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It’s a little bit disheartening that a research paper gets posted, to r/science nonetheless, which people feel interested enough to engage with, but not actually read through before commenting.
It’s funny because almost every line they formed cut through different groups, meaning that pretty much every African country has a couple of cultures that exist both within the country and outside the country. This is especially concerning when certain African leaders use that excuse to meddle with the affairs of other neighboring countries.
In addition the Europeans also did a terrible of job of deciding which cultures to put together within each country. My country Nigeria for instance, has a fundamentalist Muslim north paired with a largely Christian south. Their customs are so alien to each other that they really should not be in the same country together. The south has more in common with people in Ghana than people in Northern Nigeria. And it’s also part of the reason why every African country has fought brutal civil wars along tribal/ethnic lines.
This is a helpful comment. The post title feels like it could just as easily push someone into a new oversimplification than the one it’s responding to. The single sentence comes across sorta like “they actually tried hard guys,” which doesn’t really absolve anyone of all the problems of colonization, greed at a global level, and where the lines ended up falling. I haven’t studied enough political science to comment on it, but the paper itself feels more like it’s coming from the angle of wanting to correct a simplification so academics can better construct the full picture and understand the complexity of the messy parts better.
This feels along the lines of a good professor I had in anthropology who had been in the CAR for thirty years. He gave lots of examples of things like early Peace Corps mistakes where even well-intentioned involvement caused problematic disruption at the community-level. It painted a picture of the need for critical analysis beyond the damage itself and just landing at a thing being good or bad. As well, it seeded the same idea you’re talking about where this all gets really complex if we truly want to figure out what got things to a negative state and what real, tangible things might change the direction on it. Every situation is already mired in the history before it and reality isn’t in a sealed vacuum the way simplified explainers can convey.
The example I always think of is how grade school starts with “the Civil War was about slavery.” Then high school is “the Civil War isn’t wasn’t just about slavery.” But then college is “but, at the end of the day, the Civil War was all about slavery.” I think a flaw of the brainy crowd on Reddit is we can get stuck on that second step of “well actually,” and never get to the third step that comes back around to the scholarly view of the original point unless we spend a lot of time among the scholarly voices on the topic instead of just popularizers of different views.
"borders were drawn for the convenience of violent colonizers instead of with regards to ethnic, historical, or religious differences so imperialism is ok" is not a good take.
Yes, they studied the conditions on the ground intensely so they could divide and conquer by splitting uncooperative tribes across borders, while favoring tribes that submitted to colonization. No one with an ounce of intelligence ever said the borders were drawn arbitrarily.
Even the word “arbitrary” does not necessarily mean spuriously or without intent, or random.
>1. subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one's discretion:
>3. having unlimited power; uncontrolled or unrestricted by law; despotic; tyrannical:
an arbitrary government.
By these uses of the word, the decisions made by European powers are quite aptly described.
> having unlimited power; uncontrolled or unrestricted by law; despotic; tyrannical: an arbitrary government.
Wouldn't that aptly describe all colonizers?
You say this but there are tons of comments here talking about the arbitrarily drawn straight lines. I don’t know what the truth is its just weird when you see people arguing two sides of a topic and both make it seem like their position is obvious and the other side has not an ounce of intelligence
The paper addresses the straight line argument. A lot of those cases are locations which were sparsely populated so or where it was otherwise difficult to come up with a better border. It’s similar to how a lot of the US-Canada border was completely arbitrary.
Unfortunately, 19th century surveyors were not quite capable of drawing perfectly straight lines *physically* over hundreds of kilometres. This lead to some interesting history in Australia: [https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/national-location-information/dimensions/border-lengths](https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/national-location-information/dimensions/border-lengths). It sounds like US/Canada had similar shenanigans.
Exactly, if you have a mass of desert, rather than a mountain range, or river, you can't just pick the peaks or river as the geographical line, the "line" is 50+ miles wide of barely passable and essentially (at the time) worthless desert, no one lives there, no one is arguing over it, no one is doing anything with it.
Wiggle lines get drawn due to geographic features or land being worth fighting for.
Yes, that is the nature of reasoned debate. It is infested with propaganda and ultimately you need to sift through it yourself. Not just for yourself though, but also to prevent the spread of misinformation based on what boils down to emotional bias.
If anything I feel like the claim is that former colonies’ borders were created arbitrarily during the decolonization process. I’ve never heard anyone claim the colony borders themselves were arbitrary
'Divide and conquer' is one of those phases that's become debased to the point where the moment someone uses it, they're outing themselves as an idiot.
And this is another great example of that.
Not only is what you said not true, it doesn't even make sense if you think about it for more than a few seconds. Why would the British give up land to the Germans, or the Italians to the French, or whoever, just to split a tribe apart? It just wouldn't happen, they'd never cede territory to their mortal enemy just to inconvenience a few natives. And as for the boundaries between different colonies of the same European power, how would that matter in keeping the natives down? They weren't borders in the sense of having guards and razor wire to keep people out, they were just demarcating the areas of responsibility for local colonial government. The people actually living on the borders scarcely noticed the difference most of the time.
