Introduction : border, frontier and the geography of rule at the margins of the state / Benedikt Korf and Timothy Raeymaekers -- Geographies of violence and sovereignty : the African frontier revisited / Tobias Hagmann, Martin Doevenspeck and Benedikt Korf -- Centering borders and borderlands : the evidence from Africa / Markus Virgil Hoehne and Dereje Feyissa -- Treading a fine line : state making and conflict within eastern Burma / Sylvia Brown -- Navigating the urban "in-between space" : local livelihood and identity strategies in exploiting the Goma/Gisenyi border / Karen Buscher & Gillian Mathys -- Dangerous divisions : peace building in the borderlands of post-Soviet Central Asia / Christine Bichsel -- State making and the suspension of law in India's northeast : the place of exception in the Assam-Nagaland border dispute / Bert Suykens -- Get it while you can : building business and bureaucracy between wars in the Uganda-Sudan borderland / Wolfgang Zeller -- When civil wars hibernate in borderlands : the challenges of the Casamance "forgotten civil war" to cross-border peace and security / Aboubakr Tandia
Summary
This boldly multidisciplinary volume surveys African and Asian conflicts through individuals' lived experiences of territorial borders, as well as the ways these experiences affect political configurations. The contributions gathered here depict borderlands not just as the objects of globalized or state-driven processes, but as actual political units that generate their own actions and outcomes. In particular, these studies demonstrate the explicit transboundary character of conflict and peace. In this way, they explore alternatives to the still-dominant model of contemporary state formation as a centrally guided, top-down process - a model that has led to a deep misunderstanding of borderlands as marginal spaces that either are fraught with savagery and rebellion or linger in dark oblivion
