Sovereignty, territory and authority: boundary maintenance in contemporary Africa

Abstract

Why have Africa's borders survived intact in the post-Cold War era, and what changes have the past two decades witnessed in the relationship between sovereignty, territory and authority in African statehood? After 1989, a number of authors predicted changes to the political map of the continent, with far-reaching international changes expected to reverberate in ways the fragile borders of African states were unlikely to contain. Yet legally recognized borders remain basically fixed. Only in the cases of Sudan/South Sudan and Ethiopia/Eritrea did borders change with the consent of the states concerned. This paper tracks the transformations to the postcolonial boundary maintenance regime masked by the lack of meaningful changes to sovereign territorial jurisdictions. The end of superpower competition and the advent of donor conditionality, combined with liberal norms of conflict management and state reconstruction, have attenuated the sovereignty that once bolstered African states against internal rivals. But changes sparked by China's deepening engagement with Africa and the emphasis placed on the effective administration of territory in the War on Terror have shored up wavering sovereigns and contested borders. The cumulative effects have been twofold: first, to diminish the formal protections afforded by juridical sovereignty even as recognized boundaries remain fixed; and second, to complicate authority relations within and across borders, undoing the great levelling of the postcolonial period that sought to replace complicated authority relations within and across states with a relatively uniform system of sovereign territorial states.