Governance and Border Security in Africa

The book is analysis of conflict development in the continent in the post-colonial era underscored the general observation that territorial disputes constitute the most recurrent and intractable source of adversarial relations in intra-African relations. This is hardly surprising, as border problem in Africa is inexorably tied to the politics of its transformation from per-colonial tributary systems into territorial state under imperial tutelage. This transformation in turn entrenched a benign Hobbesian conception of international and regional systems as "threat system" in which force remains the "ultima ratio: the basis of diplomacy and of all contractual obligations beyond the boundaries of the state".The need, therefore, for effective governance through border security regimes arises from the intractable challenges of conflict management as a core objective of multilateral institutions and non-governmental agencies in global governance. Thus, governance along the Frontier has come to be "marked by density and complexity". This density and complexity in frontier relations under-score the disciplinary concern for border governance.