Dan Banik and Max Gallien explore how smuggling operates as a deeply embedded part of state–society relations in North Africa, rather than a simple threat to state authority. They discuss what this reveals about governance, livelihoods, and the political bargains that shape life in border regions.
Smuggling is often portrayed as a shadowy threat to state authority — a world of criminals, traffickers, and dangerous border crossings. But in many parts of North Africa, smuggling is a fundamental part of the political economy. It sustains livelihoods, shapes state–society relations, and reveals how power actually works at the margins.
In this episode, Dan Banik speaks with political scientist Max Gallien about his acclaimed new book, Smugglers and the State: Negotiating the Maghreb at Its Margins. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Tunisia and Morocco, Max shows how states do not simply fight smuggling. They regulate, tolerate, and sometimes rely on it. Together, Dan and Max unpack the “informal authoritarian bargains” that allow illegal and semi-legal economies to operate with the state’s active knowledge, and how these arrangements distribute opportunity, risk, and legitimacy in borderland communities.
The conversation explores why smuggling persists, how border closures and security interventions reshape local economies, and what all of this means for development policy at a time when fences and walls are rapidly multiplying.Â
[Dan Banik]
Max, you've been very patient with me. You've been waiting for a long time to come on the show. My apologies, but I'm really delighted to see you. Welcome.
[Max Gallien]
Thank you so much for having me on. It's a pleasure.
[Dan Banik]
We often think about smuggling as a bad thing. It is a bad thing. It takes resources away from the state, it reduces legitimacy, it can let terrorists in—lots and lots of bad things. But it turns out it's not always bad, is it? It can sometimes even make a state. So tell us a little bit about some of the other, less well-known aspects of smuggling that conventional wisdom often ignores.
[Max Gallien]
Yeah, I think the point about conventional wisdom is a really good starting point. We might think of smuggling as a good thing or a bad thing, but I think most commonly we don't think that much about it at all. We assume that we have a vague sense of how it works; we've seen it in movies, and we assume that we have a vague sense of what it means for development and also what we do about it.
We very much live in an era where concern and anxiety around borders is really having a moment, both in nationalist politics and very concretely in infrastructure on the ground. The amount of border fences and border fortifications around the world has quadrupled since the early 2000s. There's an enormous industry in helping states build new fences, new walls, new border infrastructure.
A lot of it draws on this generalized anxiety that there's a battle about an orderly globalization between the forces of infrastructure, security, and control on the one hand, and illicit actors undermining states and teeming in this dark underbelly of globalization on the other.
The starting point for my work, and for a lot of other work on smuggling in the last couple of years, has been that this assumes smugglers and states are antagonists—these cat-and-mouse, robbers-and-policemen actors that chase each other at the border—and that backing up the state with more infrastructure is the obvious response.
Anyone who has done empirical work with smugglers, who has interviewed smugglers or spent time on borders—or anyone who is from border communities—often knows that's not quite what happens in practice. The reality is more complicated. Smuggling is often a lot less anarchic than we think it is, and a lot more regulated. There are informal deals and arrangements that states make with smugglers, and types of activities that are tolerated because there's an understanding that they're embedded in local livelihoods.
All this becomes quite a different story from the cat-and-mouse game we assume it is. It also starts to explain why a lot of the infrastructure that we're building isn't doing what we think it is. And I think it opens up a more interesting conversation about the relationship between states and illegal activities, but also between border communities and states, about state-building, and about better development interventions in these areas.
[Dan Banik]
When reading your book, I kept thinking about the question: why smuggle? There are many reasons. You touched upon something that is very important in the United States and in Europe: immigration and human trafficking.
But that was not how I imagined smuggling. Growing up in India, I remember a very protectionist economic policy. Buying foreign goods was extremely expensive and very difficult. The government was trying to promote national production. If you wanted a cassette player, you had to buy something called Santosh. It was a really bad brand, but that was it.
