Although African ethnicity has become a highly fertile field of enquiry in recent years, most of the research is concentrated on southern and central Africa, and has passed Ghana by. This volume extends many of the distilled insights, but also modifies them in the light of the Ghanaian evidence. The collection is multidisciplinary in scope and spans the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial contexts. A central contention of the volume is that, while there were significant regional variations, ethnicity was not purely a colonial invention'. The boundaries of we-groups' have constantly...

The first integrated history of the Ghana-Togo borderlands, "Smugglers, Secessionists, and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier" challenges the conventional wisdom that the current border is an arbitrary European construct, resisted by Ewe irredentism.
Paul Nugent contends that whatever the origins of partition, border peoples quickly became knowing and active participants in the shaping of this international boundary. The study itself straddles the conventional divide between social and political history and offers a reconstruction of a long-range history of smuggling and a...

The first integrated history of the Ghana-Togo borderlands, "Smugglers, Secessionists, and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier" challenges the conventional wisdom that the current border is an arbitrary European construct, resisted by Ewe irredentism.
Paul Nugent contends that whatever the origins of partition, border peoples quickly became knowing and active participants in the shaping of this international boundary. The study itself straddles the conventional divide between social and political history and offers a reconstruction of a long-range history of smuggling and a...

Boundaries are inherently artificial - they interpose barriers between people which do not exist by any fundamental law of human organization. The contrast between the intentions of those who police boundaries and those who are affected by them is part of the paradoxical nature of boundaries throughout the world. In Africa the paradoxes were accentuated, as colonial powers constructed new boundaries for their own purposes, altering the pre-colonial perceptions of the boundary and its functions.

Who belongs to the nation? How is citizenship defined? And why have such identities become so politically explosive in recent years? This book explores the instrumental manipulation of citizenship and narrowing definitions of national-belonging which refract recent political struggles in Zimbabwe, Cote d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Somalia, Tanzania, and South Africa. Conflicts which have arisen over the resources of the post-colonial state are increasingly legitimated through recourse to claims of nationhood and citizenship. The contributors address the historical roots of national and ethnic...

The first integrated history of the Ghana-Togo borderlands.

A genuinely comparative study of the different trajectories and experiences of independent African states. This expanded, revised and updated new edition of an established text now includes the latest scholarship and features more on issues such as AIDS, urbanisation, South Sudan, questions of citizenship and the importance of transnational spaces.