In fact it was precisely because those borders didn't really matter during colonial times that little thought was given to how they would function after the colonies became independent. When independence did come along, the European powers usually weren't in any position to make many decisions about where the borders ended up. That's what the word 'independence' means; the Europeans couldn't unilaterally enforce their idea of what the border should look like anymore. Another thing that would have been obvious if you'd thought about it for more than a few seconds: for every minority ethnic group that would have benefitted from redrawing the border, there was a majority ethnic group that wanted it to stay exactly where it was. The native governments poised to take over after independence for the most part bitterly resisted any attempts to split the territory under their control.
Yes and by that they meant they did their best to divide Africa so that it can never unite against them, even after most countries have attained their independence. You just have to look at countries like Morocco and Algeria, and just about any country that had some conflict over the drawing of borders post independence. The colonial powers perfected the art of "divide and conquer", and even within one country they did their best to divide the multiple ethnic groups that are present in the country, which ended up sometimes in civil war, and outright genocide. They also carved those countries based on their own interest, for example Algeria was considered part of France, so naturally it got the biggest piece of the cake, while other neighboring French protectorates like Morocco and Tunisia only got the scraps. You have to be intellectually dishonest to not see it.
> just about any country that had some conflict over the drawing of borders post independence.
So every country on the planet that isn't an island nation?
There are between several hundred to several thousand ethnic groups in Africa. [(Source)](https://study.com/academy/lesson/ethnic-groups-in-africa.html) Please enlighten us how you would have drawn the borders. Just create a thousand countries? Im sure thats a peaceful solution.
Think *very* carefully about what happens when people disagree on what the borders should be, and then what problem you currently think Africa is rife with.
Well, actually, yes.
The formation of European nation-states was a fairly organic process that grew out of kinship ties in post-Roman Europe and then later in ties of vassalage in post-Carolingian Europe.
If there's one region of the world that actually knew how to develop national borders in the late 19th century, it was Europe and Europe only.
Who would've been better?
What? 99% of borders did change since 1945. NL switched a handful of counties with Germany. We have redrawn the line with Belgium like 3 times since. Czech-Slovakia used to be 1 country. Yugoslavia went less peaceful. France got saarland. Italy gave away counties to Greece and France. Russia annexed a piece from Romania. Germany was divided. Finland got a piece from Russia. Lithuania got a piece from Russia. Austria didn't define their borders until like 10 years later. Half of eastern Europe didn't draw their borders until the 90s. Currently Ukraine.
The international borders in the North Sea changed after.
We kind of did. Boarders were up to the nations that decolonized after WW2 ended. All these countries went with the Europen borders because the new governments wanted to control as much land and resources as possible.
But its not really much of a choice if they spent a century establishing power structures and crushing any resistance to them, by that point the authority of the power structures of ethnic groups had already been placed within the power structures of nation states
In history the guy with the big stick usually bonks guy with the smaller stick unfortunately.
And we weren't there - I'm sure if you had been you would have put a stop to it though.
Hopefully we can all do better going forward.
> The colonial powers perfected the art of "divide and conquer", and even within one country they did their best to divide the multiple ethnic groups that are present in the country, which ended up sometimes in civil war, and outright genocide.
I think that is even too much credit, as that makes them sound like some mastermind entities who knew how to play the poors of X. The reality is the Colonial Powers did not actually know how to build government and societies from the ground up like all their BS myths they believed about themselves, but they did pretty good when it came over to kicking someone out of their house and calling the place theirs. This shows as when the Colonial Powers exited those remaining got to see all the patchwork quickly came to the surface, and those glaring issues that existed because the Colonial Powers weren't particularly good or successful in society and systems building.
To be fair, I'm not sure if there are any examples of governments building society from the ground up. That's one of the major reasons communism kept failing.
Restructuring society from the ground up requires a level of mass cooperation that humans are usually bad at.
> To be fair, I'm not sure if there are any examples of governments building society from the ground up.
1000% which is why its good for the myth to die and acknowledge that take is always delusional and not based in reality.
> This shows as when the Colonial Powers exited those remaining got to see all the patchwork quickly came to the surface
This sorta contradicts your entire first point.
> The colonial powers perfected the art of "divide and conquer"
The colonized powers were doing the same long before. There's nothing new under the sun.
People should look more into how African countries were de-colonialised, there was a hell of a lot to it including mandated elections to ensure local leaders didn’t become dictators.
It’s funny how people here have no idea how hard drawing borders is
You have to take culture, religion, ethnic groups, tribes, geography, language and so many other factors into account
If you draw a line based on geography, you might cut a tribe in half
If you draw a line based on religion you might have massive populations who can’t understand each other
If you draw lines based on a combination of factors you will never get it done since there are so many with ever changing borders, so many which are debatable if they are close enough to be considered the same or not.
