Short Abstract

This panel interrogates how African borders shape the uneven implementation of AfCFTA, focusing on the tensions between continental integration and territorial governance, informal practices, mobility, trade facilitation and borderland livelihoods.

Long Abstract

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) constitutes a major effort to overcome the fragmentation of African markets and deepen continental economic integration. Yet its implementation confronts a fundamental conundrum: although AfCFTA seeks to reduce barriers to intra-African trade, implementation remains territorially anchored in national borders, institutions and regulatory systems that may reproduce the fragmentation it seeks to overcome.

This panel places borders at the centre of AfCFTA implementation, conceptualising them not as passive administrative lines or obstacles to trade, but as dynamic institutional, spatial and socio-economic sites where continental policies are interpreted, negotiated and adapted. Differences in border governance, infrastructure, regulatory capacity, non-tariff barriers, digital systems and informal practices produce uneven experiences of integration across Africa. The panel brings together contributions examining border governance, informal cross-border trade, non-tariff barriers, mobility, digitalisation, trade facilitation and borderland livelihoods, with particular attention to interactions between state institutions and non-state actors such as traders, businesses, transporters, border officials and communities. It asks: How do borders mediate AfCFTA implementation? Why do some borders facilitate integration while others reproduce fragmentation? How do formal and informal practices interact in implementing continental trade policy? And under what conditions can border governance, technological innovation and borderland agency transform borders from sites of constraint into infrastructures of integration? By shifting attention from AfCFTA as a continental policy project to its everyday enactment at borders, the panel seeks to advance a grounded understanding of Africa’s uneven integration process.

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