Webinar: Pandemics, Posturing and Cold Feet: Re-bordering Africa

A link to the Zoom event will be posted on May 13, here on Facebook and on our Twitter handle.

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced a range of responses across the world, typically involving some mix between lockdowns and border closures.

In Africa, some of the response has been informed by responses to earlier Ebola outbreaks in which selective border closures and more rigorous health checks at airports and land crossings played their part.

This time around, governments have been very quick to slam the borders shut on the basis that the virus is most likely to be introduced by those who are internationally mobile. Much as police in urban areas have been ‘empowered’ to enforce lockdowns, Customs, Immigration and security agencies have found a renewed lease of life in border areas.

This paper addresses two questions: the first is whether closing borders is really a considered response and essentially the only available option; and the second is who actually benefits from border closures.

I will argue that in many cases, it was about being seen to do something. Moreover, it is important to note that border closures preceded COVID-19 in East and West Africa alike. Within each of the Regional Economic Communities (RECs), regional integration was already in retreat despite – and arguably even because of – large-scale investments in transport infrastructure. The long-term fallout from the pandemic may herald a return to economic nationalism and more rigid border controls in Africa – much as it is likely to entail a return of elements of statism in Europe.

Paul Nugent is Professor of Comparative African History at the University of Edinburgh.

He is a former president of the European Association for African Studies, AEGIS, and is the founder/chair of the “African Borderlands Research Network” (ABORNE). He is currently the holder of an ERC Advanced Grant for a multi-regional project entitled “African Governance and Space: Transport Corridors, Border Towns and Port Cities in Transition (AFRIGOS)”.

In 2019 he published his most recent monograph under the title of Boundaries, Communities, and State-making in West Africa: The Centrality of the Margins (Cambridge University Press) and is completing the third edition of Africa Since Independence (Palgrave Macmillan).