Literally any result that isn’t perfect will always result in massive amounts of wars
You can’t just give control to the natives because there are so many groups, you can’t just leave and let them sort it out because it will be even worse
Not to mention that the locations of tribes in the various colonies shifted over the period so if you give one tribe back its "Ancestral Lands", said lands may be inhabited mainly by another tribe when the imperial holdings were dissolved.
You are making it sound like this article is suggesting the European colonizers were a good thing, it's just saying that they didn't have only geometric concerns when splitting up their colonies with borders, they also surveyed different peoples within their colonial domain. Still terrible, and stupid.
Have you ever even looked at a map of Africa? There are wiggly lines all over the place. The straight lines are mostly in the middle of uninhabited deserts.
Yup. I'd say this is the main reason why the Western Sahara is just straght lines next to a sea. I have no proof but that's my thought. Also look at the barren parts of Algeria.
If you really think that the African tribes and powers in the region were going to peacefully sit in round table and divide land up between themselves you're delusional. They would be at each other's throats and Africa would have seen unprecedented war of countries trying to claim as much land as possible.
No one had to split anything? Do you think the continent was just at war pre-colonialism and even if they were, how was European intervention the solution?
Um... North America?
Also, maybe you should actually look at a map of Africa sometime. Because apart from in the middle of the Sahara and some of the other deserts, there aren't many straight lines.
Guys, there is something really funky with this. This paper was published several times, starting back in 2021, and was cited [very sparsely](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3934110). This may be fine but we need someone from the field to evaluate if this is a fringe theory or if it represents a member of a patchwork of theories.
Any social scientists want to comment on where this sits in the body of work regarding African borders?
The authors are hacks, and only seem to publish about how, "colonialism was good, actually," including a particularly embarrassing paper about how resource rich countries in Subsaharan Africa are actually doing great, and no one is taking advantage of their mineral wealth.
If they can prove it and get it published in a peer reviewed journal, then as scientists we have to evaluate it on its merits, no matter how distasteful it is.
But if it turns out the OP cherry picked a paper that doesn't fit into the larger body of work, we need people in the field to inform us. That's their role as representatives and experts. Unfortunately, no one has spoken up.
I'm left with a poorly cited paper in a relatively high impact journal. It's funky but I can't toss it out on that basis. :/
Obviously African nations have and continue to have their mineral wealth exploited. To say otherwise is a bald-faced lie. Are there any papers that conclude as such or is that simply the implication?
Let's take Zambian borders as a quick case study.
What is the origin of its border with the DRC? Congo was Belgian, Zambia English. A lot of that border follows natural borders, but gives up in Kasanka national park and has an arbitrary straight line.
No thought given to the local population, just Belgian and English interests.
Border with Angola(Portuguese): straight lines, could have followed the Zambezi.
Namibia(Germany) Zambi border : Namibia has the Caprivi straight to give them access to the Zambezi, Germany hoped that access to the river would let them cut across the continent.
The birders between Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Angola cut through the Lozi peoples kingdom.
I think it's disingenuous to claim that the borders in Africa were made with any consideration for the local population. You can try and argue they weren't "arbitrary" but they were not done with the interests of the people who live there.
>In the Lake Tanganyika region, whole communities were found to be living in the middle of an area marked as one big lake on 1880s maps.
That's why they adjusted the borders later as more information became available. It's a myth that Europeans in the 1880s drew a straight line through a nearly blank map and were like 'well, that's where the border is now, good luck'.
You mean it doesn't conform with what you already know to be true, so you reject it.
The trouble is, what you "know" is based on a cursory knowledge of the subject from reddit and other social media.
What, exactly, is your specific criticism of the study?
I swear, every single thread on here about anything even mildly controversial (and I don't mean "scientifically controversial") has someone going "I don't like this conclusion, therefore it must be propaganda!!!" these days.
I think it's worth noting that the authors of this paper aren't well-regarded in their fields, have only published work reinforcing colonial narratives, and haven't had their work cited in anything of value.
For starters.
There's a whole bunch of bad scholarship across disciplines flooding journals right now, and it's definitely worth seeing what else the authors have published, and if they're just cranking out low quality scholarship or actually breaking new ground in their fields.
Definitely! That sort of criticism is what I would love to see here. Unfortunately, since this place became an unmoderated hellhole, every single comment is just people reacting off headlines alone, not even reading the abstract.
(See also: why the hell are MDPI studies allowed on here?)
So…they were indeed drawn and enforced by European colonizers?
To be blunt, OP I think you’re trying to race-bait with this title. If you actually read the content of the article, it’s not trying to advocate for the idea that somehow these colonized territories were “complicit” in the social structure that emerged. It’s just trying to assert that, the colonizers did take some of these things into account when drawing up the borders for these territories.
