Artificial states ? On the enduring geographical myth of natural borders

Reka CC BY-NC-SA 10/06/2014

Freakonomics » The Violent Legacy of Africa’s Arbitrary Borders

▻http://freakonomics.com/2011/12/01/the-violent-legacy-of-africas-arbitrary-borders

Ne pas confondre avec notre copain @freakonometrics !

Even if they haven’t heard the term Scramble for Africa, most people know that something went wrong when the continent was divided into nation states by European colonial powers.
http://www.freakonomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Africa-Ethnic-Borders.png
Some economists, however, have taken the time to quantify the destructive nature of Africa’s national borders. Authors Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou have released a new working paper showing how arbitrary border decisions have affected war and civil unrest in Africa, particularly among split ethnic groups and their neighbors. Not surprisingly, the length of a conflict and its casualty rate is 25 percent higher in areas where an ethnicity is divided by a national border as opposed to areas where ethnicities have a united homeland. Examples of divided (and conflicted) groups are the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania, and the Anyi of Ghana and the Ivory Coast. The conflict rate is also higher for people living in areas close to ethnic-partitioned hot-spots.

#afrique #conflits

#AFRICA

Reka CC BY-NC-SA

koldobika @koldobika CC BY-NC-SA 10/06/2014

#langues_sans_frontières

koldobika @koldobika CC BY-NC-SA
CDB_77 @cdb_77 10/06/2014

#frontière #frontière_arbitraire #frontières_nationales #Stelios_Michalopoulos #Elias_Papaioannou #visualisation #carte #ethnie #ethnicité

CDB_77 @cdb_77
CDB_77 @cdb_77 10/06/2014

Peut-être en lien avec cette problématique, un point de vue différent... celui de @ChiaraBrambilla.
–-> voici la recension de son ouvrage que j’ai écrite il y a quelques années...
►http://espacepolitique.revues.org/1603

CDB_77 @cdb_77
CDB_77 @cdb_77 10/06/2014

Et cet article de @JulietFall (Université de Genève):
Artificial states? On the enduring geographical myth of natural borders
Alberto Alesina, William Easterly and Janina Matuszeski’s paper Artificial States, published as a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper in June 2006, suggests a theory linking the nature of country borders to the economic success of countries ( Alesina, Easterly, & Matuszeski, 2006). This paper critically examines this suggestion that natural boundaries and ethnic homogeneity are desirable for economic reasons. It takes issue with the understanding of artificial and natural boundaries that they develop, arguing that this ignores two centuries of critical and quantitative geographical scholarship that has mapped, documented and critiqued the obsession of a link between topography and the appropriate shape of states and boundaries. It explores how their argument is linked to a defence of ethnically homogeneous states. The focus is on their teleological and paradoxically ahistorical vision that naturalizes politics by appealing to spatial myths of homogeneity and geometric destiny, grounded in a reactionary understanding of space as container. In so doing, I am mindful of the strong links between such proposals and calls for post-conflict partition, and the corresponding discourses of ethnic and cultural homogenization on which they rely. Instead of thinking of boundaries as geometric objects, squiggly or not, I consider boundaries through the simultaneous processes of reification, naturalization, and fetishization.
▻http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629810000533

CDB_77 @cdb_77

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Artificial states ? On the enduring geographical myth of natural borders

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