So there was a huge demand and hunger for smuggled goods. Reading your book, I was reminiscing about those markets I sometimes visited when I was young. They were called “fancy markets” in Calcutta, where you could get all these foreign smuggled goods. And I now think about how it was possible for everyone in the city to know that you could buy smuggled goods there. They were being sold openly, and it was illegal.
That is one source of demand: there’s no availability and smuggling meets that problem. Another example I have is cross-border trade between Norway and Sweden. We often travel over to Sweden to buy cheap goods, cheap groceries, even gasoline sometimes. And this is a multi-billion-dollar business, driven by affordability.
So you have human trafficking, unavailability of certain goods, affordability. But in your case, in this fantastic book, it's also about youth unemployment. It's not just that states are willing to overlook these illegal activities. It can also be that smuggling has a lot of legitimacy in local communities.
[Max Gallien]
Yeah, one of my favorite things about working on smuggling is that almost everybody I talk to has personal experience. I love the fancy markets that you're mentioning, but I also really like that you're bringing in a European example.
I grew up in Germany and almost everybody I know has some experience of having moved something across into Eastern Germany or out of Eastern Germany, or having sent parcels. So I think it's a lot more common than people often assume. And the number of things that are being smuggled is a lot more diverse than people think.
People's heads tend to go to cocaine and cannabis. But in North Africa, where I've done most of my work, by some orders of magnitude gasoline is the most smuggled good, whether in terms of dollar value, weight, or volume. But also Hello Kitty backpacks, tea, glasses, and all kinds of goods, for many reasons, as you point out. Sometimes these things aren't available locally. Sometimes it's about getting around taxes and tariffs. In other contexts, historically, it's been about getting around sanctions.
So there are many reasons why smuggling happens that aren't just about drugs and guns. And when consumer goods are being smuggled, they need to be sold somewhere. I like the fancy markets you describe because they're very similar to markets I've studied, not just in North Africa, but also in parts of West Africa.
If you have consumer goods, you need a consumer marketplace. The moment you have these marketplaces, a certain amount of regulation comes in. These things aren't being sold from the back of a van or from a car at night. They're sold in places where they interact with ordinary consumers and households. So a process of normalization begins. Municipalities then usually start figuring out some way to charge rent or fees—something that starts looking like a tax on people who sell these goods. And all of a sudden, they begin to be integrated into the regular economy.
The point of legitimacy that you make is really important to me. One of the reasons I've studied the smuggling of gasoline and Hello Kitty backpacks, and these kinds of goods, and not just cocaine or arms, is that this is where the labor-intensive activity is. Smuggling consumer goods, especially in North Africa, is what employs thousands and thousands of people, while smuggling cocaine might be higher value but is not as labor-intensive.
This is where it becomes a story of how borderland economies have consciously been built around the availability of smuggling. In the countries where I work, you often have a post-independence political settlement where formal income-generating opportunities are centralized around economic centers—capital cities or coastal areas.
You can see that in the post-independence period there was almost an explicit arrangement with the borderlands: you're not getting the new factory, you're not getting the new road, but you can occupy yourself around the border, and we're going to let that happen. That will be your thing.
This is very explicitly understood in border communities. The sense that we are being given this opportunity because another opportunity has been taken from us—this “they closed the door, they opened the window” idea—is a very explicit understanding of the role that smuggling plays in local livelihoods.
Consequently, this ties to the legitimacy point, where people see new border infrastructure or restrictions on smuggling not as a security intervention, but as interference with the development model they've been offered. They might not have chosen it. It might not be their preference or their favorite activity. But they recognize that it's relevant and essential for local employment and for getting cheaper goods. In many of the areas I've worked in, it's the bedrock of local employment. And when the border closes, a lot of people are out of a job.
[Dan Banik]
In this context, I remember reading in your book the local phrases that were used. It was not directly about smuggling, but terms like “parallel trade,” “intra-border trade,” “informal trade.” These are ways in which, I suppose, those involved in smuggling legitimize what is deemed illegal.
