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Thesis/Dissertation
Date
2025-12
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Political Science
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https://doi.org/10.34944/r8we-vn82
Abstract
How does smuggling affect the production of violence? This dissertation examines the relationship between smuggling as a tool for community resilience in peacetime and violent behavior in conflict using a multi-methods design. I argue that smuggling emerges as a form of pre-conflict economic and social order that provides smugglers with political influence, such as the ability to negotiate security settlements with state actors. Essentially, because smuggling incorporates a humanitarian aspect to it as it is a practical option for populations living in marginalized spaces to meet their needs, it contributes to community-building and connects economic actors with political actors. When engaging in conflict, I demonstrate that insurgents strategically opt to rely on smuggling networks, not just as a civil war economy, but for political gain. Insurgents’ reliance on smuggling contributes to rebel capacity and serves as a tool to facilitate the establishment of control over territory and population to support a political cause. Focusing on the conflict in the Sahel and the northern Mali’s borderlands with Algeria and Mauritania, I analyze the implications of smuggling as a tool for statehood and self-determination on violence. First, I briefly retrace the historical roots of the trans-Saharan and intra-Saharan caravan trade and show that trade and taxes contributed to state formation to understand how smuggling emerged as an essential and tolerated economic activity. Then, I analyze the formal and informal arrangements tying smugglers, states, and rebels, and show that insurgent’s reliance on smuggling is a political strategy that facilitates claims of self-determination and establishment of control over territory. Lastly, I examine patterns of violence produced by armed groups reliant on smuggling and show that smuggling, by itself, does not enable or cause violence. I distinguish violence targeting civilians and violence involving state forces and show that violent political organizations involved in smuggling to establish governance resort to different strategies of violence, which seem to be determined by the aims of the group rather than by reliance on smuggling. The dissertation builds on and contributes to the existing scholarship on political violence and civil wars, governance in borderlands, and on the political economy of conflict by analyzing how smuggling can serve political motives rather than solely profit motives, and examining how insurgents’ reliance on smuggling can do so without consistently or directly enabling violence.
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