Subverting Borders: Doing Research on Smuggling and Small-Scale Trade

252 Pages·2012·8.483 MB·English

by  Bettina Bruns, Judith Miggelbrink (auth.), Bettina Bruns, Judith Miggelbrink (eds.)

Bettina Bruns · Judith Miggelbrink (Eds.)
Subverting Borders
VS RESEARCH
Bettina Bruns
Judith Miggelbrink (Eds.)
Subverting
B orders
Doing Research on Smuggling
and Small-Scale Trade
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografi e;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

1st Edition 2012

All rights reserved
© VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften | Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2012
Editorial Offi ce: Dorothee Koch | Anette Villnow
VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften is a brand of Springer Fachmedien.
Springer Fachmedien is part of Springer Science+Business Media.
www.vs-verlag.de
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
copyright holder.
Registered and/or industrial names, trade names, trade descriptions etc. cited in this publication
are part of the law for trade-mark protection and may not be used free in any form or by any
means even if this is not specifi cally marked.
Cover design: KünkelLopka Medienentwicklung, Heidelberg
Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
ISBN 978-3-531-17788-5
Contents

List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Bettina Bruns and Judith Miggelbrink
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Abel Polese
Who has the right to forbid and who to trade? Making sense of
illegality on the Polish-Ukrainian border . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Just Boedeker
Cross-border trade and identity in the Afghan-Iranian border region . . . . . . . 39

Rory Archer and Krisztina Rácz
Šverc and the Šinobus: Small-scale smuggling in Vojvodina . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Martin Doevenspeck and Nene Morisho Mwanabiningo
Navigating uncertainty: Observations from the Congo-Rwanda border . . . . . 85

Kapitolina Fedorova
Transborder trade on the Russian-Chinese border: Problems of
interethnic communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

Gulcan Kolay
An economy of survival and reinventing the way of life: The case
of oil commerce in southeast Turkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Enza Roberta Petrillo
Shadow Triangle. Trans-border smuggling between Kosovo, Albania
and Montenegro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
6
Tobias Kraudzun
From the Pamirian frontier to international borders: Exchange relations
of the borderland population . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

Lale Yalçın-Heckmann and Nino Aivazishvili
Scales of trade, informal economy and citizenship at Georgian-
Azerbaijani borderlands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

Andrea Weiss
Crossing conflicting state boundaries: The Georgian-Abkhazian
Ceasefire Line. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

Anna Stammler-Gossmann
‘Winter-tyres-for-a-flower-bed’: Shuttle trade on the Finnish-Russian
border . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
List of Figures1
Fig. 1 Map of investigated borders in the edited volume p. 14
Fig. 2 Polish-Ukrainian border region p. 24
Fig. 3 The border region around Sarhad (own design) p. 45
Fig. 4 Close to the border, 2008: Children conveying Iranian cement p. 47
Fig. 5 2008: Afghan work migrants approaching the Afghan-Iranian border p. 50
Fig. 6 Zabol 2008: Opium consumption with wāfur (the traditional pipe) is widely p. 53
common in Iran
Fig. 7 The Vojvodina region p. 61
Fig. 8 The šinobus at Subotica station p. 65
Fig. 9 The ‘Lepa Brena Pizzeria’ p. 68
Fig. 10 Kultúrcsempész - the šinobus festival p. 78
Fig. 11 The border area between Goma (DRC) and Giseny (Rwanda) p. 91
Fig. 12 Buildings along the border: The new construction is on the Rwandan side, p. 92
the corrugated-iron house on the Congolese
Fig. 13 The map of Chita region and bordering territories (Source: p. 109
http://www.chitaobl.ru/)
Fig. 14 Manzhoulis city centre p. 116
Fig. 15 Monuments representing Russian culture along the road to the check-point p. 117
Fig. 16 The ‘Matryoshka square’ p. 118
Fig. 17 Russian words and expressions adapted in the Chinese phonological system p. 120
Fig. 18 Signs, advertisements, instructions on goods packing etc. demonstrate p. 121
numerous mistakes in Russian grammar and spelling
Fig. 19 Areas of Kurdish settlement p. 133
Fig. 20 Location of the Haber river crossing (Source: Google Maps) p. 135
Fig. 21 The border region of Kosovo, Albania and Montenegro p. 149
Fig. 22 Map of the case study area (own design) p. 176
Fig. 23 Surreal appearance of closure in an open mountain landscape: The p. 182
electrically secured, barbed-wire fence, called sistema elketrosignalizacija
(vernacularly ‘the system’), delimits the buffer zone of the Sino-Tajik
border (near Kara-Kul Nov 2007)
Fig. 24 Price differences between the markets of Osh and Murghab in October 2003 p. 186
(own survey)
Fig. 25 Costs and profits of the trade between the markets of Osh and Murghab in p. 187
October 2003 (own survey)
Fig. 26 The Caucasus region p. 196
Fig. 27 Finnish-Russian border (Source: Arctic Centre, University of Lapland) p. 235

