Borderlands in West Africa are ungoverned: why this is bad for security

By Ernest Toochi Aniche, Lecturer ,Political Science, Federal University,Utouke
Chris Changwe Nshimbi, Director & Research Fellow, University of Pretoria
Inocent Moyo, Senior Lecturer and Head of Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Zululand

In many parts of the African continent borders are porous. People cross them to visit their kin and for economic reasons such as herding, farming, fishing, hunting and trading. They are also spaces in which human smuggling, human trafficking, gun-running, terrorism and money laundering take place.

In our paper we set out to understand whether this state of affairs contributed to worsening insecurity. Our focus was on West Africa, where there are a host of ungoverned border spaces and where…

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