Abstract

This paper explores how improving inter-state relations and deepening links and growing trade flows between Thailand and Laos are manifest at the level of local traders in the Thai-Lao borderlands. Drawing on interviews with key informants including Thai and Lao traders and Thai officers and participant observation in a border market, the paper unsettles two assumptions that implicitly underpin policies concerning the management of cross-border trade. First is the assumption that cross-border trade and linkages with Laos were largely absent or somehow insufficient before 1988. And second, that the official opening of the border has smoothly and inclusively stimulated greater trade and interaction. Focusing on small-scale and informal traders, the paper argues that trade and cross-border interactions were always present even when relations were at their worst and that the formalization of trade has had negative effects on informal and small-scale activities which were so important at the local level. The paper also shows, however, that in the market itself there is a small space of informalization—where formal rules and regulations are informalized in the interests of local people.