Africa: Why African Borderlands Keep Burning

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.

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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 violence

Elsewhere on the continent, borderlands are associated with two other conflict trajectories. Both are entrenched and highly resistant to resolution, as in the borderlands of Lake Chad, eastern Congo, and the Horn, where conflicts follow exceptionally durable cycles of violence. Once a conflict emerges in a region, it lasts on average nearly six years (Figure 2).

The borderlands of the Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa are also home to the rarest conflict trajectory, defined by overwhelming persistence of intense and clustered violence. The cycles of violence last more than eight years on average, the longest observed on the continent. These ‘balanced’ conflicts typically occur where belligerents are evenly matched, producing prolonged confrontations between government forces, militias, and violent extremist groups.

Figure 2. Borderlands are associated with long cycles of violence

Once a border region enters a state of conflict, de-escalation becomes structurally unlikely. The persistence of violence in some peripheries of the state is not just the result of an opportunistic move by armed groups. It means that borderlands are a spatial form of strategic infrastructure for armed groups and the networks that sustain them. Far from being used solely as a rear base, African borderlands emerge as key linking spaces, where enduring conflict types extend across national boundaries and overlap with unstable shorter-term patterns.

What borderland dynamics mean for policy

The persistence of violence in African borderlands carries direct implications for Western countries. Recent posture changes in places like Niger and Chad were meant to encourage greater local ownership of security. That objective is valid.

But ownership will remain fragile if policy stays nationally bounded while conflict systems remain regionally networked. Our findings suggest that when borderland connectivity is left intact, pressure in one country often shifts violence into neighbouring zones instead of reducing it overall.

Security assistance should be designed around border systems, not national silos. The current model still organises training, equipment, and advisory support country by country. That is appropriate for conventional defence tasks, but it underperforms against conflict systems that operate across frontiers.

Military assistance should prioritise cross-border intelligence sharing, interoperable operational planning, and coordinated deployment windows among neighbouring states. In the Sahel, this would mean synchronised pressure across the Burkina Faso-Mali-Niger tri-border area, rather than a series of bilateral programs that armed groups can evade through movement.

Stabilisation planning should treat border governance as core security policy. Programs still concentrate resources in capitals and major urban centres while many border districts receive limited services, infrastructure, and administrative presence. That pattern allows armed groups to retain sanctuary and logistics even after tactical setbacks. If borderlands function as strategic infrastructure for conflict, then governance, cross-border development corridors, and coordinated civilian protection in these regions must be primary investments, not residual line items.

Western countries cannot stabilise African conflicts alone, nor should they try. But security assistance, diplomatic engagement, and development programs either reinforce or undermine regional stability depending on whether they account for how borderlands actually function in African conflict systems. The current approach, which is designed for nationally bounded threats, systematically fails against violence that operates as borderland networks.