This survey of various African and Asian conflicts examines people's experiences on territorial borders and the ways they affect political configurations. By focusing on individuals' routines and daily life, these contributions treat borderland dynamics as actual political units with their own actions and outcomes.

SURPRISING CONCLUSIONS: The book undermines the assumption that post-colonial borders divide and undermine, showing that frontiers in fact unite and bring together people, albeit often informally and outside of the state's control.

PART I: INTRODUCING A BORDERLAND PERSPECTIVE 1. Border, Frontier, and the Geography of Rule at the Margins of the State; Benedikt Korf and Timothy Raeymaekers 2. Geographies of Violence and Sovereignty: The African Frontier Revisited; Tobias Hagmann, Martin Doevenspeck, and Benedikt Korf 3. Centering Borders and Borderlands: The Evidence from Africa; Markus Virgil Hoehne and Dereje Feyissa PART II: THE BORDER'S ROUGH TERRAIN: VIOLENCE, SECURITY, AND THE BORDER 4. Treading a Fine Line: State Making and Conflict within Eastern Burma; Sylvia Brown 5. Navigating the Urban 'In-Between Space': Local Livelihood and Identity Strategies in Exploiting the Goma/Gisenyi Border; Karen Buscher and Gillian Mathys PART III: THE BORDER AS FRONTIER: STATES, SOVEREIGNTY, AND IDENTITY 6. Dangerous Divisions: Peace Building in the Borderlands of Post-Soviet Central Asia; Christine Bichsel 7. State Making and the Suspension of Law in India's Northeast: The Place of Exception in the Assam-Nagaland Border Dispute; Bert Suykens PART IV: "BRINGING THE STATE BACK IN": BORDERS, WAR ECONOMIES, AND PEACE ECONOMIES 8. Get It While You Can: Building Business and Bureaucracy between Wars in the Uganda-Sudan Borderland; Wolfgang Zeller 9. When Civil Wars Hibernate in Borderlands: The Challenges of the Casamance 'Forgotten Civil War' to Cross-Border Peace and Security; Aboubakr Tandia Epilogue: The View from the Border; Jonathan Goodhand