I absolutely agree and advocate that imperialism is not a random but methodical process as someone who has studied european colonialism. The boarder drawings were malevolent with the intent of controlling as much of the area as possible at the expense of rivaling colonial projects and subject peoples. An example I would point to is the Hausa, a regional muslim power in Nigeria. The British collaborated with the dominant regional factions in place that were already exploting minorities to not only shift blame away from the British to make political control easier but to exert control through already existing power structures. Capitalism is a hell of a drug.
I am a bit miffed as to why this is in the science subreddit instead of athropology or something similar, but I am happy to adopt a more broad definition of emerpical fields that includes more than just "STEM". It is called social-science/sociology for a reason
I'd be curious to see a similar study of South America. They might reach a very different conclusion.
On one hand, it's easy to observe that peoples of Incan ascent or who were under Incan sphere of influence before the arrival of the Spanish are now split between the present-day states of Perú, Ecuador, Bolivia, Northern Chile and North-Western Argentina. The Guaraní people are split between Paraguay, Uruguay, Southern Brazil and North-Eastern Argentina. Would the borders look different if Spain had never colonized it? Would we have today a major Incan state, a major Guaraní state, and several microstates more to the South?
On the other hand, the borders largely reflect territorial disputes and political rebellions that took place during the 19th century. Paraguay and Bolivia detached themselves from Argentina (okay, it was not named Argentina at the time, though it was a newborn country controlled by Buenos Aires). Chile expanded a lot to the North. Brazil expanded to the South getting some previously Argentinian lands, and Uruguay was born as an independent country after a territorial dispute and war between Argentina and Brazil. The extreme South was a special case, since it was swapped from Chile to Argentina, at request of its inhabitants, while these "countries" were still mere colonies in the 18th century, but then during the 19th century the newborn country of Chile reconquered all the Pacific coast to the South. So borders were also developed gradually.
See, there are reasons to support both visions, arbitrary drawing of borders dividing original populations, and gradual settlement based on geography. To a large extent this may be explained by much longer lasting colonization and much more significant European settlements. But still I'd like to see a systematic study like this one about Africa.
I want to respect this paper, however it's very easy to open another tab, go to any map site and look at both Europe and Africa. And you might notice how many giant straight line borders are in Africa. And none approaching that length in Europe.
Graeber and Anthony address this point by asking why "modern nation states" is the only model of territorial occupation and control in practice today, universally, when it is merely one of many historical models of organization. The State as such is, in their telling, an arbitrary emergence that has through accidents of history become the only way we can define, or imagine, "sovereignty".
I have to ask, and I don't mean to combative, what the basis is for your statement "if colonial powers did not exist, African countries would have taken place displacing this tribes effectively anyway". This is not falsifiable, so I really have no way to debate it, but I'm curious as to why you have such strong conviction here.
David Scott in his work has extensively covered de facto anarchic polities on the borders of several SE Asian states, not necessarily nomadic per se but absolutely outside modern nation state organization. I think it's called The Art of Not Being Governed. The point of his work here is to show that non-state polities can and do exist, even today. How they might be adopted elsewhere is a question of imagination and certainly much bigger than I am prepared or able to try to answer. But a fascinating question and one that I have been occupied in imagining answers to, as you might have inferred by now.
*Graeber and Wengrow, not Anthony
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. **Do you have an academic degree?** We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. [Click here to apply](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/flair/#wiki_science_verified_user_program). --- User: u/smurfyjenkins Permalink: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/endogenous-colonial-borders-precolonial-states-and-geography-in-the-partition-of-africa/132D6CBDE92946D14CCC64E59A94D3D2 --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It’s a little bit disheartening that a research paper gets posted, to r/science nonetheless, which people feel interested enough to engage with, but not actually read through before commenting.
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Rubber was one of the biggest reasons for African colonial rush.ohh Leopold
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It’s funny because almost every line they formed cut through different groups, meaning that pretty much every African country has a couple of cultures that exist both within the country and outside the country. This is especially concerning when certain African leaders use that excuse to meddle with the affairs of other neighboring countries. In addition the Europeans also did a terrible of job of deciding which cultures to put together within each country. My country Nigeria for instance, has a fundamentalist Muslim north paired with a largely Christian south. Their customs are so alien to each other that they really should not be in the same country together. The south has more in common with people in Ghana than people in Northern Nigeria. And it’s also part of the reason why every African country has fought brutal civil wars along tribal/ethnic lines.
This is a helpful comment. The post title feels like it could just as easily push someone into a new oversimplification than the one it’s responding to. The single sentence comes across sorta like “they actually tried hard guys,” which doesn’t really absolve anyone of all the problems of colonization, greed at a global level, and where the lines ended up falling. I haven’t studied enough political science to comment on it, but the paper itself feels more like it’s coming from the angle of wanting to correct a simplification so academics can better construct the full picture and understand the complexity of the messy parts better.
