The paper gives an introduction to the panel from a theoretical perspective. Pastoral margins are viewed as frontier spaces that are increasingly coming under pressure due to the expansion of development corridors. Against this backdrop, the paper revisits the concept of the frontier and its spatial implications in Eastern Africa. While older conceptualizations understand the phenomenon of the frontier in connection with changing centre-periphery relations and the establishment of state authority in marginal lands, more recent approaches highlight the expansion of markets, the appropriation of resources, the commodification of nature and the emergence of structural heterogeneity.
Frontier dynamics play out in space. They do so through spatial imaginations, governance practices, and physical transformation. Spatial planning and development corridors are examples of attempts to put previously “unused” or “ungoverned” territories under the control of a new order. This has implications for the frontier and how it is conceptualized, either as a boundary between civilization and the wilderness (or nature), or rather, as a relational space that is characterized by interaction, connections and conflict. Frontier dynamics emerge from the ‘messiness’ of competing spatial imaginations, disputes over territorial claims, and institutional bricolage in the interstitial space.
Usually Frontier Studies revolve around the question of contested access to and control of natural resources such as land, water or mines. Research usually pays attention to particular social techniques of organized violence which enable certain strategies of resource acquisition in a situation which is characterized by a ‘state of exception’ and legal vagueness. However, in contrast to this set of research, this paper will discuss organized violence not as a vehicle for resource acquisition, but as a research subject in its own rights. It addresses the interplay of ideas, actors, practices, means and formations of organized violence, which appear along the frontier. The hypothesis is that frontiers resemble socioeconomic laboratories in which new figurations (Norbert Elias) of violence emerge. Thus frontiers are not characterized by a bipolar contestation between an expanding central state and ‘ungoverned areas’. Instead, dynamic figurations of organized violence are constantly blurring the lines between state and non-state spheres. The paper builds on comparative insights across Africa and beyond. It follows an inventory approach, which investigates how the understanding and the legitimacy of violence change with the arrival of new violent actors, and the resort of new practices of physical violence. Hereby the frontier becomes the location where novel figurations of violence emerge, which have an impact far beyond the frontier region itself, at the national and global level.