Violence on the margins: states, conflict, and borderlands

Abstract

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.