Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the implications of using growth corridors as a new tool for enhancing sub-regional integration and development across Africa. It probes the results in terms of inducing economic growth and the risks associated with using such devices depending on different development scenarios

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, Africa has been receiving substantial amounts of development funds focused mainly on economic development, poverty reduction and developing gateway infrastructures such as ports, airports, airport cities, highways and railway projects. Specifically, a new development trend is emerging under the form of developing sub-regional corridors stretching across several countries and aiming to link landlocked countries, cities, large agricultural areas or mining fields with major coastal hubs and gateway infrastructures in an effort to enhance sub-regional integration at both the economic and infrastructure levels. This is the case of West Africa, where a study on a growth ring master plan connecting Burkina Faso to the port cities of San Pedro, Abidjan, Accra and Lomé is underway. Similarly, five other corridors are being developed across the continent with relatively similar goals and objectives.

This paper will focus mainly on depicting the different aspects and extents of such corridor projects, trying to understand their mechanisms, processes and objectives and most importantly their impacts in terms of inducing polarization and concentration in the coastal areas. The assumption is that different development scenarios can bring different results, and that in the context of growth corridors there is an inherent risk of increasing existing inequalities on the short and medium terms especially that this type of development projects is spatially blind and focuses on quick wins that can only be generated and achieved in the already leading gateway cities leaving few opportunities for the lagging behind regions.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines an otherwise arcane category of trade law -- non-tariff barriers to trade -- to examine the techniques of governing space, value, and subjects that are enrolled in efforts at regional integration in East Africa.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, East African governments have pursued an energetic array of initiatives to integrate their economies by building new infrastructure, reforming border controls, and harmonizing legal regimes. If the East African Community exists within a longer genealogy of supranational connectivity, exchange, and affiliation, this history does little to generate the regional loyalties or trade sought by governments and aid organizations. Instead, East African technocrats are compelled to deploy an array of arcane techniques to enact the region. This paper examines the technopolitics of one such means of governing across borders, namely "non-tariff barriers" to trade (NTBs). While formally defined as regulatory impediments to trade, in practice, NTBs are an enormously expansive category. In World Bank or WTO publications, hundreds of administrative rules are aggregated, commensurated, and compared across borders—a type of international audit which is today a central form of global government. Yet in my conversations with officials, everything from bribery to "business ethnocentricism" have been labelled as non-tariff barriers to trade. In fact, it is this very expansiveness, I suggest — and the way in which it incorporates seemingly non-economic behaviors, customs, and ideas — that give NTBs, and the project of trade liberalization more broadly, their political potency. Following the surprising vivacity of this obscure metric — and the way it seeks to remake space, value, and subjects — sheds light on the contradictions, ambiguities, and inequalities of the new economic geographies of East Africa.

Paper short abstract:

Border points between Zambia and DRC are nodes in the global value chains. Infrastructures development (roads, gates…) and their funding are crucial means of access for international, regional and national corporate and political bodies to the revenues extracted on the circulations of goods.

Paper long abstract:

A 2000km long border divides the DRC and Zambia, and zigzag across the mineral-rich Copperbelt. On this border, only a few crossing points allow the export of minerals (copper and cobalt ores mostly) from Katanga to the harbors of Durban and Dar-es-Salaam, and the import of chemical, machineries and foodstuffs on the other way around. These border points are thus constituted as interfaces on the system, and can not be bypassed. They became main sites for and rent-capturing activities and have concentrated attention from international, regional, national corporate and political bodies, willing to position themselves on profitable flows. Political and commercial flows have a mutual influence on each other : commercial flows shape the infrastructural architecture which in return orientate the flows of goods, or make them divert. Mining flows have historically prevailed in the area, but now all types of flows have to adapt to the inertia of geographies the latter have created. Political and private entities, though infrastructure building and funding have the power to make some routes faster but also more expensive. The result is a changing landscape, changing arrangements, opening of new routes when the old ones become too crowded or too expensive. This contribution will look into the diverse strategies of this large array of actors involving into trade and infrastructures, and show how power and commercial flows tend to concentrate themselves on a very few numbers of crossing points, tending to be aligned on colonial and neoliberal polarization of space.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation will present selected preliminary results and vignettes form 6 months of field work with truckers, border checkpoint and harbour workers and their managers in Namibia and Zambia, conducted during January to June 2017.

Paper long abstract:

Rather than a fully developed paper, this presentation will present selected preliminary results and vignettes form 6 months of field work with truckers, border checkpoint and harbour workers and their managers and supervisors in Namibia and Zambia, conducted during January to June 2017.

The research investigates 5 interrelated topics along the Walvis Bay - Ndola - Lubumbashi Corridor: Agenda-Setting, Peripheral Urbanism, Border Workers, Connective Infrastructure as well as People & Goods in Motion.

This 2600 km long asphalt road crosses 3 countries, 2 borders and 1 bridge over the Zambezi to connect the mining regions of DRC and Zambia with Namibia's deep sea port.

The research is part of the African Governance and Space (AFRIGOS) project examining transport corridors, border towns and port cities in four regions of Africa from 2016 to 2020.

Paper short abstract:

This paper hopes to address a lack of scholarship on contemporary western experiences of travel in the context of post-colonial Africa by exploring how networks of transportation and imaginative geographies intersect.

Paper long abstract:

What we believe to be the reality is in fact a highly constructed vision mediated by various systems of knowledge/power; and the most material outputs of these systems are these complex interdependent networks of communication and transportation. Their link to western colonialism is undeniable: France's and England's capacity to conquer and then rule their respective overseas empire was made possible by shipping and telegraph lines, railways and roads. If this idea of projection of power through transportation networks is rather straightforward, its corollary looking at how these networks then framed and influenced the very perception that Europeans have had of the spaces they conquered is widely overlooked, let alone their contemporary influences on how Westerners travel and experience these post-colonial spaces nowadays.

This paper hopes to address this lack of scholarship on contemporary western experiences of travel in the context of post-colonial Africa by exploring how networks of transportation and imaginative geographies intersect. It investigates how western travellers consume the African space and how this is shaped by their very way of travelling. It argues that current networks of transportation in Africa are experiencing a growing tension between uncertainty and standardisation, indeed while international air traffic is expanding rapidly bringing a more standardized way of travelling; road systems and local/regional air traffic have more mixed records leaving travellers in a situation of uncertainty once they leave international airports. This tension, in turn, influences how Western travellers practice/use these networks and thus their imagination of Africa's space.