In European imaginings of the Islamic world, women incited intense curiosity and were often depicted by early modern writers as sexualized subjects and curious objects of male desire. However, this Orientalist fascination ignores the very curiosity of these women and their desire to glean knowledge about the world around them. While curiosity became increasingly valued in the early modern period as a means of progress, female curiosity was still often linked to the perils of excess (Neil Kenny). This essay examines this apparent contradiction by focusing on the Muslim protagonist in one of Miguel de Cervantes’s plays that takes place on the Spanish–North African borderlands. In Los baños de Argel (1615), Zahara defends her desire to inquire about the world by portraying herself as a “curious impertinent” (“curiosa impertinente”), a name that clearly recalls the tale of “El curioso impertinente” intercalated in the first part of Don Quixote (1605). Moreover, Zahara harnesses her ability to ask questions to further her goals and ambitions. Ultimately, through a close reading of the female protagonist in this play, I argue that Cervantes considers the ways in which women asserted their own curiosity and represented themselves as agents of inquiry.

Cross-border trade is an enduring feature of African borderlands. Ethiopia had a long history of informal economic relations in its frontiers. This study examined the prevalent trends of economic relations in the Ethiopia-Somaliland borderlands, with particular reference to the post-1991 period. These trends are assessed in the context of the entrenchment of state authority. The paper found that ‘informal’ trade, which is pervasive in these borderlands, is not as such informal. Indeed, the distinction between formal and informal is found to be imprecise. The conventional view holds that the presence of a large size of informal economy is a manifestation of state’s weakness. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this paper shows that state capacity is not something to be owned or possessed but rather is a result of a multifaceted negotiation of actors on the ground.

The goal of this special issue is to explore the relationships that bind trade and security in African borderlands. Examples from the Horn, North, and West Africa suggest that African countries are in the difficult situation of having to pursue their regional integration efforts without having the resources or the willingness to control their borders. In other words, the process of regional economic integration is rarely accompanied by an effective securitization of borders, despite Western efforts to establish new border regimes. Technological transfers have marginally improved the ability of African states to monitor the transnational circulation of goods and people. Imported technologies have been instrumentalized by political elites and contested by border communities when they threatened local livelihoods. This integration process differs greatly from the model developed in Europe and North America, where a balance has been found between the opening of markets and control of mobility. It is increasingly challenged by violent religious groups who argue that modern nation-states are incompatible with religious law and that their borders are irrelevant to the community of believers.

This article examines how Mozambique National Resistance (Renamo) operatives have become part of everyday life in Zimbabwe’s Honde Valley communities since the 1980s. While most studies of civil conflict and insurgency in African borderlands emphasise the predicaments of borderland communities, we examine how socio-economic and political dynamics in the Honde Valley borderlands challenge the dominant characterisations of borderlands as zones of predicament and borderlanders as mere victims of transnational socio-economic and political instability. By centring on borderlands and borderlanders, we argue that the Honde Valley borderland communities share common ethnic, linguistic, cultural, socio-economic and political networks that defy state-centric notions of national boundaries. Using the Honde Valley case study, we articulate how people’s historical ties created various opportunities for trade and self-determination for the local people, Renamo bandits and the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) forces. Drawing from interviews with Honde Valley borderlanders, archival documents and media reports, we provide a ‘bottom-up’ interpretation of the Renamo phenomenon, to contest scholarship that principally emphasises violence and suffering in African borderlands.

ABSTRACT The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is one of the most acute global conservation challenges. This paper examines what is driving young men to enter the rhino horn trade while advancing theory on environmental conflict. We show how the illicit rhino horn economy is a telling instance of environmental conflict—largely between ground-level hunters and increasingly militarized state conservation forces—that emerges from a context of radical inequality. We examine how practices ranging from labor migration and sidelining rural development to biodiversity conservation itself have profoundly transformed the Mozambican-South African borderlands from which many hunters originate, in turn generating poverty, exclusion, and vulnerability across the region. Juxtaposed against the wealth afforded by rhino hunting, this changing agrarian political economy has created an enabling environment for the rhino horn economy to take off. Illicit hunting, in other words, has become an attractive albeit risky livelihood alternative. We close by examining two questions that broaden our understanding of both environmental conflict and IWT: under what conditions might poverty lead to environmental harm and to what extent should such conflict be read as resistance that can bring about more just ends.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of borderlands in contemporary armed conflicts in North and West Africa. Borderlands are important to the legitimacy and security of states because of their association with sovereignty and the provision of order. They are also essential to efforts by non-state groups to bypass or challenge the same. However, not all borderlands are the same and the evolution of conflict is a complex and dynamic process. Building on previous work on African borderlands, this paper considers how the permeability of borderlands impacts the propensity for nearby violence and how this relationship varies over both space and time. While there is an association between violence and borderlands in aggregate, this is highly contextualized by both the characteristics of the borderland in question and the larger geopolitical context underpinning the violence.