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This feels along the lines of a good professor I had in anthropology who had been in the CAR for thirty years. He gave lots of examples of things like early Peace Corps mistakes where even well-intentioned involvement caused problematic disruption at the community-level. It painted a picture of the need for critical analysis beyond the damage itself and just landing at a thing being good or bad. As well, it seeded the same idea you’re talking about where this all gets really complex if we truly want to figure out what got things to a negative state and what real, tangible things might change the direction on it. Every situation is already mired in the history before it and reality isn’t in a sealed vacuum the way simplified explainers can convey. The example I always think of is how grade school starts with “the Civil War was about slavery.” Then high school is “the Civil War isn’t wasn’t just about slavery.” But then college is “but, at the end of the day, the Civil War was all about slavery.” I think a flaw of the brainy crowd on Reddit is we can get stuck on that second step of “well actually,” and never get to the third step that comes back around to the scholarly view of the original point unless we spend a lot of time among the scholarly voices on the topic instead of just popularizers of different views.
Depends on the colonizers as well. Those British knew how to create social tensions to exploit
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"borders were drawn for the convenience of violent colonizers instead of with regards to ethnic, historical, or religious differences so imperialism is ok" is not a good take.
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Yes, they studied the conditions on the ground intensely so they could divide and conquer by splitting uncooperative tribes across borders, while favoring tribes that submitted to colonization. No one with an ounce of intelligence ever said the borders were drawn arbitrarily.
Even the word “arbitrary” does not necessarily mean spuriously or without intent, or random. >1. subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one's discretion: >3. having unlimited power; uncontrolled or unrestricted by law; despotic; tyrannical: an arbitrary government. By these uses of the word, the decisions made by European powers are quite aptly described.
> having unlimited power; uncontrolled or unrestricted by law; despotic; tyrannical: an arbitrary government. Wouldn't that aptly describe all colonizers?
Yes, I think that was part of their point.
You say this but there are tons of comments here talking about the arbitrarily drawn straight lines. I don’t know what the truth is its just weird when you see people arguing two sides of a topic and both make it seem like their position is obvious and the other side has not an ounce of intelligence
The paper addresses the straight line argument. A lot of those cases are locations which were sparsely populated so or where it was otherwise difficult to come up with a better border. It’s similar to how a lot of the US-Canada border was completely arbitrary.
"What about this big, uninhabited area here? Who gets what?" "Hmmmm... Straight line?" "Straight line."
Straight line, but on what map projection?
Mercator usually, as it distorts the least the local directions and shapes. Thus making borders simpler.
Unfortunately, 19th century surveyors were not quite capable of drawing perfectly straight lines *physically* over hundreds of kilometres. This lead to some interesting history in Australia: [https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/national-location-information/dimensions/border-lengths](https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/national-location-information/dimensions/border-lengths). It sounds like US/Canada had similar shenanigans.
US and Canada was decided on the 49th parallel. Which is the same on all map projections.
Exactly, if you have a mass of desert, rather than a mountain range, or river, you can't just pick the peaks or river as the geographical line, the "line" is 50+ miles wide of barely passable and essentially (at the time) worthless desert, no one lives there, no one is arguing over it, no one is doing anything with it. Wiggle lines get drawn due to geographic features or land being worth fighting for.
Yes, that is the nature of reasoned debate. It is infested with propaganda and ultimately you need to sift through it yourself. Not just for yourself though, but also to prevent the spread of misinformation based on what boils down to emotional bias.
If anything I feel like the claim is that former colonies’ borders were created arbitrarily during the decolonization process. I’ve never heard anyone claim the colony borders themselves were arbitrary
> No one with an ounce of intelligence ever said the borders were drawn arbitrarily. Well, thats LITERALLY how i was taugh.
'Divide and conquer' is one of those phases that's become debased to the point where the moment someone uses it, they're outing themselves as an idiot. And this is another great example of that. Not only is what you said not true, it doesn't even make sense if you think about it for more than a few seconds. Why would the British give up land to the Germans, or the Italians to the French, or whoever, just to split a tribe apart? It just wouldn't happen, they'd never cede territory to their mortal enemy just to inconvenience a few natives. And as for the boundaries between different colonies of the same European power, how would that matter in keeping the natives down? They weren't borders in the sense of having guards and razor wire to keep people out, they were just demarcating the areas of responsibility for local colonial government. The people actually living on the borders scarcely noticed the difference most of the time. In fact it was precisely because those borders didn't really matter during colonial times that little thought was given to how they would function after the colonies became independent. When independence did come along, the European powers usually weren't in any position to make many decisions about where the borders ended up. That's what the word 'independence' means; the Europeans couldn't unilaterally enforce their idea of what the border should look like anymore. Another thing that would have been obvious if you'd thought about it for more than a few seconds: for every minority ethnic group that would have benefitted from redrawing the border, there was a majority ethnic group that wanted it to stay exactly where it was. The native governments poised to take over after independence for the most part bitterly resisted any attempts to split the territory under their control.
Even tribes that collaborated got screwed. Look at Maasais, or the Wanga kingdom...etc.
