Transdisciplinary Views on Boundaries

Spatial Practices Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa, 2018

The edited collection Spatial Practices: Territory, Border and Infrastructurein Africa presents research ndings from the German Research Council’s Priority Programme 1448 “Adaptation and Change in Africa” (2011-2018). At the heart of the volume are important new spatial practices that have emerged after the end of the Cold War in the elds of conict, climate change, migration and urban development, to name but a few, and their ordering efects with regard to social relations. These ndings bear particular relevance for the co-production of territorialities and sovereignties, for borders and migrations, as well as infrastructures and orders. Contributors are: Sabine Baumgart, Andrea Behrends, Marc Boeckler, Martin Doevenspeck, Ulf Engel, Claudia Gebauer, Karsten Giese, Katharina Heitz Tokpa, Shahadat Hossain, Anna Hüncke, Gabriel Klaeger, Kelly Si Miao Liang, Andreas Mehler, Felix Müller, Detlef Müller-Mahn, Wolfgang Scholz, Sophie Schramm, Jannik Schritt, Michael Stasik, Florian Weisser, Julia Willers, and Franzisca Zanker.

Borders in Africa unfold in diverse appearances besides their being markers of national identity. Added to their being important realms of migration flows, cross-border areas are nests of growing multifaceted insecurity problems among which organized transnational crime is the most topical. While States paradoxically hang on to criticized regional intergovernmentalism, local public authorities, though not necessarily autonomous, engage in local initiatives or modes of “borderland governmentalities”. In the borderlands of Senegal, Guinea Bissau and The Gambia, preceding research reveals how borders appear as spheres of material and symbolic stakes (Tandia 2007, Sindjoun 2002). A sort of “homeland nationalism” stems from identity narratives of the borderlands, a “localism” that yields a “local system of governance” between cross-border State and non-State agents and services in order to supplement the countryside from inter-State anomic diplomacy. Among other questions, we ask to what extent and how local representation of identities and territories produce new meaning/s or perceptions of borders? To what extent and how production of border meaning/s springs from (is linked to, produces and is produced by) cross-border governance? Theoretical analysis of the literature will be leveled with empirical accounts of cross-border governance and community building, through qualitative empirical data (interviews, focus groups and life stories) processed in a socio-anthropological perspective.

: Symbolic artifacts that help to understand and define spatial discontinuities, boundaries and borders are essential to our territorial alphabet. The text first recalls on the historic construction of a bounded form of thinking (spatially) within the Western world, according to a model that was disseminated worldwide through colonization. The focus shed by globalization on flows and networks profoundly questions the nature of boundaries and borders, making them appear as more and more topological. In this context, where de/rebordering processes cannot be considered as symmetric to de/reterritorialization processes, contemporary borders have to be grasped through their portativity, considering a change of focus towards the individual and his/her personalization of a mobile device. The chapter ends sketching the premises of an ontology of the mobile border, allowing time and instability to be instilled into a renewed analysis of spatial limits.

This publication based dissertation offers a comparative examination of the making and contestation of the Namibia-Zambia and Uganda-South Sudan borders in everyday relations between state and non-state actors. While events in the former borderland were strongly determined by the annual floods of the Zambezi, the movements of massive numbers of people fleeing from past and fearing future conflict characterized the latter. Past and present events in both borderlands, despite their peripheral location, are shown to be an integrate and crucial part of state formation in both countries. The key question guiding the analysis is: How are competing claims of territory, authority and citizenship negotiated between state representatives and residents in these borderlands, and what kinds of governance regimes emerge as a result of these negotiations? This is the synthesis of two lines of investigation pursued by the author. The first seeks to clarify how pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial governments’ power is broadcast from the centre to the territorial and social margins in African borderlands. The second seeks to clarify in what ways those who inhabit these borderlands exercise their own power. With the answers to these questions the author contributes to the ethnographic and historiographic study of borderlands worldwide and in Africa, as well as the literature that examines state formation as a continuous processes constituted in everyday-encounters between representatives of the state and its citizens. The author conceptualizes borderlands as dynamic sites where the actual meanings and practices of state-society relations are contested and forged on a daily and continuous basis in the relationships between borderland inhabitants with each other across the border, and with those who represent central state authority. The central argument of this dissertation is that this lived quality is what makes the border ‘real’: The border does not only exist as an abstract construct separate from or ‘above’ the people and territories it is supposed to separate. Borderland actors actively engage, challenge and thereby reshape the state, over time and repeatedly. They contribute to fine-tuning the state in ways that do not necessarily undermine or hollow it out. This working practice of the border is what brings it to life in the sense in which a relationship between people is only alive - and therefore real - if it is filled by meaningful and ongoing exchange and interaction.

