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About Us – 2026
African ArgumentsBurkina FasoCongo-KinshasaDebating IdeasMaliNigerPolitics<br>Home›African Arguments›Why African Borderlands Keep Burning
Why African Borderlands Keep Burning
By Olivier Walther and Steven Radil<br>April 15, 2026<br>285
Dr Olivier Walther and Dr Steven Radil share findings from their ongoing research on African borderlands including a forthcoming article in Applied Geography.
Africa’s margins have become its main theatre of violence. From the Great Lakes region to the Sahel, armed groups exploit borderlands as safe havens and logistics hubs.
The conventional explanation is simple: these remote areas let militants escape government forces, exploit civilian populations, and recruit fighters beyond the reach of state authority. That function is real, but it misses the more fundamental dynamic at work.
Borderlands are more than conflict spillover zones. They are strategic infrastructure, acting as connective tissue sustaining conflict systems that span countries and resist resolution for years. From this perspective, borderlands have never been more central than they are today, changing what works and what fails in conflict response.
Interventions that ignore borderland connectivity don’t resolve conflicts, they redistribute them. Understanding how borderlands sustain violence over time should reshape how Western countries approach stabilisation, security assistance, and early warning across the continent.
Borderlands as safe havens and logistics hubs
Borderlands have played a major role in conflicts in Africa since the end of the Cold War. Due to the weak capacity of states to control their territory, these regions have often served as safe havens and logistics hubs for rebel groups seeking to overthrow the central government. In the Great Lakes, Hutu genocidaires used refugee camps in eastern Congo to launch attacks back into Rwanda, setting in motion the First Congo War.
More recently, the violent extremists who wish to implement religious law in West Africa have used the vast borderlands of the Central Sahel and Lake Chad to expand regionally. As we noted in African Border Disorders, the legendary porosity of the continent borders has greatly encouraged the development of these violent transnational activities.
According to the most widely held opinion, borderlands are therefore a refuge from which armed groups can capture the state. This view tends to reduce the importance of borderlands to their physical dimension: it is because border regions are far from the centre of power and difficult for government forces to access that they serve as a haven and a hub for insurgents, it is argued.
Although this function undoubtedly exists, our most recent work highlights another equally fundamental dimension of border regions. Far from being limited to serving as a refuge or transit zone for armed groups, borderlands provide the resources necessary for the development of unique trajectories of violence that can spread across countries over long periods of time.
Borderlands as long-term conduits of violence
Tracking political violence across 6540 regions in Africa from 1997 to 2024 reveals that violence does not just start and stop. It evolves through recognisable stages and spreads from region to region following six predictable patterns, with borderlands hosting the most persistent types
As indicated in Figure 1, violence experienced in borderlands is usually very intense and clustered. This means that the same locations are targeted again and again, as on the borders of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger since the mid-2010s. The typical time for such regions to decay from a violent state into a no-conflict state is just below four years, suggesting that once violence emerges, it remains a recurrent feature for a while.
Figure 1. Borderlands are associated with repeated cycles of...