Paper short abstract:

Building on the history of the post(colonial) Senegalese state, this paper aims to assess the presence and evolution of the Mouride trade diaspora both in Senegalese “informal” economic sector as in the current structure of regional and global political economy.

Paper long abstract:

Building on the history of the post(colonial) Senegalese state, this paper aims to assess the presence and evolution of the Mouride trade diaspora both in Senegalese "informal" economic sector as in the current structure of regional and global political economy.

I will argue that the formal/informal divide in the case of Senegal (as elsewhere) does not represent a hermetic closure between these two realms but instead an intersection and a point of exchange between them.

What I want to show by using the Mouride example is the different perspective of the economic exchanges (either formal or informal) from the angle of a non-state actor.

Indeed, from its very origins, the mouride economy has combined a series of economic relationships with both formal and informal capitalism. Since its rural origins, the brotherhood participated intensely in the colonial peanut economy but always kept the possibility of trading the produce in the informal markets of Gambia, thus keeping distance with the official economic channels when marketing prices paid to farmers were considered too weak.

With time, this same dynamic has persisted with the integration of mouride traders into the informal sector of the Senegalese postcolonial in the context of the adoption of structural adjustment economic policies and diminishing state assistance.

Thus we cannot argue that for the Senegalese citizen-mouride disciple this divide is irrelevant because it signals different political, social, economic, and cultural behaviors that account for different political contexts and subjectivities as well.