The Journal of African History, 2021

builds on the African borderlands literature that he has helped to forge to bring our attention to the ways that three social constructsboundaries, communities, and stateshave helped define much of the political history of West Africa from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. 1 Founder of the African Borderlands Research Network (ABORNE), Nugent, along with A. I. Asiwaju, has led the charge for scholars arguing that African borders are not exceptional because they are 'artificial'. Since all borders are artificial in that they are socially constructed, African borderlands provide useful frames of analysis for those interested in how states and communal identities affected one another over time, especially on the geographical margins. Nugent compares the development of two West African borderlandsthe Trans-Volta (Ghana-Togo border) and the Senegambia (Senegal-Gambia border)to argue that West African borderland societies were not marginalized by events at the political center but rather were crucial to them. These 'margins' go beyond geography to include social and ethnic groups sidelined by colonial officials and nationalist leaders in state-making processes. Thus, he stakes a claim for the influence of borderlands in colonial state-making in his subtitle: 'the centrality of the margins'. Nugent shows how trade and exchange on the borders often subverted or avoided state control in the capital or port city, which were often the same thing. Indeed, as Nugent demonstrates, these African states were made less through the 'war and taxes' formula of Charles Tilly and more through the regulation of cross-border trade. 2 Nugent claims that the geographical margins were therefore 'productive' in at least three respects: Temporally, in that states were forged in the process of converting frontier zones into colonial borders; structurally, in that fiscal logics, which hinged on regulating border flows, fundamentally underpinned the morphology of colonial states and that of their post-colonial successors; and politically, in that the social contracts that were forged under colonial rule, and which were

2013

From the intro: This volume is on borders, and concentrates on the marked influence borders and boundaries, whether “real” or “imaginary,” have on the lives of those who happen to live near them or are involved in making them. As Filip De Boeck pointed out in his keynote address to the conference on Borders and Frontiers in Africa —the event that led to this book: "The notion of frontier is increasingly used to convey the post-colonial cosmogonies of the interstitial, the fold (le pli). The world of the frontier is currently portrayed as one of fluid margins rather than fixed boundaries. In this interpretation, the notion of frontier as “spatial boundary” becomes one of “borderlands.” As such it deconstructs and dissolves the clearcut center/periphery or the local/global binarism embodied in the traditional border fetishism of the nation state ideology and its imperialist extension in the colony." [De Boeck 2007:1] This perspective is the point of departure for the seven contributions collected here, whether they look at how political and symbolic borders took concrete form or at how borders and boundaries shape life in the city, mould the experience of “state,” or morph the relations between those in power and the not-so-powerful. Important is that from the outset this volume argues that borders and boundaries do more than simply indicate where one territory stops and another begins. They are much more than spatial designations, and more than simple markers of “otherness” (see Das and Poole 2004:8). Therefore, the contributors to this volume see borders and borderlands in line with what Ana Tsing (1994:279) has argued with regard to the notion of margins, “the zones of unpredictability at the edges of discursive stability, where contradictory discourses overlap, or where discrepant kinds of meaning-making converge.” In Tsing’s understanding, then, margins appear as an “analytical placement that makes evident both the constraining, oppressive quality of cultural exclusion and the creative potential of rearticulating, enlivening, and rearranging the very social categories that peripheralize a group's existence” (Tsing 1994:279).

Vuna Journal of Politics and Diplomatic Studies (VUNAJOPODS) A Journal of Political Science and Diplomacy, Veritas University Abuja. , 2017

The post world war era provided an opening for renunciation of empire and race as organizing principles of society. African states obtained their independence with poorly demarcated borders that considered the most potent source of conflict and insecurity. Most vulnerable local minorities are found in border regions of Africa. The politics of homogenization are played out in the remote corners of the country in relation to language, religion and way of life. Border regions in Africa have developed a highly specific culture of social changes. Thus, in the context of economic expansion, border towns are booming and rapidly growing. The activities of transport corridors, human and drug traffickers, trans frontier parks, regional integration, cross-river boat operators, long-distance truck operators and women involved in long-distance trade strive, the members of frontier communities are active participants in the creation and maintenance of borders and habitants are eager to benefit from the resources which borders create. This study observed that dynamism of borderlands have created opportunities for political and economic activism and at the same time resulting to social changes. This paper investigates the real world social changes and its visibility in borderland using Chad, Cameroun, Benin, Togo and Nigeria despite the political instability. The Trans border cooperation on historical linkages would considerably reduce conflicts and litigation, and the borders converted to bridges rather than barriers from the grassroots as opposed to the state-centric views.

