While in Zurich I was given a copy of Benedikt Korf and Timothy Raeymaekers’s new edited book, Violence on the Margins: States, Conflict, and Borderlands. It’s in a series on African Borderlands Studies, but also has quite a lot of treatment of Asia, and looks to be of interest for those interested in borders, territory and politics much more generally.

This boldly multidisciplinary volume surveys African and Asian conflicts through individuals’ lived experiences of territorial borders, as well as the ways these experiences affect political configurations. The contributions gathered here depict borderlands not just as the objects of globalized or state-driven processes, but as actual political units that generate their own actions and outcomes. In particular, these studies demonstrate the explicit transboundary character of conflict and peace. In this way, they explore alternatives to the still-dominant model of contemporary state formation as a centrally guided, top-down process – a model that has led to a deep misunderstanding of borderlands as marginal spaces that either are fraught with savagery and rebellion or linger in dark oblivion.