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&#160;Forthcoming: Borders, Informality, International Trade and CustomsJournal of Borderlands Studies - Special Issue (Volume 30 n°3/2015)Informel, commerce international et douanesGuest editors: Thomas Cantens, Robert Ireland &#38; Gaël RabalandInformality is, first and foremost, a concept. There are neither "informal" individuals nor "informal" goods. Informal merely says what they are not (formal), not what they are. This nomenclature applied to the social sciences first appeared in the early 1970s to term the activities which escaped economic and statistical measurement. Its analytical usefulness has been recently questioned. When investigated in the field, informality unveils well rooted and organized rationales, which tends to represent it as a reorganization of forms rather than a simple obscure disorder. As such, informality has been focused on by intellectual streams that are theoretically different: neoliberalism recognizes the informal sector and its fluidity as confirmation of a free market without regulation, while the opposite view is more Keynesian - that the informal economy can be dealt with by more state intervention; Marxist approaches suggest that an informal economy obscures capitalist dominance and exploitation of these activities.The international trade of goods reminds us of a sobering reality. On the one hand, informality has passed into common usage, particularly among Customs and Tax civil servants in emerging and developing countries, the traders themselves, and "international development experts". On the other hand, in the past couple of decades, international transport, especially air transport, and the opening of Asian economies influenced many developing and emerging country entrepreneurs to gain access to long-distance international trade. This class of retailers who previously waited at home for the arrival of foreign peddlers or who were small cross-border smugglers have become long-distance and major traders. These importers form and lean on local, regional, linguistic networks, parts of which extended outside their nation of origin to set up as intermediaries in Asia, Americas and Europe. Further, at the individual level, formal and informal activities are increasingly overlapping, which weakens categorizations of actors and pleads for a focus on practices. These practices are generally not bureaucratized or standardized, in contrast with those of multinational companies historically implanted in the developing countries since colonial times. This reality limits de facto the ability of the State to regulate this kind of international trade.Frontières, informel, commerce international et douanesDossier spécial coordonné par Thomas Cantens, Robert Ireland &#38; Gaël RabalandLe commerce international des marchandises nous rappelle à une réalité spécifique. D’une part, le concept d’informel est d’ores et déjà passé dans l’usage courant, chez les fonctionnaires des administrations douanières et fiscales des pays dits en développement et émergents, les commerçants et les « experts internationaux ». D’autre part, depuis une vingtaine d’années, les transports internationaux, notamment aériens, et l’ouverture économique des pays asiatiques ont permis à une multitude d’entrepreneurs des pays en développement et émergents d’accéder au commerce international de longue distance. Cette classe de commerçants qui auparavant attendaient chez eux des démarcheurs de pays occidentaux ou qui pratiquaient la petite contrebande transfrontalière sont devenus des «grands commerçants» importateurs. Ils forment et s’appuient sur des réseaux locaux, régionaux, linguistiques dont une partie s’est étendue hors de leur pays d’origine pour faire fonction d’intermédiaire en Asie, Amérique et Europe. Par ailleurs, au niveau individuel, les activités formelles et informelles se chevauchent, ce qui affaiblit la pertinence des taxonomies d’acteurs et plaide pour qu’on s’intéresse plutôt aux pratiques. Celles-ci demeurent peu bureaucratisées ou standardisées, en contraste avec celles des entreprises multinationales historiquement implantées dans les pays en développement depuis l’époque coloniale. Les pratiques de ces commerçants au long cours offrent de facto peu de prise à l’État pour réguler ce type de commerce international.&#160;