Informal Economies
- NINT 5292 - Informal Economies (Fall 2008)
This course will propose a critical approach to the category of the "informal economy" in Africa.. It will do so in a specific way: through the prism of both literal and figurative "border economies." The latter include trans-border trade as well as war economies, mercenary economies, enclave economies, and offshore entities. We will review the various forms these "border economies" take and will debate the various manners of describing and conceptualizing them. A few founding or classical texts will be read and contrasted to recent monographs or ethnographies of these economic spaces in Africa. The aim of this course is to develop critical analytical skills for appraising central concepts in the analysis of both the economy and political economy. This critical approach to the very notion of the informal economy entails inquiry into the ways in which such a concept serves to bracket out certain categories, rendering them residual to theorizations. Through the readings, students will be brought to raise questions about the ways in which supposedly "peripheral" phenomena are critical to the very constitution of "the center." Their answers to these questions are significant insofar as current academic and policy debates about informality and illegality are most often confined to issues of morality, thus slighting central questions about economic redistribution.
Concentration:Development