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

Senior Resident Fellow – University of Victoria
Sophia Carodenuto
Sophia Carodenuto is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Victoria (UVic), Canada, where she leads the Environmental Governance Group (envirogov.org). She holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences and an MSc in Environmental Governance from the University of Freiburg, Germany. Before joining UVic, she was a Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and a Visiting Scholar at Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
From 2012 to 2016, Sophia was based in Cameroon, where she established and managed a regional hub for Central and West Africa with UNIQUE land use, focusing on sustainable land management solutions. Her research integrates science and policy to address sustainability challenges in global food systems, with particular emphasis on land use, climate change, and tropical forest-risk commodities.
Sophia’s work actively bridges academia and practice, collaborating closely with policymakers, businesses, and civil society to advance environmental and social sustainability. A current research focus examines the role of commodity traders in promoting sustainability in agricultural supply chains. Her scholarship is widely recognized, including recent contributions to Nature Sustainability.
Sophia is passionate about amplifying the voices of marginalized actors, particularly smallholder farmers, in global food systems. She frequently engages in public outreach through lectures, media interviews, and articles, including features like The Atlantic’s “Chocolate Might Never Be the Same.”

BIG Lab Research
Examining financial responsibility across borders
Regional integration unfolds through a series of cross-border dynamics. At the highest level of integration lies what we term fiscal solidarity, where an asymmetry in financial responsibility is assumed by the countries on either side of the border. Achieving fiscal solidarity requires a progression through three stages of interaction: coordination, cooperation, and ultimately collaboration.
The goal of this research was to examine cross-border infrastructure projects in Latin America and Africa to identify instances of fiscal solidarity and evaluate the overall level of integration of each continent. Our methodology involved identifying terrestrial dyads and determining the types of cross-border infrastructure present. We collected data on the location, costs, financing mechanisms, and the legal and fiscal agreements associated with each case. The way these projects are financed and the agreements governing them provide insight into the nature of interactions between neighbouring countries.
On December 2–3, 2024, BIG Lab research on fiscal solidarity was presented by Onome Akhigbe and Anna Perez Verdia-Bayne at the 2024 MOT Borders Forum, an international conference/workshop series held at the Cité Internationale Universitaire in Paris, France. Learn more about the Borders Forum here.
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!

Graduate Research Assistant
Matt Britton
Borders in Globalization | 21st Century Borders
Matt Britton is Graduate Research Assistant for the Borders in Globalization program and a student in the Master of Public Administration program at the University of Victoria. Originally from the United States, he has lived in eight different countries over the past two decades.
After graduating from the University of Tulsa with a BFA in graphic design and printmaking, Matt worked as a Health Education Volunteer with the U.S. Peace Corps in Mauritania, West Africa, and then joined the U.S. Foreign Service and served as a diplomat in Papua New Guinea, El Salvador, and Burundi. As a stay-at-home father in Brazil, he also volunteered with the Rio 2016 Olympics.
Prior to commencing the MPA program, Matt managed a nonprofit organization called WorldDenver for six years, overseeing international exchange and education programs. He has taught classes at the Akilah Institute for Women in Bujumbura, Burundi, and the University of Denver in Colorado, USA.

CFGS Global Talk — Whatever happened to our borderless world? An anarchist rethinking of the ‘open borders’ debate
with Dr. Nick Megoran (Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Global Studies and Borders in Globalization, University of Victoria) | Victoria, BC & Zoom | November 8, 2023
In Person: CFGS C168 (Sedgewick building, University of Victoria) or Zoom. The meeting will take place from 10:30am to 12pm PST. Register in advance for this meeting here. Registration is free but required.
In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, some writers declared that humanity was on the verge of a ‘borderless world.’ Yet three decades later, the world is more fenced and bordered than ever. In response, many scholars and activists have restated the moral and political case for ‘Open Borders.’ How persuasive are these arguments, and do they help us think through what better borderlands might look like? This talk will draw on anarchist traditions in political theology, as well as the author’s own research in various borderlands, to open a broader discussion of borders in the world today.
Dr. Nick Megoran is a Professor of Political Geography at Newcastle University, England. His research considers what it means to value human life in sites as diverse as international borderlands and the neoliberal workplace. He has studied the Uzbek-Kyrgyz and Danish-German borderlands for nearly three decades, and is interested in how critical geopolitical theory and African-American political theology can help us think through how borders can become places in which human life thrives. His publications include Nationalism in Central Asia: A Biography of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Boundary (Pittsburgh, 2017) and Big Questions in An Age of Global Crises (Wipf & Stock, 2022).

