This dissertation is concerned with how One Stop Border Posts (OSBPs) are positioned to transform both the facilitation of trade as well as southern Africa's identity as a regional polity based on cooperation and interdependence. Based on ethnographic research with government officials, customs officers, cross-border truck drivers, border communities, technical experts and regional development consultants at a newly reconfigured border post along sub-Saharan Africa's largest trade corridor‚ this dissertation illustrates the social, spatial, and economic experiences of connectivity and the everyday business of integrating southern Africa through the facilitation of trade. It critically interrogates what happens when infrastructural investment, technical expertise, and technological development are positioned to deliver political futures. "Assembling Regional Community" gestures to the ways in which these programs come to materialize regional unity and regional connectivity. Assembly is in this first instance material, technical, and infrastructural; it refers to the material scaffoldings, roads and bridges linking countries to one another as well as the technical expertise that goes into their smooth operations. "Assembling Regional Community" also refers to the discourses and programs mobilized in the continuous imagination of "southern Africa" as a united polity bound by shifting, strategic objectives. This dissertation is a study of a regional community under infrastructural assembly.
