Paper short abstract:

This paper examines an otherwise arcane category of trade law -- non-tariff barriers to trade -- to examine the techniques of governing space, value, and subjects that are enrolled in efforts at regional integration in East Africa.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, East African governments have pursued an energetic array of initiatives to integrate their economies by building new infrastructure, reforming border controls, and harmonizing legal regimes. If the East African Community exists within a longer genealogy of supranational connectivity, exchange, and affiliation, this history does little to generate the regional loyalties or trade sought by governments and aid organizations. Instead, East African technocrats are compelled to deploy an array of arcane techniques to enact the region. This paper examines the technopolitics of one such means of governing across borders, namely "non-tariff barriers" to trade (NTBs). While formally defined as regulatory impediments to trade, in practice, NTBs are an enormously expansive category. In World Bank or WTO publications, hundreds of administrative rules are aggregated, commensurated, and compared across borders—a type of international audit which is today a central form of global government. Yet in my conversations with officials, everything from bribery to "business ethnocentricism" have been labelled as non-tariff barriers to trade. In fact, it is this very expansiveness, I suggest — and the way in which it incorporates seemingly non-economic behaviors, customs, and ideas — that give NTBs, and the project of trade liberalization more broadly, their political potency. Following the surprising vivacity of this obscure metric — and the way it seeks to remake space, value, and subjects — sheds light on the contradictions, ambiguities, and inequalities of the new economic geographies of East Africa.