Borders are lucrative zones of exchange and trade, much of it clandestine. Smuggling, by definition, ‘depends on the presence of a border, and on what the state declares can be legally imported or exported’ (Donnan & Wilson 1999: 101), and while free trade zones and growth triangles welcome the free movement of goods and services, border regions can also become heightened areas of state control that provide an environment in which smuggling thrives. Donnan and Wilson (1999: 88) argue that acts of smuggling are a form of subversion or resistance to the existence of the border, and therefore the state. However, there is not always a conflict of interest and struggle between state authorities and smugglers (Megoran, Raballand, & Bouyjou 2005). Synergies between the formal and informal economies ensure that illegal cross-border trade does not operate independently of systems of formal regulatory authority. Smugglers are frequently subject to a system of unofficial ‘rules of law’ developed through tacit agreement among trading parties, which operates in parallel to regulations imposed by the state (cf. Chang 2004; Walker 1999). The existence of these parallel regulatory systems creates a situation where smuggling can constitute a form of informal power in opposition to state power while at the same time being integrated into state apparatuses. Indeed, studies of smuggling demonstrate that collusion by state authorities is almost always essential for illegal cross-border trade to occur (Chang 2004; Niger- Thomas 2001; Van Schendel 1993). Like many other forms of illicit cross-border exchange, smuggling thus reveals the paradox of the border: even as illegal cross-border trade works to undermine the state, it also works to constitute it (Donnan & Wilson 1999: 106).

In this chapter, we examine the unauthorised movement of goods across the border to and from Indonesia's Riau Islands from the perspective of the individuals who smuggle and consume them, and from the perspective of local agents of the state – individuals whose stories demonstrate the multiple meanings associated with cross-border flows across the straits and, in doing so, shed light on how state practices intersect with competing ideas about legality and licitness.