African Studies Research Seminar: Political belonging in the Ghana-Togo borderlands: citizenship and the vote at the margins of the state

Conveners: Miles Tendi and Michael Odijie

Speaker: Dr Nathalie Raunet, University of Birmingham

This book analyses claims to belonging that are rooted in different legal contexts (citizenship and local belonging) and territorial frameworks (the local, regional, national, international, and transnational) in the border region between Ghana and Togo. Based on archival research, interviews, oral tradition as well as newspaper analysis, it looks at the making or remaking of political communities. It demonstrates that belonging claims are based on legitimating narratives of indigeneity/autochthony at each geographical level of different kinds of political communities (smaller than the state or located across the border). Similarly to a palimpsest, political communities are laid across each other which stimulates the simultaneous making of political communities and political belonging across different scales. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach (politics, history, anthropology), this book connects contemporary power struggles with the history of the region and with contemporary issues of belonging and citizenship in anthropology. From local belonging to the electoral debate on cross-border voting in 2016 and to disputes between Ghanaian and Togolese heads of state in the 1990s, the border region and the narratives that justify belonging are mobilised by different actors and have far-reaching consequences in modern configurations of power in the region since the turn of the twentieth century.

Dr Nathalie Raunet
Assistant Professor
International Development Department
University of Birmingham