African Boundaries. A Legal and Diplomatic Encyclopaedia

African Borders as Sources of Natural Experiments Promise and Pitfalls

“…However, where they follow geographical features such as rivers and watersheds, or where the negotiations that led to their drawing explicitly took account of historical or demographic factors, it is possible that pre-partition settlement patterns caused the populations lying on either side to differ in material ways. For example, the high-density border between Benin and Nigeria exploited in Asiwaju's (1976) study of traditional customs was intentionally drawn according to local ethnic settlement patterns (see Brownlie 1979;Green 2012). That between Nigeria and Niger, exploited in Miles' several studies, was drawn to correspond to the northern edge of Usman dan Fodio's jihad conquest (Englebert, Tarango and Carter 2002).…”

Borders in a ‘borderless’ world

“…General concepts, for example, about the stages of evolution of international boundaries was only possible because for a long time the nuts and bolts of almost all the world's international boundaries have been described in terms of treaties and the existing political aims of competing countries. Such information was found in collections and descriptions by writers such as Hertslet (1875-91), Ireland (1938) and Brownlie (1971). Alas there are not yer any equivalent continental or even sub-continental texts regarding border landscapes.…”

Sovereignty, territory and authority: boundary maintenance in contemporary Africa

“…The arbitrary nature of African borders is much remarked upon (Touval 1969;Brownlie and Burns 1979;Davidson 1992;Nugent and Asiwaju 1996;cf. Clapham 1996).…”