The silent encroachment of the frontier: A politics of transborder trade in the Semliki Valley (Congo–Uganda)

This article is about the frontier as a political place. Through a discussion of unofficial cross-border trade in the Semliki Valley (on the Congo–Ugandan border), it describes how people, despite the ruining effects of delocalization and state privatization, continue to reproduce their life worlds as places, which eventually makes them the matrix of new political constellations. This silent encroachment of the Congo–Ugandan frontier is marked in turn by a prolonged silent, and at occasions loud, advancement on existing power configurations that profoundly questions ruling modes of classification and standards of evaluation. In the article, this encroachment is illustrated mainly with regard to the imposition of tax and the control over peopleʹs mobility—both a quintessence of (post)modern state building. At the end of the day, the analysis of meanings and processes attached to this everyday life on the Congolese–Ugandan border illustrate quite clearly how people, notwithstanding the structural and technological forms that direct and mould their world, can also progressively challenge conventional notions of political and economic power, and simultaneously introduce new notions of where politics is to be found and what it is. It is probably this ambiguous role, of hidden smugglers with open official ties, of “rebel” entrepreneurs seeking high political protection, that sustains the transformation of politics at the Semliki border crossing. Contrary to previous wisdom however, such emerging regulatory authorities do not operate against the state, but are rather involved in different scales of political decision-making—particularly in the domain of cross-border taxation. Without demolishing the question of its power, such processes can eventually introduce a reconfiguration of post-colonial statehood that combines different and apparently contradictory legal orders and cultures, but which simultaneously give rise to new forms of meaning and action.