Author: Dr. Noémia Peres De Bessa Vilela
Date: 22-01-2026
When people hear the expression “illicit trade”, they often imagine shadowy networks operating outside the state something exceptional criminal and clearly separable from everyday life. What I keep encountering in the Middle East is something far more uncomfortable. Illicit trade is not outside governance or mobility. It is woven into them.
This became especially clear to me while developing my research on refugee transit through Jordan, a country often framed as a humanitarian success story and a security linchpin. On paper the region is mapped in terms of legal pathways border controls and international cooperation frameworks. On the ground movement looks very different.
Illicit Does Not Mean Marginal
For refugees moving through the Levant informal and illicit routes are rarely a deliberate choice. They are the only available infrastructure when legal mobility collapses under paperwork cost nationality or timing.
Smugglers transport brokers document intermediaries and informal labor recruiters are not operating in some parallel universe. They are filling gaps left by restrictive migration regimes and uneven state presence. In border regions these practices are normalized routinized and often openly acknowledged. Everyone knows who moves people who moves goods and which rules matter on which stretch of road.
Calling this illicit trade without acknowledging its structural role misses the point. What I see instead is a survival economy shaped by displacement conflict and chronic uncertainty.
Borders as Negotiated Spaces
Jordan’s borders are not simply lines of enforcement. They are zones of negotiation. Law is present but unevenly applied. Enforcement is real but selective. Humanitarian logic security priorities and local livelihoods constantly collide.
This creates a reality where legality is not a stable status but a fluctuating condition. Refugees move in and out of formal recognition. Informal crossings become tolerated then criminalized then quietly ignored again. Governance adapts often pragmatically to pressures it cannot fully control.
From this perspective illicit trade is not a governance failure. It is one of the ways governance actually functions under strain.
Criminalized Mobility Manufactured Risk
One of the hardest things to sit with is how quickly refugee movement becomes criminalized and how much risk that criminalization produces.
The more legal pathways narrow the more power accrues to intermediaries who operate in legal grey zones. Refugees become dependent on networks that can protect them one day and exploit them the next. This is where migration governance and illicit trade truly intersect. Not at the level of abstract policy but in the everyday management of risk debt and vulnerability.
What is often framed as a fight against trafficking or smuggling can in practice deepen the conditions that allow those practices to thrive.
Why the Middle East Changes How We Think About Illicit Trade
Much of the global conversation on illicit trade assumes strong states clear legal categories and exceptional criminal actors. The Middle Eastern context disrupts all three assumptions.
Here informal economies are long standing. Borders are historically porous. Illicit practices are embedded in social and economic life especially in regions shaped by repeated displacement. Studying illicit trade in this context forces a rethink. Not just of security policy but of how we define legality legitimacy and responsibility.
This is why focusing on places like Jordan matters. Not because they are problem cases but because they expose the limits of dominant models used to understand migration and trade.
Sitting With the Messiness
As a researcher I am increasingly convinced that the most important work is not producing cleaner maps or sharper categories but staying with the messiness. Listening to how people actually move. Watching how rules bend. Acknowledging how survival governance and illicit trade overlap in ways that resist moral clarity.
If we want policy responses that do less harm we have to start from these realities. Not from idealized borders or simplified notions of crime.
This blog post grows out of my work on refugee transit border governance and illicit trade in Jordan developed within the framework of the GLITSS COST Action STSM, But more than that it reflects an ongoing reckoning with what borders really do and who pays the price when mobility is treated as a threat rather than a fact of life.
