Short Abstract

This panel seeks to move beyond traditional framings of borderlands histories, clan politics, transnationalism, and inequality in the Somali Horn of Africa by inviting borderlands perspectives on health and well-being, ecologies, infrastructures, and more-than-human materialities.

Long Abstract

This panel re-examines social and political trajectories in the Somali Horn of Africa by extending conversations about the socio-political and socio-economic dynamics of borderlands and transnational relationships into new framings. The disruptive social influence of colonial border-making that divided Somalis among multiple imperial territories, and the recurrent postcolonial border conflicts that ensued, have played prominent roles in postcolonial identity formation for local groups as well as social-scientific analysis of the region. Today, such tensions continue to manifest themselves in debates and struggles over decentralization, autonomy, and federalism across the Somali-inhabited territories. Nevertheless, an exclusive focus on the socio-political dimensions of borders risks occluding other relationships and histories that constitute space- and place-making in the Somali Horn. We invite contributions that develop new perspectives and methods for thinking about the nature of territory, borders, mobility, and political struggle in the Somali Horn, especially through lenses such as human health, ecologies, infrastructures, and other more-than-human materialities and relationships.

The panel provokes contributors to consider questions including:

How do encounters and relationships with non-human life in the borderlands, conservation initiatives, and changing ecologies shape border-making and human communities?

How do analytics of health, healthcare, happiness, and well-being inform our discussions of social dynamics, pressures, and everyday socio-economic life in the Somali territories?

How does attention to visuality, text, and materiality shape perspectives on history, culture, and contemporary politics?

What do borderlands infrastructures, their histories, their functions (or failures to function as designed), and human engagements with them tell us about the borderlands?

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