By Katrin Sowa (University of Cologne).
This book analyses historic and contemporary border regime developments in East Africa, and draws a complex picture of borders control in Africa beyond stereotypical “Western” imaginations. Based on ethnographic research, it describes the everyday realities of Kenyan border officers dealing with colonial border legacies on the ground, and analyses actual enforcement practices. Moreover, the book examines the implementation process of One Stop Border Post (OSBP), which is currently taking place all over the African continent. OSBPs stand in between regional, pan-African as well as neo-colonial, capitalist interests, and will shape cross-border trade, migration, security and transnational relations in the future. The book offers a critical analysis of this implementation process with reference to local voices from different borderlands of Kenya with Ethiopia, Tanzania, South Sudan and Uganda. The case studies thereby exemplify the ambivalent reality of borders worldwide, which simultaneously open and close at the same time, whereby reproducing inequalities.
Reference
Sowa, K. 2025. Enforcing the Line. An Ethnography of the Kenyan Border Regime. Palgrave Macmillan. Link
