Borders in Africa have generally been conceived as barriers, but they also provide what Nugent and Asiwaju (1996) call “conduits and opportunities”. The academic discourse on state borders in the continent is largely focused on the constraints side. The main topics of the literature on African borders and borderlands are conflicts over borders, marginalization of the people living along the borders, informal cross-border economies such as smuggling and the disregard of the local population for the “artificial” and often ill-administered borders. 1 A second body of (not necessarily Africa-related) literature perceives borders as limiting economic and other exchanges, or, to the contrary, argues that borders are frequently irrelevant when looking at transnational and global processes of exchange and identity formation. 2 Studies of transnationalism and globalization emphasize the diminishing importance of territoriality and, consequently, posit the detachment of culture, politics and economy from any fixed borders. 3 Borders and borderlands feature, if at all, as zones of displacement and deterritorialization. 4 Achille Mbembe 5 drew attention to recent dynamics in contemporary Africa related to conflicts within and between states and/or the exploitation of natural resources such as oil and diamonds through external actors, which transcend the focus on the state as clear-cut unit, defined by its borders. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.