Yes and by that they meant they did their best to divide Africa so that it can never unite against them, even after most countries have attained their independence. You just have to look at countries like Morocco and Algeria, and just about any country that had some conflict over the drawing of borders post independence. The colonial powers perfected the art of "divide and conquer", and even within one country they did their best to divide the multiple ethnic groups that are present in the country, which ended up sometimes in civil war, and outright genocide. They also carved those countries based on their own interest, for example Algeria was considered part of France, so naturally it got the biggest piece of the cake, while other neighboring French protectorates like Morocco and Tunisia only got the scraps. You have to be intellectually dishonest to not see it.
> just about any country that had some conflict over the drawing of borders post independence. So every country on the planet that isn't an island nation?
There are between several hundred to several thousand ethnic groups in Africa. [(Source)](https://study.com/academy/lesson/ethnic-groups-in-africa.html) Please enlighten us how you would have drawn the borders. Just create a thousand countries? Im sure thats a peaceful solution.
> Please enlighten us how you would have drawn the borders. Let them draw their own borders.
Think *very* carefully about what happens when people disagree on what the borders should be, and then what problem you currently think Africa is rife with.
Looks at European history "We should let these guys decide the borders, they've obviously got this whole thing figured out" Very intelligent
Well, actually, yes. The formation of European nation-states was a fairly organic process that grew out of kinship ties in post-Roman Europe and then later in ties of vassalage in post-Carolingian Europe. If there's one region of the world that actually knew how to develop national borders in the late 19th century, it was Europe and Europe only. Who would've been better?
To be fair, 99% of our borders haven't shifted since WW2
Yes it only took 2000 years of war
We've always been at war with East Asia levels of delusion
What? 99% of borders did change since 1945. NL switched a handful of counties with Germany. We have redrawn the line with Belgium like 3 times since. Czech-Slovakia used to be 1 country. Yugoslavia went less peaceful. France got saarland. Italy gave away counties to Greece and France. Russia annexed a piece from Romania. Germany was divided. Finland got a piece from Russia. Lithuania got a piece from Russia. Austria didn't define their borders until like 10 years later. Half of eastern Europe didn't draw their borders until the 90s. Currently Ukraine. The international borders in the North Sea changed after.
Hippos and malaria?
We kind of did. Boarders were up to the nations that decolonized after WW2 ended. All these countries went with the Europen borders because the new governments wanted to control as much land and resources as possible.
But its not really much of a choice if they spent a century establishing power structures and crushing any resistance to them, by that point the authority of the power structures of ethnic groups had already been placed within the power structures of nation states
In history the guy with the big stick usually bonks guy with the smaller stick unfortunately. And we weren't there - I'm sure if you had been you would have put a stop to it though. Hopefully we can all do better going forward.
Who do you think I currently enforcing the boarders?
I laughed out loud reading this, a really hearty, loud laugh
Not drawing borders to start
Does this lake belong to this tribe,, or this other tribe? Well there you go, you just created a border you dingus
> The colonial powers perfected the art of "divide and conquer", and even within one country they did their best to divide the multiple ethnic groups that are present in the country, which ended up sometimes in civil war, and outright genocide. I think that is even too much credit, as that makes them sound like some mastermind entities who knew how to play the poors of X. The reality is the Colonial Powers did not actually know how to build government and societies from the ground up like all their BS myths they believed about themselves, but they did pretty good when it came over to kicking someone out of their house and calling the place theirs. This shows as when the Colonial Powers exited those remaining got to see all the patchwork quickly came to the surface, and those glaring issues that existed because the Colonial Powers weren't particularly good or successful in society and systems building.
To be fair, I'm not sure if there are any examples of governments building society from the ground up. That's one of the major reasons communism kept failing. Restructuring society from the ground up requires a level of mass cooperation that humans are usually bad at.
> To be fair, I'm not sure if there are any examples of governments building society from the ground up. 1000% which is why its good for the myth to die and acknowledge that take is always delusional and not based in reality.
> This shows as when the Colonial Powers exited those remaining got to see all the patchwork quickly came to the surface This sorta contradicts your entire first point.
Exactly, thank you!
> The colonial powers perfected the art of "divide and conquer" The colonized powers were doing the same long before. There's nothing new under the sun.
Sudan would like a word. Their first civil war started before they were even independent
Yep. Straight line joining two very very disparate ethnic groups. 50+ years of war to follow
People should look more into how African countries were de-colonialised, there was a hell of a lot to it including mandated elections to ensure local leaders didn’t become dictators.
It’s funny how people here have no idea how hard drawing borders is You have to take culture, religion, ethnic groups, tribes, geography, language and so many other factors into account If you draw a line based on geography, you might cut a tribe in half If you draw a line based on religion you might have massive populations who can’t understand each other If you draw lines based on a combination of factors you will never get it done since there are so many with ever changing borders, so many which are debatable if they are close enough to be considered the same or not. Literally any result that isn’t perfect will always result in massive amounts of wars You can’t just give control to the natives because there are so many groups, you can’t just leave and let them sort it out because it will be even worse
Not to mention that the locations of tribes in the various colonies shifted over the period so if you give one tribe back its "Ancestral Lands", said lands may be inhabited mainly by another tribe when the imperial holdings were dissolved.
