From: LSE Research Online
Max Gallien
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Between Tunisia and Libya, traders move goods – high-value licit goods, as well as cigarettes, arms, alcohol and narcotics across the difficult territory along the border, in what locals call the “contra route”. Similarly, on the border between Algeria and Morocco, smugglers try their luck outside the ‘doors’ – many of them moving cannabis-based products grown in Morocco. Regulation along these routes, clearly, is much less visible than along the nodes discussed above. Still, there are strong indications that even here, regulation is not entirely absent.
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Second, in some regions outside of these nodes, relations between smugglers and security forces approximate a cat-and-mouse game, which still contains rules that structure, control and regulate interactions. Traders, security forces and politicians across these case studies report the existence of ‘security arrangements’ in which smugglers, even as they are trying to evade security forces as they are crossing the border, will still report suspicious activities along the border, and the presence of unknown individuals, back to the security forces. While some of these agreements seem to have developed out of clientalist relationships with security forces, others seem to have grown historically out of similar agreements with pastoral communities in the borderlands….