ABSTRACT While there is a growing interest in Zimbabwean literature about diasporic experiences in the UK and the USA, scholarship on literary engagements with the Zimbabwean diaspora in South Africa remains sparse. This article analyses clandestine migration from Zimbabwe to South Africa and the formation of a precarious diaspora in the host country as represented in Sue Nyathi’s 2018 novel The Gold-Diggers. In contrast to strategies seen in South-North migration writing, those adopted by Nyathi’s migrants and diasporic subjects to negotiate everyday challenges – such as the need to pass as South African – reflect the close historical and cultural ties that structure African borderlands. Nyathi’s polyvocal text reconfigures diaspora discourse in relation to class and community, drawing attention to migrant vulnerability while illustrating strategies of resistance through identity erasure and homemaking. It carves out a space for precarious, yet not wholly disempowering, intra-African migratory and diasporic experiences often elided in diaspora studies.

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.

ABSTRACT EU externalised border control has become a bone of contention in EU–Malian relations. Based on fieldwork among Malian state officials, migrant associations and EU staff in Bamako, the article explores readmission agreements and border police collaboration. By examining the often-underestimated agency of national authorities, the article shows how EU border interventions aimed at producing control and confinement deep within the EU–African borderlands are contested and shaped by Malian state actors’ ‘borderwork’ (Rumford 2008). It argues that the contentious border politics produce ‘hidden acts’ through which moments of ‘sovereign exception’ (Agamben 1998) are produced in the ‘grey zone’ (Feldman 2019) of Europe’s externalised migration–security apparatus. Meanwhile, in the grey zone state actors’ everyday tactics of resistance are constitutive of new forms of sovereignty that is agency enabling.

ABSTRACT While jihadism appears to be on the rise in Africa, the explanations of violent extremist groups’ capacity to foment jihadi insurgencies and mobilize recruits remain poorly understood. Recent studies have challenged the assumption that the rise of jihadism in Africa is the result of poor governance in areas of limited state reach, highlighting instead the significance of the (perception of) abuses perpetrated by state authorities. Looking at collective action and its structural determinants, it is rather state action—and not the lack thereof—that best explains the capacity of mobilization of jihadi insurgencies in African borderlands. In order to test this theory in a least-likely case, the article explores the genealogy and evolution of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), mobilizing extensive qualitative evidence. Borrowing the analytical framework from civil war studies, it argues that the contentious political dynamics observed in Niger’s borderlands amount to a case of symmetric non-conventional warfare, where abuses perpetrated by state proxies trigger an escalation of homegrown terrorism. It therefore supplies a further specification of the theories investigating the complex interplay between the processes of jihadi mobilization/rebel governance and the practices of counter-terrorism in weak states.

Contemporary writing on North African borderlands invokes the idea of a general, unregulated porosity through which small-scale informal traders of food or textiles move alongside drug smugglers and terrorists. I challenge that conception, demonstrating that the vast majority of smuggling activity is in fact highly regulated through a dense network of informal institutions that determine the costs, quantity, and types of goods that can pass through certain nodes, typically segmenting licit from illicit goods.While informal, the institutions regulating this trade are largely impersonal and contain third-party enforcement, hence providing a direct empirical challenge to common characterisations of informal institutions in political science. I argue that revisiting the characteristics associated with informal institutions, and understanding them as contingent on their political environment, can provide a new starting point for studying institutions, the politics of informality, state capacity, and the regulation of illegal economies.

ABSTRACTThis article advances a subaltern geopolitics of sovereignty production at the borders of the DR Congo – the supposedly most fragile – and South Sudan – the youngest state in Africa. Moving beyond critiques of representing postcolonial statehood and sovereignty in terms of ‘lack’ and ‘failure’, we localise and ground analysis by drawing on Butler’s figure of the ‘petty sovereign’‘ to analyse the agency of border officials at the DR Congo/Rwanda and the South Sudan/Uganda border who we refer to as ‘sovereignty entrepreneurs’: officials who, tasked with managing and controlling the border, in constant face-to-face negotiations and closely linked to resource competition prescribe, set and decide on the terms and conditions of border crossing. It is argued that in the context of the DR Congo and South Sudan, where the states’ claims to territorial sovereignty face similar internal and external challenges, the border work of sovereignty entrepreneurs, characterised by the ability to tax, threaten and discipline with impunity, represents a form of sovereign power that renders the state’s capacity to act excessively visible at its borders.

ABSTRACTThe physical and social retreat of international interveners behind the walls of ‘bunkered’ aid compounds in (putatively) more remote and dangerous regions of the South has been the focus of growing critical attention in recent years. An increasingly remote and fearful culture of risk aversion and differentiation among Western states and organizations has been largely identified as the driving force behind this set of practices. This article presents a different perspective on the bunkerization phenomenon through focusing on the agency of Southern states in the process. Exploring bunkerization across eastern/central Africa—and in Ethiopia’s eastern Somali region in particular—the study emphasizes not only how African states have been key promoters of modern bunkerization, but also how bunkerization behaviour and mentalities have historically characterized how many African borderlands—and contemporary sites of international intervention—have been incorporated into the global state system.

