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Accepted Paper:

Crime at the margins: the material symbiosis of smuggler and state at the Russian-Estonian border  
Timothy Anderson (Tallinn University)

Paper short abstract:

In the context of a rapidly evolving Estonian border security regime, this paper will analyse the material relationship between migrants, smugglers, and the Estonian state at the Narva-Ivangorod border crossing.

Paper long abstract:

Petrol, alcohol, cigarettes, and other materials are commonly smuggled between Ivangorod and Narva, and a thriving grey market in Narva ensures high profits for individuals who sell these goods on the street. Rapid FRONTEX integration and shifting citizenship policies have changed what criminality means on this border, and tightened import restrictions at Narva's border stations have provided both a heightened risk and a greater reward for those who illegally move materials into Estonia. Drawing on the work of Alfred Gell and Bruno Latour, this paper will consider materials and objects as political agents, focusing on the ways in which changing state policies of material control have shaped the Estonian borderland and altered the lives of those living within it. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in Narva, I will discuss the Estonian state and the cross-border smuggler as imagined ideals that exist primarily as functions of their material interactions with each other. Moreover, I will contend that states and smugglers depend on and reinforce each other through these interactions, giving form and purpose to otherwise inarticulate categories and oppositions. Materials are an integral part of the state-making process at the border, and through them boundaries are set, citizenship is produced, and criminals are assembled.

Panel P44
Border/control and circulation: new perspectives and approaches in cultural anthropological border studies
  Session 1