From the story you paint in the book, I see the capital cities with all the regulation and institutions saying all the right things that a state should be saying: we want to tax goods; if you want to bring something in, you pay a tax and then you can sell it.
But in the interiors, the peripheries, the borders, you're describing a situation where the state is willing to selectively implement—or even purposefully overlook—these regulations because it knows it's not providing social protection and that income from taxation isn't flowing to these hinterlands. People have to fend for themselves.
So, in a way, this is a kind of sweet arrangement in which the state says: I'll provide you with the police force. I'll maintain law and order. I'll make sure these illegal activities don't get out of control. In return, you fend for yourselves. You make a living. As long as you don't come and sell these goods openly in the capital cities, it's fine.
Is that part of the story, Max?
[Max Gallien]
That's definitely part of the story. I'm not sure it's a sweet arrangement—I'll come back to that—but it is an arrangement.
The key part of the story is that it's a very active arrangement. It's a good example of how states actively govern through selective enforcement: creating zones where certain activities are tolerated, sometimes for everybody, sometimes only for some people.
Smuggling is a vivid case study of that, but we could have the same conversation about informal markets in city centers or the toleration of cannabis growing in certain parts of the world. It's a really good example of selective enforcement by states as a conscious tool of governance in spaces where we often assume states are not active or present. But when we go there, we see that the arm of the state is very long and very actively involved in structuring these economies to grant income-generating opportunities to some, and deny them to others.
Interestingly, this happens in the capital as well. We often think of smuggling at a mountainous border where cars and people are bringing things across. But if you look at what's happening in ports and airports, a lot of smuggling is happening through big businessmen under-declaring their goods, having specific arrangements with customs or with political regimes to get their goods in more cheaply.
[Dan Banik]
But Max, don't you think that in the borderlands it may be more visible, whereas in the capitals there may be a more conscious attempt to hide it?
[Max Gallien]
Yeah, I think in the borderlands it's more visible to people who live there. It might be less visible to people in the center.
The important point is that selective enforcement happens at the top and the bottom. There's often a tendency by chambers of commerce and big business associations to look down on smugglers and say, “this is all unfair competition; they're all breaking the law,” without acknowledging that some big businessmen are doing the same thing—also tolerated by the state—but at a very different level of the political economy.
So these markets are being selectively governed through selective enforcement in ports and airports, and also on land borders.
I do want to come back to the fact that it's not always a sweet arrangement. A lot of my argument is about highlighting that this is a conscious arrangement, and that it has not always undermined states but often contributed to stability in borderlands. But that can sound like I'm advertising this as a state-building model, which I'm very much not.
Smuggling economies tend to generate very unequal economies. They are often highly gendered economies, and they distribute risk very unevenly. You see some people making quite a lot of money, hiring others, accumulating resources, investing in cafés in the capital city. And then you have others who are the drivers across the border. They take most of the risk, they are involved when there's trouble at the border—when people are shot at or when there are accidents—and they often make very little money.
So these are very unequal economies. They often don't build skills or offer people alternatives. They are extremely vulnerable to border closures, shifts in value chains, or nearby conflicts, which we've seen in North Africa. So it's not a sweet arrangement, but it is an arrangement. And that's the important point: it's not just a security question about building fences and securing a border. There's an economic and development dimension we need to think about.
[Dan Banik]
So it's a marriage of convenience. And as a state, you can be called out. Civil society organizations might say: Why are you accepting this? This undermines our trust in government. We don't want to pay taxes if other people are getting rich in the informal economy, and the state isn't taxing them. Why are we being taxed?
I suppose governments can be called out. Have they been called out, Max?
And I'm thinking about the two cases in your book, Tunisia and Morocco. What is special about North Africa and smuggling? I'm sure there are commonalities between Sweden and Norway and North Africa—some of the same issues we talked about earlier.
You mention the political sphere and a particular term, “informal authoritarian bargain.” Tell us a bit more about that and how it applies to these two countries and the region more generally, and how it helps explain this marriage of convenience.