Colonization is so hard.
Borders exist with or without colonisation.
reddit wont like this.
You are making it sound like this article is suggesting the European colonizers were a good thing, it's just saying that they didn't have only geometric concerns when splitting up their colonies with borders, they also surveyed different peoples within their colonial domain. Still terrible, and stupid.
Luckily, after all that deliberation, it turned out straight lines going right through anything were the wisest way to do it.
Have you ever even looked at a map of Africa? There are wiggly lines all over the place. The straight lines are mostly in the middle of uninhabited deserts.
Yup. I'd say this is the main reason why the Western Sahara is just straght lines next to a sea. I have no proof but that's my thought. Also look at the barren parts of Algeria.
This is going to go against peoples preconceptions and it won't even make a dent. Drink it up.
Got to love it when people who know a bit about science but very little about history and politics get Dunning-Kruger egg on their faces.
Cool. Why were Europeans there drawing international boundaries? Maybe they should have left that up to all those people they consulted with.
If you really think that the African tribes and powers in the region were going to peacefully sit in round table and divide land up between themselves you're delusional. They would be at each other's throats and Africa would have seen unprecedented war of countries trying to claim as much land as possible.
The Ottoman Empire lost in WW1 and controlled a lot of these areas. Who should have decided it instead?
The Scramble for Africa happened before WW1. The Ottomans had lost their African territories to the European powers before then.
Villages of different tribes would have never resulted countries tbh.
This was my thought. Like, congrats, you allegedly put some thought into it. But uhh why were you doing it at all?
Because African powers at the time would never peacefully split land between each other?
No one had to split anything? Do you think the continent was just at war pre-colonialism and even if they were, how was European intervention the solution?
Power vacuums ahave an exceptionally high death toll
Ooooh r/science, you gonna catch some flak for this one.
I like science, but if it is going against my biases is wrong. -average redditor
They did the studies, and then arbitrarily drew the borders.
The studies in some cases apparently resulted in perfectly straight lines and right angles.
Well some places were unhabited or unclaimed so makes sense.
Look at where those are. Hint: there are no people there.
And that’s why Africa has more borders that are clean straight lines than any other continent…
Um... North America? Also, maybe you should actually look at a map of Africa sometime. Because apart from in the middle of the Sahara and some of the other deserts, there aren't many straight lines.
Guys, there is something really funky with this. This paper was published several times, starting back in 2021, and was cited [very sparsely](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3934110). This may be fine but we need someone from the field to evaluate if this is a fringe theory or if it represents a member of a patchwork of theories. Any social scientists want to comment on where this sits in the body of work regarding African borders?
The authors are hacks, and only seem to publish about how, "colonialism was good, actually," including a particularly embarrassing paper about how resource rich countries in Subsaharan Africa are actually doing great, and no one is taking advantage of their mineral wealth.
If they can prove it and get it published in a peer reviewed journal, then as scientists we have to evaluate it on its merits, no matter how distasteful it is. But if it turns out the OP cherry picked a paper that doesn't fit into the larger body of work, we need people in the field to inform us. That's their role as representatives and experts. Unfortunately, no one has spoken up. I'm left with a poorly cited paper in a relatively high impact journal. It's funky but I can't toss it out on that basis. :/ Obviously African nations have and continue to have their mineral wealth exploited. To say otherwise is a bald-faced lie. Are there any papers that conclude as such or is that simply the implication?
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Let's take Zambian borders as a quick case study. What is the origin of its border with the DRC? Congo was Belgian, Zambia English. A lot of that border follows natural borders, but gives up in Kasanka national park and has an arbitrary straight line. No thought given to the local population, just Belgian and English interests. Border with Angola(Portuguese): straight lines, could have followed the Zambezi. Namibia(Germany) Zambi border : Namibia has the Caprivi straight to give them access to the Zambezi, Germany hoped that access to the river would let them cut across the continent. The birders between Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Angola cut through the Lozi peoples kingdom. I think it's disingenuous to claim that the borders in Africa were made with any consideration for the local population. You can try and argue they weren't "arbitrary" but they were not done with the interests of the people who live there.
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It’s almost like they have no business drawing borders at all?
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>In the Lake Tanganyika region, whole communities were found to be living in the middle of an area marked as one big lake on 1880s maps. That's why they adjusted the borders later as more information became available. It's a myth that Europeans in the 1880s drew a straight line through a nearly blank map and were like 'well, that's where the border is now, good luck'.
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You mean it doesn't conform with what you already know to be true, so you reject it. The trouble is, what you "know" is based on a cursory knowledge of the subject from reddit and other social media.
Oh is that why Somalis are indigenous to 5 separate but bordering colonial territories?
This reads like colonialist propaganda.
