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Geographies of unease: Witchcraft and boundary construction in an African borderland

Leonardi, Cherry; Storer, Elizabeth; Fisher, Jonathan

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Authors

Elizabeth Storer

Jonathan Fisher



Abstract

African borderlands – such as those between South Sudan, Uganda and Congo – are often presented by analysts as places of agency and economic opportunity, in contrast to hardened, securitized borders elsewhere. We emphasize, however, that even such relatively porous international borders can nevertheless be the focus of significant unease for borderland communities. Crossing borders can enable safety for those fleeing conflict or trading prospects for businesspeople, but it can also engender anxieties around the unchecked spread of insecurity, disease and economic exploitation. Understanding this ambiguous construction of borders in the minds of their inhabitants requires us, we argue, to look beyond statist or globalizing discourses and to appreciate the moral economies of borderlands, and how they have been discursively and epistemologically negotiated over time. Narratives around witchcraft and the occult represent, we argue, a novel and revealing lens through which to do so and our study draws on years of fieldwork and archival research to underline how cartographies of witchcraft in this region are, and have long been, entangled with the construction of state political geographies, internal as well as international.

Citation

Leonardi, C., Storer, E., & Fisher, J. (2021). Geographies of unease: Witchcraft and boundary construction in an African borderland. Political Geography, 90, Article 102442. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102442

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jun 7, 2021
Online Publication Date Jul 13, 2021
Publication Date 2021-10
Deposit Date Jul 21, 2021
Publicly Available Date Jul 21, 2021
Journal Political Geography
Print ISSN 0962-6298
Electronic ISSN 1873-5096
Publisher Elsevier
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 90
Article Number 102442
DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102442
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1245330

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