#22 BIG Podcast – “Nepal-India Border, Minorities and Cross-Border Networks”
featuring Kalpana Jha, Analyst and Researcher at the University of Victoria, BIG Graduate Student Fellow (PhD)
Country of 27 million inhabitants, in the Himalayan mountain range, Nepal shares a border with India for 1,690 km and with China for nearly 1,200 km. The majority of the inhabitants live in the south of the country (along the Indo-Nepalese border) and in the Kathmandu valley. Nepal became a republic in 2008 and the country adopted a new Constitution in 2015 which provides for a federal-type state, organized around 7 provinces which have their own assembly and executive power. This episode focuses on the State of Nepal, internal bordering processes, the marginalized people at its borders, notably the Madhesi People, and also relations with India and China.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube!
Kalpana Jha is a BIG Graduate Student Fellow and the author of “The Madhesi Upsurge and the Contested Idea of Nepal”. She is currently a board member on the Nepal Policy Institute (NPI) – an international policy think tank. Jha is an alumni as well as former research fellow from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, India. She also holds a Master’s degree in Social Work from TISS-Mumbai and a Master’s in Socio-legal studies from York University, Canada. Jha has worked extensively on identity issues, citizenship in Madhes and minorities and their status in Nepal and India. Jha has multiple publications including journal articles, book chapters, reports, newspaper articles and commentaries in the field of identity, citizenship, gender and borders. She has also worked in the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi, India as a Regional and internal security intern. Jha was a former researcher at Martin Chautari and worked on a comparative study on Borderlands, Brokers and Peacebuilding in Nepal and Sri Lanka, commissioned by School of Oriental and African Studies, London, to Martin Chautari, in Nepal. She has also worked formerly in research foundations such as Social Science Baha in Nepal and Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi, India.

Graduate Student Fellow (PhD)
Kalpana Jha
Borders in Globalization | Jean Monnet Network
Kalpana Jha is a BIG Graduate Student Fellow and the author of “The Madhesi Upsurge and the Contested Idea of Nepal”. She is currently a board member on the Nepal Policy Institute (NPI) – an international policy think tank. Jha is an alumni as well as former research fellow from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, India. She also holds a Master’s degree in Social Work from TISS-Mumbai and a Master’s in Socio-legal studies from York University, Canada. Jha has worked extensively on identity issues, citizenship in Madhes and minorities and their status in Nepal and India. Jha has multiple publications including journal articles, book chapters, reports, newspaper articles and commentaries in the field of identity, citizenship, gender and borders. She has also worked in the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi, India as a Regional and internal security intern. Jha was a former researcher at Martin Chautari and worked on a comparative study on Borderlands, Brokers and Peacebuilding in Nepal and Sri Lanka, commissioned by School of Oriental and African Studies, London, to Martin Chautari, in Nepal. She has also worked formerly in research foundations such as Social Science Baha in Nepal and Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi, India.
Jha’s PhD thesis will be focused on studying Borders and bordering processes between Nepal and India. The study will explore the local cross-border networks that exists at individual and institutional level. Primarily this research will be engaging with the narratives around the changing nature of border and how local networks shape everyday bordering processes. Jha’s research seeks to trace what kind of networks exists but also how do these networks function in determining the nature of the openness of the border. Her research, embedded in the critical border studies that sees the border beyond a geographical line that divides territories but acts as a space of interaction, a bridge that brings together geographies, people and cultures.

#16 BIG Podcast – “Popular Protest, the Middle East and Borders”
featuring Michael J. Carpenter – Political Scientist at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada, and Managing Editor of BIG Review
The Middle East is the name of a complex geographical region comprising different countries and cultures between Europe, Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and Asia. It is also a space where many conflicts have existed and continue to exist today, in particular the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These disputes linked to a complex historical, religious and political situation should not obscure the presence of populations who struggle at their level and with their means against the domination that oppresses them. One thinks of the situation in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip and the difficult conditions of the inhabitants. We will discuss this territorial, border, human complexity with political scientist Michael J. Carpenter. He has written a book titled “Palestinian Popular Struggle: Unarmed and Participatory” (Routledge 2019).
Michael J. Carpenter is a Post-Doctoral Fellow working on a project titled, “Beyond ‘Irregular Migration’: Civil Disobedience without Borders”. In addition to his fellowship, Michael also serves as a founding member and current Managing Editor of the Borders in Globalization Review. He has a PhD in Political Science from the University of Victoria (2017) and a Master of Arts in Social and Political Thought from the University of Regina (2009). His research interests include borders, Middle East politics, global politics, civil resistance, non-state governance, and the history of social and political thought. He recently completed two publications based on his doctoral research, a monograph titled Palestinian Popular Struggle: Unarmed and Participatory, and a chapter called “Peace Process without the People: Sidelining Popular Struggle in Palestine” for an edited volume called the History of World Peace Since 1750 (both Routledge, forthcoming).
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and the Podcast App!