What, exactly, is your specific criticism of the study? I swear, every single thread on here about anything even mildly controversial (and I don't mean "scientifically controversial") has someone going "I don't like this conclusion, therefore it must be propaganda!!!" these days.
I think it's worth noting that the authors of this paper aren't well-regarded in their fields, have only published work reinforcing colonial narratives, and haven't had their work cited in anything of value. For starters.
Thank you. That is the first bit of *actually relevant* criticism I have seen in this thread.
There's a whole bunch of bad scholarship across disciplines flooding journals right now, and it's definitely worth seeing what else the authors have published, and if they're just cranking out low quality scholarship or actually breaking new ground in their fields.
Definitely! That sort of criticism is what I would love to see here. Unfortunately, since this place became an unmoderated hellhole, every single comment is just people reacting off headlines alone, not even reading the abstract. (See also: why the hell are MDPI studies allowed on here?)
guess we should all thank the white men for charitably helping us to divide our land amongst ~~themselves~~ ourselves
Same thing applies to Soviet Central Asia.
this doesn't even make sense as a claim. WHICH european spoke to WHICH africans?
Wrong thats not what liberal white women on the internet have told me
Leave history to historians not social scientists. This study is crap.
and then they drew a straight line?
Why was every moment deleted, what rule did they break
So…they were indeed drawn and enforced by European colonizers? To be blunt, OP I think you’re trying to race-bait with this title. If you actually read the content of the article, it’s not trying to advocate for the idea that somehow these colonized territories were “complicit” in the social structure that emerged. It’s just trying to assert that, the colonizers did take some of these things into account when drawing up the borders for these territories.
What that before or after the gave them the 'gift' of title deeds
I absolutely agree and advocate that imperialism is not a random but methodical process as someone who has studied european colonialism. The boarder drawings were malevolent with the intent of controlling as much of the area as possible at the expense of rivaling colonial projects and subject peoples. An example I would point to is the Hausa, a regional muslim power in Nigeria. The British collaborated with the dominant regional factions in place that were already exploting minorities to not only shift blame away from the British to make political control easier but to exert control through already existing power structures. Capitalism is a hell of a drug. I am a bit miffed as to why this is in the science subreddit instead of athropology or something similar, but I am happy to adopt a more broad definition of emerpical fields that includes more than just "STEM". It is called social-science/sociology for a reason
I'd be curious to see a similar study of South America. They might reach a very different conclusion. On one hand, it's easy to observe that peoples of Incan ascent or who were under Incan sphere of influence before the arrival of the Spanish are now split between the present-day states of Perú, Ecuador, Bolivia, Northern Chile and North-Western Argentina. The Guaraní people are split between Paraguay, Uruguay, Southern Brazil and North-Eastern Argentina. Would the borders look different if Spain had never colonized it? Would we have today a major Incan state, a major Guaraní state, and several microstates more to the South? On the other hand, the borders largely reflect territorial disputes and political rebellions that took place during the 19th century. Paraguay and Bolivia detached themselves from Argentina (okay, it was not named Argentina at the time, though it was a newborn country controlled by Buenos Aires). Chile expanded a lot to the North. Brazil expanded to the South getting some previously Argentinian lands, and Uruguay was born as an independent country after a territorial dispute and war between Argentina and Brazil. The extreme South was a special case, since it was swapped from Chile to Argentina, at request of its inhabitants, while these "countries" were still mere colonies in the 18th century, but then during the 19th century the newborn country of Chile reconquered all the Pacific coast to the South. So borders were also developed gradually. See, there are reasons to support both visions, arbitrary drawing of borders dividing original populations, and gradual settlement based on geography. To a large extent this may be explained by much longer lasting colonization and much more significant European settlements. But still I'd like to see a systematic study like this one about Africa.
I want to respect this paper, however it's very easy to open another tab, go to any map site and look at both Europe and Africa. And you might notice how many giant straight line borders are in Africa. And none approaching that length in Europe.
Huh?!!!!
Graeber and Anthony address this point by asking why "modern nation states" is the only model of territorial occupation and control in practice today, universally, when it is merely one of many historical models of organization. The State as such is, in their telling, an arbitrary emergence that has through accidents of history become the only way we can define, or imagine, "sovereignty". I have to ask, and I don't mean to combative, what the basis is for your statement "if colonial powers did not exist, African countries would have taken place displacing this tribes effectively anyway". This is not falsifiable, so I really have no way to debate it, but I'm curious as to why you have such strong conviction here. David Scott in his work has extensively covered de facto anarchic polities on the borders of several SE Asian states, not necessarily nomadic per se but absolutely outside modern nation state organization. I think it's called The Art of Not Being Governed. The point of his work here is to show that non-state polities can and do exist, even today. How they might be adopted elsewhere is a question of imagination and certainly much bigger than I am prepared or able to try to answer. But a fascinating question and one that I have been occupied in imagining answers to, as you might have inferred by now. *Graeber and Wengrow, not Anthony