Third World Quarterly, 2002

Urban studies scholars drawing on Foucault's analysis of governmentality have investigated how urban social orders are increasingly more concerned with the management of space rather than on the discipline of offenders or the punishment of offences (Merry, 2001). This paper examines the 'rationality ' and efficacy of spatial governmentality in post-aparthei d Cape Town, and shows how the city has increasingly become a 'fortress city' (Davis, 1990), much like cities such as Los Angeles, Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. These 'global cities' are increasingly characterised by privatised security systems in middle class suburbs, shopping malls and gated communities (Caldeira, 1999). These spatial forms of governmentality draw on sophisticated security systems comprising razor wire and electrified walls, burglar alarms and safe rooms, as well as vicious guard dogs, neighbourhood watches, private security companies, and automated surveillance cameras. On the other side of the race and class divide are urban ghettoes characterised by growing poverty and everyday violence. These socio-spatial inequalities continue to be reproduced despite urban planning initiatives aimed at desegregating the apartheid city. Although the media and the middle classes highlight the dangers of crime and violence, they tend to ignore the structures of inequality that fuel the growth of crime syndicates and violent drug economies that are reproducing these urban governance crises. Given the diminished resources of the neo-liberal state, the policing of middle class residential and business districts is increasingly being 'outsourced' to private security companies. In working class neighbourhoods of Cape Town such as Manenberg, the state has attempted to re-establish governance by resorting to new forms of spatial governmentality. The paper draws attention to the limits of these attempts to assert state control through the management of space. Spatial governance in places like Manenberg will continue to be relatively ineffectual given existing levels of social inequality and racial polarization. Such processes are reproduced by massive unemployment and racialised poverty resulting from socio-spatial legacies of apartheid and Cape Town's shift from a manufacturing to a tourist, IT and financial services economy. Although this paper focuses on attempts at re-establishing governance in a crime and gangster-ridden working class neighbourhood of Cape Town, it addresses these issues in relation to city-wide shifts to new forms of spatial governmentality after apartheid. Version: Published version Terms of use: Full terms and conditions of use:http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-ofaccess.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2013

This book presents an intriguing account of identity conflicts to issues of scale and urban citizenship. The collection combines matters not frequently discussed simultaneously, including government and architecture, sovereignty struggles and global restructuring, Western and non-Western cities, present and past times. Davis and Libertun de Duren question the ability of traditional national institutions to answer the evidently escalating urban partisan violence, and strive to portray the potentials and dangers of various sovereignty arrangements. Urgency is vital, they state, as many growing conflicts are aligned with the scaling-down of identity issues from the nation states towards 'more territorially circumscribed subnational levels, where race, ethnicity, or religion are often the principal basis for making representational claims' (p. 2). Conflicts are especially evident in postcolonial countries 'still struggling with non-democratic forms of government', but the matter is global, since current violent struggles occur 'on a variety of scales and in a range of forms' (p. 2). Yet the book's aim is not the politics of identity struggles but their representation in built environments. Sovereignty arrangements are assumed to be 'the territorial scale of governance, representation, and citizenship' (p. 5), while architecture and urban design are studied as mediators of social tensions or tolerance. This perspective is presented as a platform for interdisciplinary research and thus the editors opted to produce a 'normative proposition that will hasten a return to the diversity, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism once associated with the urban sphere', which will 'serve as a stepping stone to generating peace and political stability on the national level or global scale' (p. 6). To achieve these high ambitions, the book is structured around three themes, or parts, each containing three distinct chapters. The first part, 'Modes of Sovereignty, Urban Governance, and the City' contains two chapters that deal with Jerusalem under late Ottoman rule (by Nora Libertun de Duren) and the (post-1917) early British mandate (by Salim Tamari) and one chapter on India and Vietnam under colonial rule (by Anne Raffin). The contributors all measure the interrelations between different identity groups competing for sovereignty, against the urban, national and colonial institutions. While the two chapters on Jerusalem focus on the politics of urban planning and public spaces, the chapter on India and Vietnam deals directly with the potential of escalating violence. The second section, entitled 'Scales of Sovereignty and the Remaking of Urban and National Space', is dedicated to perspectives on changing contemporary relations between the local-urban, national-state and global scales. Locations of probing vary in size, including the subnational region of the Basque capital Bilbao (Gerardo Del Cerro Santamaria), the Lebanese capital Beirut (Agnes Deboult and Mona Fawaz) and the whole of Western Europe (Neil Brenner). The chapters vary according to their research agendas: the chapter on Bilbao focuses on the national struggle for recognition and follows the use of transnational networks in the planning of the local flagship museum. The next chapter presents a plan for a major highway that invoked scalar overlaps between urban class tensions and nationwide religious and identity conflicts. This intriguing perspective is followed by Neil Brenner's wide-ranging discussion of the implication of the unified Euro bloc on Western European cities and its alignment with Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors.

Urban Geography, 2021

Recent approaches to urban borderlands employ border studies theories to analyze urban socio-spatial differentiation. Such approaches highlight how patterns of segregation generate not only social divisions, but also new interactions and connections. This article moves beyond analytic parallels between geopolitical borders and urban borderlands by tracing connections between changing border regimes and urban landscapes in Africa. Drawing on fieldwork in eastern Ethiopia, we show how shifting meanings and enforcement practices at Ethiopia's international and subnational borders reshaped the socio-spatial landscape of Jigjiga, capital of Ethiopia's Somali Regional State. The re-drawing of Ethiopia's internal borders through federalism in 1991 altered spatial enactments of identity in the ethnically-divided city. Since 2010, new approaches to border governance have driven a shift from urban ethnic polarization toward class-oriented differentiation. We mobilize a trans-scalar analytic that theorizes geopolitical borders and urban borderlands as intertwined milieus where groups create and regulate connections, mobilities, and resource circulations.