[Max Gallien]
Yeah. In many ways, I can tell you a story about why Tunisia and Morocco are particularly fascinating case studies—and they're very close to my heart—but in many ways they're not unusual for these dynamics. I'm far from the first person to write about this.
Across West and sub-Saharan Africa, there’s great literature by people who’ve spent a lot of time in, or written from, border communities. The same is true of the US–Mexico border, where there's incredibly rich scholarship. So I don’t think my case studies are exceptional.
What they do have is interesting parallel developments over the last few decades, both in terms of post-independence politics and, obviously, with the revolution in Tunisia in 2011 and Morocco’s more top-down management of that moment. It’s been a convenient time to watch an intense renegotiation of what is possible at the border and how the state engages with that.
What I call an “informal authoritarian bargain” starts from the idea of the “formal authoritarian bargain,” which appears frequently in the political history of Middle Eastern and some North African countries: a shorthand for a social contract in the immediate post-independence years, where authoritarian regimes—populist authoritarian regimes—were broadly tolerated in exchange for wide-reaching formal employment in the public sector, subsidies, and a certain amount of stability.
We can have a longer conversation about whether that bargain really existed and whether it's the best term. But what I try to point out is that this bargain only ever existed for some people. In some areas, you had formal state-distributed resources and employment. In others, you always had a different bargain.
So the “informal authoritarian bargain” is an exchange of acquiescence toward an authoritarian regime in return for the toleration of certain illegal activities that remain technically illegal. That technical illegality allows the state to exclude others from them. There were, for example, attempts to keep big businessmen from the political center from getting involved in smuggling, while border populations were allowed to do so.
This puts you on a different trajectory of renegotiation. In some places, citizens renegotiate their relationship with the state over public employment or education. We’ve used that lens a lot to think about changing or narrowing social contracts. Alongside that, there is this other part of the social contract: an informal bargain in which tolerating certain activities and allowing them to generate livelihoods is part of the arrangement through which people acquiesce to the post-independence state.
These bargains are also being renegotiated. And they're harder to renegotiate. It’s more difficult for people to put pressure on the state by saying, “We should still be allowed to smuggle here, because that was the deal and you haven't done anything else for us.”
Civil society organizations around that claim are more complicated to form—but the sentiment is very present. Tunisia and Morocco are good examples because we've seen mass mobilization in both countries over the last couple of decades around the wider recognition of what it means to rely on illegal activities to make a living, to be harassed by the state, and to be taken advantage of by security services and the police—to feel the indignity and criminalization of your livelihood.
In Tunisia, the obvious example is the fruit and vegetable vendor who set himself on fire after an altercation with a municipal agent, and who became one of the symbols of the 2011 uprising. Many people identified with someone who relied on a livelihood that was somewhat criminalized by the state and was being harassed for it.
Morocco, though less publicized, has had similar examples. There was a fish vendor in northern Morocco selling his fish informally. The police confiscated his fish and threw it into the back of a garbage compactor truck. He jumped in after his wares and someone turned on the truck. He was crushed to death.
It was another moment where many people—who were not smugglers or fish vendors—recognized the experience of trying to make a livelihood in a context where the state does not fully legalize your work and makes it very hard to make everything legal; where you're relying on informal employment opportunities and being harassed by the police; where your main point of contact with the state is its security apparatus. The indignity of that felt very close to many people, and it led to a large uprising.
We see similar patterns in many places with large informal economies, where we've ignored the fact that informality is a central way in which people engage with the state and negotiate their livelihoods. We often forget that when we focus only on formal channels.
[Dan Banik]
And you're right—I was wrong to call it a sweet deal. It is negotiation, constant renegotiation. And some people will always be unhappy with current arrangements.
It could be smugglers who want a bigger share of the market, or easier access to the capital, where consumers have more spending power. It could also be different agencies within the state that aren't aligned—one agency tolerating smuggling, another implementing strict controls.
