Abstract
African borderlands – such as those between South Sudan, Uganda and Congo – are often presented by analysts as places of agency and economic opportunity, in contrast to hardened, securitized borders elsewhere. We emphasize, however, that even such relatively porous international borders can nevertheless be the focus of significant unease for borderland communities. Crossing borders can enable safety for those fleeing conflict or trading prospects for businesspeople, but it can also engender anxieties around the unchecked spread of insecurity, disease and economic exploitation.Understanding this ambiguous construction of borders in the minds of their inhabitants requires us, we argue, to look beyond statist or globalizing discourses and to appreciate the moral economies of borderlands, and how they have been discursively and epistemologically negotiated over time. Narratives around witchcraft and the occult represent, we argue, a novel and revealing lens through which to do so and our study draws on years of fieldwork and archival research to underline how cartographies of witchcraft in this region are, and have long been, entangled with the construction of state political geographies, internal as well as international.
Highlights
The fear of invisible threats carried by the cross-border movement of people has perhaps never been more widely felt around the world than it is in the midst of the 2020-21 Covid-19 pandemic
Our research area has been characterized by high levels of conflict, mass migration and high-risk economic activities, which may help to explain the particular concerns with the moral and social effects of crossborder movement that seem to feature prominently here in discourses about witchcraft
We emphasize the wider salience of our findings, in terms of the need to explore how boundaries are given meaning and territory is constructed in local, vernacular imaginaries and epistemologies
Summary
The fear of invisible threats carried by the cross-border movement of people has perhaps never been more widely felt around the world than it is in the midst of the 2020-21 Covid-19 pandemic. As borderlands scholarship has emphasized, boundaries only become real on the ground through the work of borderland inhabitants and border-crossers in imagining, negotiating and exploiting them (Feyissa & Hoehne, 2010; Johnson et al, 2011; Nugent, 2002) Understanding these processes of border-making, we argue, requires exploring local imaginaries and epistemologies of space that exist in dialogue with universal statist discourses but reveal the more personal, quotidian and intimate ways in which political and economic geographies are experienced and morally interpreted. In the fourth section we develop our detailed empirical analysis of discourse and action around witchcraft in these borderlands, highlighting four main spatial themes emerging from our interviews: the import of new forms of witchcraft by cross-border migrants, returning refugees; the occult capture of labour across borders; the magical production of wealth, through cross-border trade; and the anti-witchcraft measures which work to construct and reinforce local and ethnic boundaries. We conclude by reflecting on the wider implications of our study, and the value of understanding the con struction of borders and boundaries through the lens of oft-overlooked epistemologies, discourses and geographical imaginaries
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