The (In)Commodities of Laissez-faire Integration: Trade and Mobility in a Cross-border Market

The weekly market of Diaobé, one of the largest international market-towns in West Africa, is a place of convergence for sellers and buyers from Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and Mali. At the same time that they trade, negotiate and exchange agricultural products and manufactured commodities, people renegotiate the terms of regional integration in creative, albeit informal ways. In the absence of formal channels of regulation of local centres of exchange, places like Diaobé point to a form of de facto integration that operates within and outside the institutional and legal frameworks of existing treaties and conventions. This article examines the ways cross-border flows and mobility challenge institutional modes of integration through simultaneously dis-integrative and complementary processes. The example of Diaobé allows exploring the socio-cultural dynamics, unstructured trading patterns, as well as the ways in which private operators effectively regulate the terms of market and integration; the issue of the eroding influence of state authority on its periphery is thus acutely raised.