That's where I think the stories you present—Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia and Mohsen Fikri in Morocco—are so important. These vendors, operating most likely in the informal economy, are harassed by officials who may not have got the memo from the state, so to speak, telling them to treat these people differently.
That’s perhaps what I was alluding to when I asked you about pushback. When these sensational stories occur, like those that sparked the Arab Spring, everybody wakes up and says: this is not acceptable.
So this process of negotiation and renegotiation is constant. But how does it work in practice, Max? What are the goods people really want?
Is it when I no longer have access to cheap gas that I get upset with the government? Is it when Hello Kitty bags become more expensive or harder to get for my kids? How does this negotiation process work? Who are the main actors involved?
Are there formal groups of gasoline vendors, smugglers, textile smugglers who meet and negotiate? In your cases, especially with gasoline, you point out that they’re not very centralized or structured, whereas the textile industry is.
How does this take place with local officials? Maybe there’s a bribery channel to key players. Somehow the revenue is distributed. Give us a sense of how this plays out in practice.
[Max Gallien]
Yeah, I think that's where it's been really useful to look at Tunisia and Morocco over the last decade or so, because there has been so much renegotiation: national-level political changes, regional changes, and, as a consequence, a lot of local renegotiation of what's possible and who can do what.
One of the least surprising, but most important, aspects is that all of this is hugely perforated by power—economic, political, and social. Who can negotiate? Who can bring others together to apply pressure? Who can organize? Who can be a power broker? Who can shift their status from smuggler to respected businessman, buy a couple of cafés, and move up?
I've been very interested in understanding who thrives through these changes and who gets marginalized again. The question of whether you can organize is central.
Vendors in cities, people selling in organized markets, usually have some collective action capacity. They often have social capital. If you're a vendor in a market, maybe your father was one too; maybe you're part of a wider trade and you’ve picked up skills. So we see them benefiting from collective bargaining, often aimed at municipalities.
At the same time, some people do very well individually. But we also see many people being left behind because they can't bargain on these terms.
One of the most interesting and odd aspects of how smuggling is regulated is the set of informal deals and rules that exist at the borders I study—and at many borders around the world. It's not that you can never bring cigarettes in, but that there’s a rule like: there’s a gate in the border between 8 p.m. and midnight; you can bring cigarettes through there, but you have to pay 200 to the local policeman, and then you can go through.
A lot of these deals exist, and they're often not highly personalized. You don't have to be someone's cousin or a friend of the policeman. They're broad, informal arrangements that many people without other opportunities make use of. So wider sections of the border population get involved.
The problem is that if your livelihood depends not on a specific skill, or on being part of a family or clan network, but simply on access to that rule, then if that arrangement collapses—if the border rules or terms change—you have nothing. You don't have a collective group to bargain with or someone on the other end to help you.
That's one of the most worrying parts of these dynamics for me: people whose livelihoods depend on these informal bargains and arrangements, and who are left in a very vulnerable position when those arrangements collapse.
[Dan Banik]
Why do these arrangements collapse? Is it a change of official, a change of political messaging, or some new security concern that appears on the agenda? What happens?
[Max Gallien]
All kinds of reasons. These arrangements are often volatile because so many things happen around borders.
In southern Tunisia, for example, it's largely the civil war in Libya. That has made supply routes more difficult and also changed who controls the other side of the border. Things constantly get renegotiated as different actors try to extract rents from that trade route.
In many places, increasing anxiety around open borders and border porosity plays a role. In North Africa, European anxiety about migration has been key, along with European interest in heavily investing in border fortifications there—with relatively little thought about what that does in practice.
There’s a general sense that border porosity is bad, that it’s used by bad actors, and that we have to crack down on it. We want to build fences and walls. But there’s relatively little understanding of how smuggling works in practice—about the role of doors in fences, or about the fact that most of what goes across might be gasoline, blue jeans, or carpets rather than cocaine and guns.
So there’s very little understanding of what such measures do to local economies. Often we see investment in border infrastructure that does very little to crack down on the activities you actually want to stop. There is very little evidence that border fences affect cocaine smuggling. These are highly sophisticated, highly capitalized networks that aren't intimidated by another fence.
