BIG_Review 5.2

The new issue of Borders in Globalization Review is published! You’ll find cutting-edge research in border studies, extensive policy analyses, border artwork, film reviews, and book reviews. We hope you enjoy it!

Leading the issue are two innovative research articles. First, Berfin Nur Osso integrates critical analysis of European Union migration policy with artistic expressions of refugees and other migrants on the move, featuring their narratives and their paintings. Then, for our French readers, Abdoulaye Ngom presents a case study of a Senegalese family arranging for one of their sons to undertake a precarious journey to Europe, chronicling the complexity of the dilemmas and trajectories they face.

Our readership has expanded to include policy makers in various border management organizations, customs and immigration, and border regions world-wide. So in this issue’s policy section, you’ll find policy papers from South Africa, Italy, Zimbabwe, Moldova, and Australia that reflect this newly expanded scope. We are grateful for the important contributions of Jean Luc Erero, Paola Malaspina, Rwatida Mafurutu, Mihail Secu, and Jamie Ferrill and Allanah O’Hanlon. If you are reading BIG_Review and work in a border organization, your policy research is of interest to us. Do contact us—this indeed is a call for papers! This opportunity has been made possible thanks to the support of the World Customs Organization and Korea Customs.

The new issue is also rich with artwork engaging with the contradictions of borders. In the Chief Editor’s Choice Portfolio, featured on the cover, artist Laurent Reynès shares an innovative sculpture of border lines, conceptualizing the connections and hardships they engender. The work is the product of civil society collaboration with students from the University of Strasbourg, at the Center of Excellence’s 2023 Castle-talks on Narratives on Borders in Europe. In our poetry section, readers will find six poems grappling with borders, four poems by European poet Loris Ferri and two by Canadian Chad Norman. We then present a bold project of activism and artwork, the Navire Avenir, or, the Vessel of the Future, a campaign to conceptualize and actualize an appropriate life-saving response to the crisis of migrants lost at sea, brought to you by the Collectif du Navire Avenir.

Once again, our issue closes with two film and two book reviews. Sinem Arslan and Murat Çemrek recap recent cinema that dramatizes life struggles against closed borders in Turkey and Palestine respectively. Finally, Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly and Victor Konrad review recent academic publications in border studies.

Print editions are now available for purchase, and electronic copies are available for free online in Creative Commons open-access licensing. We hope you not only enjoy BIG_Review but share it as well!

A Spatial Theory of Civil Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa

Lance Hadley | BIG Research Reports | #57

The state as a territorially homogenous container for sovereign power is typically utilized as a conceptual frame of analysis in intrastate conflict. However, observations of the territorial distribution of conflict in post-colonial weak states suggest geographic clustering in borderland territories. Especially in the Sub-Saharan African context, borders, despite the permeability and the arbitrariness appear to be a strategic territorial resource for alternative agents of sovereignty. While recent quantitative exploratory scholarship has suggested the significance of peripheral borderlands to intrastate war, little discussion has attempted to develop a formal theoretical framework (Buhaug 2010; Buhaug and Rød 2006; Buhaug and Lujala 2005) Combining a decade of empirical conflict observations from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) with an adaptation of Kenneth Boulding’s Loss of Strength Gradient (Boulding 1962), this paper attempts to develop a qualitative framework of state power that accounts for the spatial distribution of civil conflicts within states; or, why state power is often challenged in Africa’s borderlands. Select case comparisons are employed to explore this framework and suggest that borderlands in weak states are often spatially located where alternative sites of power can opportunistically challenge state sovereignty. Exploring the strategic importance of borderland areas, this paper seeks to elevate the discursively marginalized territory of state peripheries to the priority of developing states and the international development and security community.

Lance Hadley

Determinants of Civil Conflict in Africa: Borders as Political Resources

Lance Hadley | BIG Research Reports | #58

Contemporary spatial research on civil conflict in Africa has largely focused on borders and the state periphery as spaces of limited political and economic opportunity. These studies largely adopt approaches that present borderland citizens as operating in structurally desolate spaces of poor governance, economic opportunity and political inclusion. While spatial analyses are permitting unprecedented focus on borderland structures, causal mechanisms that explain how the geographic opportunities present from nearby international borders inform strategies of rebellion remain undeveloped. To explore this, this paper repositions the socio-economic processes in the borderlands as the central unit of analysis. In particular, this paper conceptualizes international borders as a political resource that is exploited by borderland groups to access unregulated ‘in’ and ‘out-flows’ of strategic capacity. This access to alternative strategic capacities is hypothesized to provide the opportunity for border citizens to challenge structural grievances and attempt alternative (if unlawful) governance structures within the borderlands. Lastly, this paper concludes with a spatial theory of conflict specific to Africa’s borderlands whereby relative distances from the state capital, in combination with weak state capacity, creates sites of competing power structures and ultimately violent civil conflict.

Lance Hadley

The Puzzle of Nonviolence in Western Sahara

Matthew Porges and Christian Leuprecht | BIG Research Reports | #78

Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony that has been controlled by Morocco since 1975, has seen virtually no violent resistance by the indigenous Sahrawi people since the conclusion of a 1975–1991 war between Morocco and the pro-independence Polisario Front. That lack of political violence is puzzling in light of several factors, including broad support for independence, social and economic disparities between Moroccan and Sahrawi inhabitants and Morocco’s repression of Sahrawi culture, resistance, and expressions of pro-independence sentiment. This article examines the absence of violence and draws lessons from Western Sahara: why some populations resort to violent resistance and others do not, and how best to frame and to study politically charged subjects such as insurgency, terrorism, and sovereignty. In addition to advancing theories of nonviolence, this article makes a methodological contribution to the study of resistance movements and improves our understanding of the conflict through fieldwork that included approximately 60 interviews with Sahrawi activists conducted in Morocco and Western Sahara. Western Sahara is difficult to study for a number of reasons, including its remoteness, relative international obscurity, and Moroccan suppression of dissenting research.

Matthew Porges and Christian Leuprecht