Governing the margins: Refugee-led informal governance in Peshawar urban marketplaces

Refugee-led informal markets are sites of livelihood production in many cities of the Global South. Yet, limited attention has been paid to how displaced populations organize, regulate, and govern these spaces under conditions of protracted displacement and legal uncertainty. This study examines the governance structures, spatial organization, and practices shaping two refugee-led markets in Peshawar, Pakistan: Karkhano Market and Board Bazar. Drawing on a qualitative case study, the paper combines in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, participatory mapping, transect walks, and field observations to examine how Afghan refugee vendors organize market activities, negotiate access to space, resolve disputes, and sustain livelihoods without consistent institutional support. The findings demonstrate that these marketplaces operate through systems of refugee-led informal governance rooted in market committees, customary leadership, kinship networks, and negotiated relationships with external actors. These arrangements regulate market participation, mediate disputes, coordinate protection, and basic service provision, while access to governance and protection remains uneven, shaped by legal status, gender, market tenure, and social networks. The analysis reveals that refugee vendors navigate a lived grey zone of legality in which legitimacy is negotiated through documentation, market participation, and long-term urban presence. Conceptually, the paper advances refugee-led informal governance as a distinct mode of urban governance in which displaced communities regulate economic life and negotiate the legal and political vulnerabilities associated with displacement. By foregrounding displacement as a condition shaping everyday governance, the paper extends debates on urban informality while demonstrating how governance practices produce negotiated legality and claims to urban belonging.