Political economy of crossborder trade flows in Southern Africa. Flow regimes in the Copperbelts ; Économie politique des circulations de marchandises transfrontalières en Afrique australe. Les régimes de circulations dans les Copperbelts

This dissertation analyzes cross-border commercial circulations through the concept of circulations regimes. Regimes are defined as lasting articulations of ideologies, policies, actors, hard and soft infrastructures, material and immaterial, social and technic elements that enable or prevent the circulations of things. Thanks to an ethnographic study conducted in the Central African Copperbelts (in Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo), this research identified three circulations regimes: - the power-steering regime is founded on a set of technologies that enable goods to move quickly, as speed represents the major positive value actors use to legitimate their actions. This regime is based on extraverted infrastructures whose organization was created during European colonization of Southern Africa. - the spare wheel regime is deployed in case of emergency which is virtually all the time given the permanent fiscal emergency in which the Zambian state is. This regime is based on ambivalent infrastructures through which the government has to find a balance between promoting free trade, as it is expected to do on the global stage and developing neo-mercantilist policies.- the off-trail regime is marked by its modularity: its characteristics make it difficult for the traditional infrastructures to detect and count these circulations. The latter then have the possibility to move more flexibly along non-traditional paths and can contribute to change the general patterns of trade in the long-term. The categorization by circulations regimes allows to analyze more specifically the differentiated use of the same infrastructure network, one that had been built to make the exportation of minerals always easier, and the role of public and private actors in the bureaucratization of trade. ; Cette thèse analyse les circulations commerciales transfrontalières grâce au concept de régimes de circulations. Les régimes sont des articulations durables d’idéologies, de politiques, d’acteurs, d’infrastructures matérielles et ...