But the person bringing gasoline across on the back of a mule, with no other livelihood opportunity, might lose everything because of the fence. As a consequence, you might destabilize borderlands when you invest in border infrastructure, because you don't understand the role that the border plays for that community.
We are seeing a lot of that around the world. Perhaps the strongest argument for this research is that it helps us better understand what happens when we build border infrastructure and what it does to border communities.
[Dan Banik]
This reminds me of one of the quotes I read in your book, where a border control agent talks about “tomatoes and terrorists”: if tomatoes can get through, then terrorists can too.
I was also thinking about negotiation and renegotiation in another way. We can't assume everyone is pushing for the same thing. Others are pushing against it.
There are always actors who play by the formal rules, pay their taxes, and sell gasoline and textiles legitimately, but who feel their businesses are being undermined by smuggled goods. They must be lobbying the government and their own power brokers to push back against this.
Did you see a lot of that? It's not just smugglers making their case, but others pushing back against them.
[Max Gallien]
Yes, absolutely. Formal business communities have lobbied heavily for states to crack down not only on smuggling, but on economic informality more broadly. Foreign actors—the European Union and international development agencies—have also contributed to this narrative that we need to crack down.
It's also been very popular for populist politicians. Saying you're going to crack down on smuggling doesn't just make you look tough on crime; it also externalizes the problem. It suggests these are things coming from outside, that these are foreign powers or disloyal populations. There’s a lot of bad-mouthing and othering of borderland communities, which is convenient for many actors.
I think it's a deep misunderstanding of the people involved. It's a securitization of an economic reality that we ignore, but it's politically powerful. In North Africa, the conflation of cross-border trade with terrorism has added another angle. Borderland communities are often maligned as being in league with terrorists or creating spaces for terrorists, even though there is very little evidence that this is what’s actually happening.
But it feels very real to borderland communities. In one town in southern Tunisia, which is a big smuggling hub, there was a local civil society committee that functioned de facto as a sort of association for smugglers—a civil society organization of smugglers, if you like.
This committee managed to get a meeting with the Tunisian president at the time, Moncef Marzouki, a prominent human rights activist who took what I think was a bold and positive step in agreeing to meet them.
The number-one item on the committee’s agenda, their main demand, was that a TV program be made to clarify that they are not terrorists. That was their top priority.
[Dan Banik]
But they’re Robin Hoods, maybe, not terrorists?
[Max Gallien]
I'm not sure they'd go that far, but they would think of themselves as businessmen.
This association with terrorism doesn't just hurt them personally. It's part of a wider othering and securitization of a conversation they want to have in economic terms. They are absolutely willing to see border economies change, but they want to have that conversation around livelihoods and employment, not just around building fences.
That moment has always stuck with me: this lobbying against them, and especially the framing of that lobbying in terms of terrorism and danger to the nation, has felt incredibly hurtful to borderland communities—who are often the first to be affected when there are real security issues at borders.
[Dan Banik]
But Libya has been in trouble for a long time now. Isn't there concern that some of the bad actors from Libya, together with gasoline, would come into neighboring countries?
[Max Gallien]
Yes, but I don't think they need the gasoline.
If you look at any map and at the border between Tunisia and Libya, it's a very large border. It's very difficult to fortify. A highly capitalized actor—an armed group with an interest in crossing that border—will find a way to get people across.
Similarly, a highly capitalized smuggling network that wants to bring cannabis, guns, cocaine, or smartphones across—high-value, compact goods—will be able to do so no matter how many night-vision goggles you buy for the Tunisian police or how many border fences you build. They are not reliant on gasoline smugglers to get things across.
The idea that smuggling licit goods creates a generalized porosity that other actors then use is, I think, a misunderstanding of how most borders work. Both kinds of activity exist, but that doesn't mean they're in league with each other.
