretical distinction between formal and informal institutions in mainstream political economy rests on the assumption that informal institutions are inherently personalistic. “By definition”, Khan (2010, 12) writes, “while most or all formal institutions are impersonal, informal institutions are never impersonal.” The classic characterisations of informal institutions as small-scale, inefficient, unwritten, ultimately follow from this primary assumption. The analysis presented here, however, does not support this assumption. The informal regulation of smuggling at the Ras Jedir border crossing, at the Melilla border crossings, and at the ‘gates’ alongside the Algerian border with Morocco are all largely impersonal. They require certain characteristics of the people involved in them, such as Tunisian passports of a residency card for Nador, but this is not untypical for impersonal institutions. They are not tied to personal identities – surely, family connections help in the smuggling business, but in the same way, they also do in the formal sector: beyond regulatory institutions, not as a feature of them.
46 One exception to this are the members of the Spanish police, who help structure the trade in Melilla in their official function. However, while the traders are in Melilla, and throughout their interactions with the Spanish police they are not breaking any laws, suggesting that their interaction with the Spanish police is secondary to the regulation of smuggling ‘at the border’ discussed in this chapter.
123 Second, they provide examples that informal institutions can provide regulation that contains third party enforcement. Some of the logic behind the assumption that informal institutions are incapable of operating impersonally lies in the expectation that they lack third-party enforcement, that they are self-enforcing (Ostrom 2005;
Greif 2006) and those adhering to them are required to avoid persecution when they stand in opposition to the formal law, hence requiring them to operate on a basis of trust or mutually rational equilibrium behaviour. Once more, in the context of the institutions observed here, these expectations do not hold: police, customs agents and soldiers, albeit unofficially and illegally, systematically act as enforcement agents for these institutions and tolerate illegal activities within the realm of these institutions.
While in some cases, they appear as corrupt patrons of individual smugglers, in others we observe them enforcing informal rules, either collecting no bribe at all or collecting a fixed bribe level that has been agreed as part of the institution itself. Crucially, they create interactions that are predictable and necessitate neither trust nor evasion.
The observations that informal institutions can operate impersonally and with third party enforcement can be extended to noting that informal institutions do not necessarily need to be ‘stateless’ in order to be informal. Even when they are in direct contradiction to the rules communicated through the ‘officially sanctioned channels’, they can still be supported and enforced, informally, by these same channels. Here, state officials involved in the maintenance of these institutions are acting systematically and in accordance with a negotiated role rather than through individualised corruption. While this will not surprise most observers of the politics of regulation, this has been underappreciated as a systematic starting point in modern institutionalism. This extends the argument of the literature on ‘forbearance’ on the purposeful non-enforcement of formal institutional regulation (Holland 2016; 2015;
Tendler 2002) to the purposeful enforcement of informal institutional regulation. It also supports the legal pluralist case for a more critical treatment of any inherent differences between formal and informal institutions, as discussed in Chapter 2.
For this project, the role of states in the regulation of smuggling across their borders provides a starting point for the analysis of the politics of smuggling. It directly points to central questions of future chapters – how are rents from these institutions distributed, who benefits from this regulation and why do states engage in it (Chapter 7)? How are these institutions negotiated and how do they change (Chapter 8-10)?
124 First, however, the following chapter will complete this mapping of the regulation of smuggling by looking at regulations that engage with the trade once smuggled goods have crossed the border.
125