Summary
The ability to establish borders is crucial to establishing territory and governing communities. As such, the question of violence at the margins lies at the heart of modern state projects. Drawing together scholarship from geography, international relations, political science and anthropology, this paper asks a number of fundamental questions, such as: Where does the state end? How is power and political authority configured at the so-called ‘margins’? And what can we learn about state formation by studying these areas? Building on these questions, the paper explores how scholars have made sense of violence in state margins. Specifically, the paper distils five recurrent explanations for violence in borderlands. These are: 1) expansion of sovereign authority into marginal spaces; 2) lack of state control or capacity by the political centre (including a monopoly on violence); 3) the role of infrastructures and materiality; 4) effects of global militarism networks and war; and 5) how people at the margins experience violent settings. Reviewing these different explanations, the paper provides an interdisciplinary state-of-the-art of a vast body of literature, offering a nuanced understanding of how different scholarly communities understand violence at the margins.
Main insights
- Violence at the margins of the state takes two main forms: First, there is the direct violence of coercion, which relies on force or intimidation. And second, there is the indirect violence of control, which relies on ‘voluntary’ submission or ‘hidden’ control mechanisms.
- Historically and today, state expansion has generated violence including through dispossession and militarisation; routine assassinations of activists and resistance groups; and the creation of proxies, vigilante groups and militias.
- Violence may also arise where state control or capacity is incomplete and multiple actors use coercion to govern, accumulate resources or contest political authority. However, violence cannot be attributed straightforwardly to state absence or the presence of multiple political orders.
- Violence is often embedded in the making and management of infrastructures. Roads, borders, refugee camps, conservation zones, checkpoints and forms of infrastructure govern mobility, territory and resources in ways that can marginalise populations and intensify conflict.
- Global capitalist networks and supply chains drive violence at the margins of the state.
- For many borderland residents, violence is a daily reality rather than an exception, often shaped by gender, class and other identity categories.
Policy Implications
- Policy responses depend heavily on how the causes and effects of violence are understood. Explanations of conflict-affected borderlands are not ‘innocent’: each explanation privileges a different assumption about authority, territory and the legitimate role of the state.
- Where violence is attributed chiefly to weak state control, the resulting policy logic may favour strengthening state capacities to ‘pacify’ peripheral areas. This approach risks supporting repressive institutions and should be recognised as a normative choice rather than a neutral response.
- Attention to infrastructures and material systems suggests supporting local forms of organisation and enabling greater autonomy from central state authority, while examining how interventions governing mobility, conservation, security and resources may themselves produce violence.
- Thinking through various understandings of the reasons violence and conflict occur in borderlands offers a more realistic basis for policy, as opposed to uncritically adopting engrained and assumed logics of conflict.