African Borders: Putting Paid to a Myth

Michel Foucher

Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2020, vol. 35, issue 2, 287-306

Abstract: Africa’s borders have a poor reputation. Even today, some say that they are arbitrary and absurd, porous and undermined, indefensible and undefended. Yet the principle of intangibility of borders, agreed by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1964, has held, with rare exceptions. The time has come to put paid to the enduring myth that the scars of colonialism are responsible for all of Africa’s troubles. This assertion about the disadvantageous consequences of Africa’s borders is just one of a number of received ideas, others being the absence of any pre-colonial political boundaries, and the lack of consideration shown by Europeans to pre-existing geopolitical realities. Certainly, there is often too little demarcation, though much progress has been made, but Africa’s borders act as creative interfaces, which are exploited by the trading networks that drive globalization from the bottom up. The borders of Africa have become Africa’s borders, agreed as such and strengthened by a process of border reaffirmation supported by the African Union. The origin of the continent’s internal tensions lies elsewhere, the key issue being appropriation and control of the periphery and the external frontiers.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/08865655.2019.1671213 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rjbsxx:v:35:y:2020:i:2:p:287-306

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rjbs20

DOI: 10.1080/08865655.2019.1671213

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Borderlands Studies is currently edited by Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, Henk van Houtum and Martin van der Velde

More articles in Journal of Borderlands Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().