A bibliometric analysis of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of African Borderlands shows that the field is highly fragmented, with over 90% of references cited only once and only a small core of widely shared works.
By Olivier Walther, 5/19/2026.
A new handbook
At the end of June, Routledge will publish our Handbook of African Borderlands. The book, which comprises 30 chapters written by 46 authors from around the world, covers the entire body of recent scholarly literature on African borderlands. To this end, our authors have drawn on more than 1,300 references, from Jon Abbink’s Ethnic-based federalism and ethnicity in Ethiopia to Yahia Zoubir’s Ethiopia and Somalia on the edge of war.
Which are the most frequently cited references? And which references are cited in multiple chapters? This brief bibliometric analysis suggests that African borderlands studies, like border studies in general, is a highly fragmented field. Over 90% of the references are cited only once throughout the handbook. Only 14 references are cited five times or more.
A few highly cited papers
Among the most cited publications are ‘classic’ books such as Dereje Feyissa and Markus Hoehne’s Borders and Borderlands as Resources in the Horn of Africa (2010), Paul Nugent and Anthony Asiwaju’s African Boundaries (1996), Paul Nugent’s Smugglers, Secessionists and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo frontier (2002) and Boundaries, Communities and State-making in West Africa (2019), Bill Miles’ Hausaland Divided (1994), and Hugh Lamarque and Paul Nugent’s edited volume on Transport Corridors in Africa (2022).
The most cited peer-reviewed articles are Gregor Dobler’s influential green, grey and blue typology published in the Journal of Modern African Studies (2016), Isabella Soi and Paul Nugent’s study on peripheral urbanism in Africa (2017), Jack Paine, Xiaoyan Qiu, and Joan Ricart-Huguet’s analysis of endogenous colonial borders published in the American Political Science Review (2024), and my editorial on security and trade in African borderlands in the Journal of Borderlands Studies (2022).
A fragmented field
The fragmentation of the references cited in the handbook can be explained by the multidisciplinary nature of African borderlands studies and its relative late emergence in the social sciences. As we noted recently, borderlands studies are still far from having produced a harmonized set of theories, concepts, and methods.
This fragmentation is particularly evident when the references cited in each chapter are represented as a network. In the figure below, the 30 chapters are represented by orange circles, while the references are represented by blue circles. The references located in the center of the figure are those shared by multiple chapters. One might assume that they address general aspects that transcend case studies or disciplinary boundaries. The references located at the edges of the figure are specific to a single chapter.
The greatest overlap is observed in the economic sphere. The chapters on informal trade, markets, and border cities share a great many references (also because they were authored by the same group of scholars!). In contrast, political and historical themes form much more fragmented clusters. Certain chapters, such as secessionism, maritime borders, festivals, and gender, share few affinities with the more general references.
The interconnections between the various chapters of the Handbook can be visualized using a simple table showing the number of references they share. Below, I have chosen to represent the frequency of these references using a gradient of increasingly dark colors. The darker the color, the more two chapters rely on the same references.
This representation shows, for example, that the chapters dealing with borders as resources (6), the process of building borderlands from below (9), the history of colonial partition (7), smuggling (14), and border cities (16) share many common references. Similarly, the chapters dealing with regional economic integration (12), informal trade (13), smuggling (14), and border markets and cities (15 and 16) draw on similar literature.
The dataset is available on our GitHub account. I thank David Russell for his help with the bipartite network.