[Dan Banik]
One of the many fascinating aspects of your work is your methodology—studying smugglers. How does this work in practice?
What kind of identity do you have in the field? You've visited these communities, interacted with officials, conducted hundreds of interviews and participant observation. That means gaining the trust of groups who need to be convinced that you're not there to report to someone, that you're not an informant, especially when you're dealing with corruption or illicit activities.
Tell us what it means, methodologically, to study smugglers.
[Max Gallien]
The book is broadly an ethnography. It's based on spending a lot of time in two borderlands and talking to many people there, including smugglers from a variety of networks, as well as civil society actors and street-level bureaucrats.
Like every ethnography, it's partial. It's based on the questions I was able to ask and the conversations I was able to have. There are many questions I couldn't ask and conversations I couldn't have—because of who I am, but also because of my limitations as a researcher.
The first part of any methodology here is recognizing that you're telling a partial story, and being explicit about which story you can tell and which stories you hope others will tell.
For me, focusing on institutions and “rules of the game” for how smuggling is done emerged as something I could talk about. I couldn't ask people, “Who is your supplier?” But I could ask, “How do people tend to meet their supplier?” I couldn't ask, “Who is the general at the border?” But I could ask, “How much does it cost to get something across the border?”
Framing things in more abstract terms was both a methodological solution and a key part of the story I wanted to tell: these generalized rules that people know, understand, and can talk about exist.
Another part was how you talk to people. As you mentioned earlier, people don't usually describe themselves as smugglers. They describe themselves as businessmen or as engaged in cross-border trade. Learning how people think and talk about themselves was crucial. You don't ask, “Are you a smuggler?” You ask, “How is business?” You say you’ve heard it’s been difficult recently and you ask how they feel about that.
Meeting people where they are has been a crucial part of the work. But that’s not just about researching smuggling; it's probably true of researching almost anything.
[Dan Banik]
Yeah. I remember doing work on corruption. I could never ask someone, “Are you corrupt?” That would be the end of the conversation. But asking them to reflect on the phenomenon, on how others are perceived, or who is corrupt among their friends or contacts would elicit a lot of interesting discussion.
A final issue, Max. Based on these two case studies and your ongoing work on smuggling, what lessons are there for European policymakers, for a Trump administration that talks about building a wall, or, in our context, Schengen and the free movement of people?
Some people say we’ve lost control over our borders. Most of the discussion is on drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, and of course irregular migrants. But the other, more important economic aspects you identify in your study are perhaps overlooked.
What would you suggest we focus on closer to home?
[Max Gallien]
That's a great question. There are other smuggling researchers who are better placed to speak about some of this than I am, especially in the US and especially those who come from the context of the American border.
But one thing that seems true globally is that certain political movements—and increasingly many movements—are selling us a vision of border control that has never existed. The idea that we're returning to a time when states had total control over everything crossing their borders is historically untrue, and in many parts of the world it's not a reasonable way to think about border security.
The idea that every border is a fence and every gate is perfectly controlled is historically untrue and practically unlikely. We need to think of border communities as part of the wider institutional and human structure around borders, and we need to bring them into the conversation.
What that looks like depends on the specific border. But treating borders as hermetically sealed contexts rather than as social and economic spaces where people live is politically powerful, yet simply untrue. It's something we need to resist.
In practice, that leads to fencing. We have a modern fetishization of border infrastructure. We don't really think about what it does. But there is an avalanche of academic research showing that it doesn't do what we think it does and that it has side effects.
I don't see us having that conversation, which connects economic and security aspects of these spaces. We often focus on security, but we need to recognize there's an economic, social, and distributional dimension as well.
That's a lesson we find in many places, but it's the part of the lesson I see most clearly in the border communities where I’ve worked.
[Dan Banik]
Max, congratulations on a fantastic book. I'm a huge admirer of your work. Please keep it going. And thank you very much for this lovely conversation and for coming on my show today.
[Max Gallien]
Thank you so much for having me, Dan. It's been an absolute pleasure.
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