Short Abstract

This panel examines African port cities as layered sites where logistics, territorial power and everyday life intersect. It asks how gateway narratives and maritime security reshape coastal cities, and how urban histories and coastal communities, in turn, influence maritime infrastructure.

Long Abstract

African port cities are increasingly seen, through the lenses of global logistics and maritime security, as key strategic sites: nodes, gateways, and chokepoints that link national territories to global trade flows. Yet such framings can obscure their histories as layered urban spaces, political centres and lived maritime environments. This panel approaches African ports as layered sites where infrastructures, territorial power and urban life intersect. Rather than treating ports as bounded facilities at the water’s edge, we examine the relations they produce across maritime spaces, port cities and inland territories, including through railways, roads, logistics corridors and military installations. These extensions shape state-building and struggles over sovereignty, while encountering existing urban histories, coastal societies, labour relations and ways of inhabiting the sea.

How do maritime securitisation, military presence, foreign investment, and the expansion of railways, roads and logistics corridors reshape relations between port cities, regions and inland territories? How do gateway narratives mobilise promises of connectivity, circulation and development]? How do local labour, urban governance and different ways of knowing and inhabiting the sea accommodate, negotiate or challenge the logistical flows and territorial transformations envisioned by states, global capital and maritime powers? Bringing critical logistics, gateway urbanism, and maritime geopolitics into conversation with everyday urban and coastal life, the panel invites interdisciplinary perspectives on how African ports operate simultaneously as infrastructures of circulation and territorial power, and as layered spaces of history, knowledge and lived experience.

Propose paper