1 As far as not marked differently in the legend, all pictures are taken by the authors themselves.
List of Tables2
Tab. 1 Typology of transborder economic small-scale activities p. 12
Tab. 2 Total customs duties on imported goods in Rwanda and DR Congo (Source: p. 95
RRA 2008; MiniFin 2007; various interviews with border officials in
Rwanda and DRC.)
Tab. 3 Industrial Inventory of the East Regions and the Southwest in 2006 (Source: p. 137
http://dergiler.ankara.edu.tr/dergiler/42/998/12142.pdf; last access:
04.07.2011)

2 As far as not marked differently in the legend, all tables are produced by the authors
themselves.
Introduction
Bettina Bruns and Judith Miggelbrink

Small-scale trade and smuggling are part of everyday life at many borders.
Whenever prosperity along the border differs leading to considerable price
differences in the adjacent countries, the border may be used as an economic
resource by inhabitants living nearby. Smuggling cigarettes, alcohol and fuel,
illegal drugs and pharmaceuticals or the – at first glance – legal transport of
commodities such as clothing or electronic devices: trading activities as the
above mentioned often compensate for economic shortages that many
households suffer from in consequence of difficult external conditions caused
e.g. by economic crises or political transformation processes. Therefore,
transborder small-scale trade and smuggling are possibilities to cope with
stressful periods of biographic transition such as unemployment and poverty. At
the same time, transborder small-scale trade and smuggling are an everyday
border phenomenon which is part of the normal routine at many borders.
Although there is no uniform definition of transborder small-scale trade applied
throughout the different contributions to this book, the phenomenon can be
approached by Williams‘ and Baláž‘s clarification which describes transborder
small-scale trade as “(...) a form of arbitrage (Altvater 1998), understood as the
exploitation of differences in prices and exchange rates over time and space via
circulation activities” (Williams/Baláž 2002: 323). It is characteristic that small-
scale traders operate with mostly limited economic resources and over relatively
short distances. They rely on local knowledge and social networks in order to
trade successfully. The same applies to smugglers. In theory smuggling and
small-scale trade differ in accordance to their legal status. “Traditionally, ‘trade’
is the legal and ‘smuggling’ is the illegal means of moving items from one side
of the border to the other” (Thuen 1999: 741). Legality respectively illegality
thereby is not a natural feature of a person or a thing but the result of an external
labelling process (see Singelnstein/Stolle 2008: 122) through which the attribute
of being legal or illegal is applied. The status of (il)legality qualifies a relation
between a trading activity and a state‘s law. Smuggling and small-scale trade are
hence effects of state regulations (see Paul et al. 2002: 117). Table 1 shows this
typology of transborder small-scale activities and their legal relation to the state.
B. Bruns, J. Miggelbrink (Eds.), Subverting Borders, DOI 10.1007/978-3-531-93273-6_1,
© VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften | Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2012
12 Bettina Bruns / Judith Miggelbrink
Activity Definition Legal relation to the state
small-scale trade “Applies to individual legal
people crossing a border to
purchase goods at a cheaper
smuggling price” (Deflem/Henry- illegal
Turner 2001: 473)
Tab. 1: Typology of transborder economic small-scale activities
In praxis, however, the borders between legality and illegality while engaging in
small-scale trade are fluid. The process of transporting goods contains mostly
legal and illegal elements. For example it is possible that the amount of
transported goods is fully legal, but that they were bought in an illegally
functioning shop. Also it may be that goods were declared for own needs,
although the goods were actually used as trading goods after crossing the border.
Thus, legal formal trade and smuggling are often intertwined by small-scale
traders.
Illegal elements of a transborder economic activity do not have to be
automatically illegitimate. In the light of high unemployment and a high level of
poverty, few decent paid working places or other alternatives, smuggling and
small-scale trade are often highly legitimized among the population, although by
state law labelled illegal and therefore forbidden. “Many transnational
movements of people, commodities, and ideas are illegal because they defy the
norms and rules of formal political authority“, as Abraham and van Schendel put
it, “but they are quite acceptable, ‘licit‘, in the eyes of participants in these
transactions and flows” (van Schendel/ Abraham 2005: 4). Legitimization does
not necessarily derive from legality, but has its own sources.
Illegal markets bear some remarkable threats for those involved in them: In
contrast to legal transactions, breaching contracts cannot be brought to court.
3
This “opens the floodgates to informal rules or violence” (Besozzi 2001: 14).
Consequently, trust plays an important role in illegal markets. Furthermore,
people engaged in the production of illegal goods and services face the risk of
being controlled by the police at any time (see ibid.). This risk is not abstract but
has to be regarded as a concrete element of the ongoing transaction and is
therefore calculated by the traders anew time and again.
In case the traded goods are subject to certain restrictions or prohibitions (e.g.
human beings, certain drugs, illegally produced cigarettes, items of historical and
cultural interest) people have to face prosecution because of the illicit production

3 All quotes from German sources are translated by the authors.