Smuggling Sovereignty: Trade, Transgression, and State Authority

ABSTRACT Global supply chains are saturated with transgressions—corruption, smuggling, document forgery, and other practices that blur the line between legality and illegality. States do not merely endure these practices; they actively shape the conditions for them, producing the very illegal systems they then claim to police. My research on the control and management of commodities in Serbia shows that engaging in illicit activity did not necessarily delegitimize the state. On the contrary, it often worked as a mechanism for sustaining sovereign power in conditions of crisis and scarcity. Although such practices are frequently dismissed as evidence of Balkan exceptionalism or postsocialist dysfunction, I argue that they are central to how global commodity chains are managed. Illegality is not a breakdown of the system—it is a feature of it. The entanglement of statehood and illegality thus unsettles the notion of sovereignty as a coherent, legalistic ideal. Instead, it invites us to rethink sovereignty not only as authority over territory and populations but also as authority exercised over commodities. It draws attention to how the infrastructural and logistical practices that regulate the movement of goods—including illicit flows—form part of the material and economic foundations through which state power is sustained and reproduced.