The culture of smuggling between stigma and legality in the border space in southern Tunisia: a socio-anthropological study

Abstract

The border trade between Libya and Tunisia is one of the old phenomena that border residents use as a source of livelihood, despite the great risks resulting from prosecution due to the smuggling of prohibited goods such as drugs, weapons and some other goods, which were primarily contributed by advanced communication technologies, as these goods became a huge amount of money for smugglers and contributed to the emergence of social inequality, which contributed to the widening gap between the different social groups within the local community, especially as they are interactions with circumstances and variables. Which the region witnessed after 2011, which is the absence of the Libyan state and the weakness of the Tunisian state with the concentration of some "militias" and groups on the border strip, and these technologies had an effective role in coordination in this space, and thus produced new forms of border trade.