Martin Doevenspeck

Geographies of Violence and Sovereignty: The African Frontier Revisited

In his classic The African Frontier,1 Igor Kopytoff provided a powerful explanation of the processes of pacification and inculturation of precolonial African peripheries. For Kopytoff, the frontier was “an area over which political control by the regional metropoles is absent or uncertain”.2 Kopytoff’s understanding of frontier is essentially one of a politically constructed space: “The frontier is above all a political fact, a matter of political definition of geographical space”.3 His work is primarily motivated by this distinctive understanding of peripheral African spaces and places. In this chapter, we draw attention to the analytics that can be garnered from Kopytoff’s work on the frontier, which allows understanding contemporary political dynamics in some parts of the African continent. We are primarily interested in a discussion of the logic or rationale of governing that shapes present-day African frontiers. In other words, we propose using Kopytoff’s heuristics of the African frontier, but apply them in empirical contexts different to those where Kopytoff did in his original work: postcolonial, not precolonial, Africa is our empirical site. In order to achieve this, we first develop a typology of the political frontier and illustrate it with two case studies from eastern Ethiopia and northern Benin.

Navigating uncertainty: Observations from the Congo-Rwanda border

This article concentrates on how people make use of the state boundary between the cities of Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Gisenyi, Rwanda to cope with specific uncertainties on either side, how these borderlanders, by doing so, expose themselves to new uncertainties and how they at the same time subvert and perpetuate the border through their activities. This tension-filled state boundary separates two countries that, after fifteen years of war, proxy warfare and mutual allegations of supporting militias and rebel groups, have only very recently started hesitant efforts towards a political rapprochement. Despite the long-lasting ethnic and identity conflicts in this region and remaining tensions (for overviews see Mamdani 2001; Lemarchand 2009; Prunier 2009) this border, situated between the Congo Basin and the densely populated highlands of Uganda and Rwanda, has always kept its function as a transit point for long-distance trade connecting the east and the west of Central Africa (see Tegera/Johnson 2007).

Climate and Mobility in the West African Sahel: Conceptualising the Local Dimensions of the Environment and Migration Nexus

Despite the theoretical and methodological critique of deterministic and linear explanations of migration under changing climatic conditions, many empirical case studies in this field remain deeply entrenched in static push-pull frameworks and tend to reproduce simplistic causal relationships. Drawing on results from an interdisciplinary research project in Mali and Senegal, the chapter presents a methodological approach that emanates from past analytical shortcomings. By adopting a local perspective on migration, we consider cultural norms, the migration history and people’s interpretations of weather and environmental changes. Moreover, we argue for a multilevel, multi-method research that seeks to separate the two research topics of migration and climate/environment; for example, by avoiding explicit questions about possible linkages. Contrasting results from ethnographic fieldwork concerning migration, climate and environment with ‘hard’ data on climate and vegetation allows us to become more susceptible for the social construction of alleged ‘facts’ such as droughts and land degradation as drivers for migration. We place a focus upon local meanings of weather and environment by considering how they are being assessed by the people, within a context of not only climatic but rather multiple changes.

‘Sovereignty Entrepreneurs’ and the Production of State Power in Two Central African Borderlands

ABSTRACT This 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.

Population Projections for Benin

Part I Fundamentals and process understanding, 1. Introduction, 2. Impacts of Global Change, 3. Regional Geography of West and Northwest Africa: An Introduction, 4. Measurement Concepts, 5. Atmosphere, 6. Continental Hydrosphere, 7. Biosphere, 8. Anthrosphere, 9. Summary Part II Future Projections and Decision support, 1. Introduction: The IMPETUS method, 2. The IMPETUS Spatial Decision Support Systems, 3. Scenarios, 4. Impacts of Global Change in Benin, 5. Impacts of Global Change in Southern Morocco, 6. Summary and Conclusions

Migration, property rights and local water resources management in Benin

Part I Fundamentals and process understanding, 1. Introduction, 2. Impacts of Global Change, 3. Regional Geography of West and Northwest Africa: An Introduction, 4. Measurement Concepts, 5. Atmosphere, 6. Continental Hydrosphere, 7. Biosphere, 8. Anthrosphere, 9. Summary Part II Future Projections and Decision support, 1. Introduction: The IMPETUS method, 2. The IMPETUS Spatial Decision Support Systems, 3. Scenarios, 4. Impacts of Global Change in Benin, 5. Impacts of Global Change in Southern Morocco, 6. Summary and Conclusions