The Moroccan Eastern border region (namely L’Oriental) had been under state scrutiny and considered ‘useless’ (al-maghrib al-ghayr nafi’). This status was further reinforced by the border’s official closure in 1994 due to continuous diplomatic conflicts with Algeria. This conception of the periphery as “useless” was often depicted as one where state actors had limited control, thus allowing wide informal networks to structure and create order within the different communities inhabiting it. As Baduel proposes in his schema of the traditional state, ‘the periphery tends to escape continuously from the centre, which is not allowed by centrifugal powers to exert control in ways other than by recurrent negotiation, [and is] therefore in permanent tension with the peripheral forces’. This paper departs from these premises, and critically examines the relationship between centre and periphery in the Moroccan case. It does this by examining the recent creation of cooperatives as a means to alleviate poverty and to create employment at the borderland, particularly for the youth and women. In fact, between 2016, when both Morocco and Algeria started limiting smuggling activities, and 2021, an overall 570 cooperatives were created on the Moroccan side of the border with an allocated budget of roughly five million USD. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with policymakers, cooperative owners, and borderland communities, I argue that cooperatives, largely portrayed as apolitical mechanisms, provide a platform for smallholders to address the dysfunctional socioeconomic effects of the border closure, particularly since the clampdown on smuggling activities in 2016. However, their creation remains a contested political process aimed at shaping borderland communities into docile and productive citizens. Their revival represents a ‘dramatic intensification of coercive, disciplinary forms of state intervention in order to impose market rule upon all aspects of social life’ (Brenner & Theodore 2002). This paper further argues this is a b/ordering process in which the formalisation of working-class populations enables the (re)production of hierarchies beyond the territorial border region through capital accumulation in both local and global centres. By examining state-cooperatives relations, this paper dislocates the centre/periphery dichotomy and offers a novel perspective on the bordering technologies that sustain, and are sustained by, the border. This view represents a move away from prior understandings of the borderland as solely produced by the geopolitical context and conflictual bilateral relations between Morocco and Algeria.