Abstract What are the reasons for the extraordinary dynamism of many African border regions? Are there specificities to African borderlands? The article provides answers to these questions by analysing the historical development of African state borders’ social and economic relevance. It presents a typology of cross-border trade in Africa, differentiating trade across the ‘green’ border of bush paths and villages, the ‘grey’ border of roads, railways and border towns, and the ‘blue’ border of transport corridors to oceans and airports. The three groups of actors associated with these types of trade have competing visions of the ideal border regime, to which many dynamics in African cross-border politics can be traced back. The article contributes to African studies by analysing diverging political and economic developments in African countries through the lens of the border, and to border theory by distilling general features of borders and borderlands from African case studies.

The movement of people across national boundaries on the African continent, for the purposes of earning a living through gainful employment, engaging in cross-border trade or visiting their kin, is commonplace. However, the extent to which political power and authority permits this mobility is dependent on specific historical and political factors of each country. This paper traces and examines Ethiopian state presence at the Togochale border in the east of the country by examining patterns of cross-border movement – namely migration, refugee movement and cross-border trade – since the 1960s. Using archival sources and secondary sources, the paper constructs a historical narrative of strong state presence in this border area. Furthermore, the paper argues that the notable presence of the Ethiopian state at this border is a consequence of how the Ethiopian state conceptualises the notion of territorial statehood, which is shaped by the country’s history. Popular understandings suggest that local populations hold much sway in African border areas, rather than the central state, which is often confined to the capital – miles away from the border. Therefore, the presence of the Ethiopian state at the Togochale border appears to depart from the norm of limited state presence in African borderlands.

The duo-field of historical archaeology is increasingly being recognized around the world for its contributions. However, most of the existing surveys have concentrated on the coastal and hinterland locations in West Africa. Whereas, the ethnographic cum archival study of West African borderlands abounds in the literature, there is the dearth of the comparative analysis of these sources in tandem with the archaeological findings of material culture. Thus, this paper seeks to open up a new dialogue on the importance of borderlands studies in historical archaeology and vice versa. It concludes that the historical archaeology of West African borderlands promises to yield new insights into the dynamics of the region’s modern history. Keywords : African History; Borderlands Studies; Historical Archaeology; Intercultural Encounter; Modern Era; West Africa.

Abstract:More than five decades after independence, Africa still struggles with the legacies of colonial partition. On the territorial frontiers between the postcolonial inheritors of the two major colonial powers, Great Britain and France, the continuing impact of European colonialism remains most acute. On the one hand, the splitting of erstwhile homogeneous ethnic groups into British and French camps gave rise to new national identities; on the other hand, it circumvented any possibility of sovereignty via ethnic solidarity. To date, however, there has been no comprehensive assessment of the ethnic groups that were divided between English- and French-speaking states in West Africa, let alone the African continent writ large. This article joins postcolonial ethnography to the emerging field of comparative borderland studies. It argues that, although norms of state-based identity have been internalized in the Anglophone–Francophone borderlands, indigenous bases of association and behavior continue to define life along the West African frontier in ways that undermine state sovereignty. Although social scientists tend to focus on national- and sub-national-level analyses, and increasingly on the effects of globalization on institutional change, study of the African borderlands highlights the continuing importance of colonial legacies and grassroots-derived research.

Abstract Recent literature has emphasised the political and economic opportunities afforded to peoples living in African borderlands by the existence of permeable inter-state boundaries. This article examines the history of the Darfur-Chad borderland under colonial rule and finds that serious risks existed for those attempting to circumvent state authority in order to take advantage of such opportunities. State-led attempts to control these borders, though always incomplete, were often characterised by considerable violence. The limits of state power did not therefore straightforwardly translate into an accommodation with border societies. That said, this was also a border zone characterised by complex interaction and negotiation between state and local forms of regulation, and by multiple forms of sovereignty. This led to the emergence of plural and hybrid forms of authority, now repeatedly observed in studies of contemporary African borderlands, but rarely fully historicised.

Cooperation in terms of Afro-regions should largely be based on the experience of Euro-regions, but necessarily must take into account African specifics, especially through the use of a far greater degree of informal cross-border economy and trade. Borderlands as regions of cooperation constitute the realization of the idea of integration from the bottom. This will foster a process of open borders, which in turn will lead to a real acceleration of the integration processes. Moreover, on both sides of the border / boundaries it is possible to start the process of regional identity, especially among the young generation, which would be a kind of “resurrection” of existing links from the pre-colonial past.

Abstract Although borders haunt its historical and recent past as well as its contemporary political situation, Kashmir has rarely been theorized as a borderland. This article examines the perspective of borderlands as conceptualized in North American, Asian and African borderlands scholarship. It argues that the application of this perspective – in which borderlands are defined as middle grounds where imperial competition and negotiations among a variety of imperial and indigenous actors led to the production of distinct political cultures – to rethinking Kashmir’s history has the potential to liberate the region from the imperatives of national borders that misread its history, while also reinvigorating South Asian borderlands scholarship.