Whatever Happened to the “Safe Havens”? Imposing State Boundaries between the Sudanese Plains and the Ethiopian Highlands

Abstract

This book focuses on the newest of Africa’s independent states, South Sudan, and its international boundaries. One of these is itself the newest in the whole continent, the boundary created by its secession from the former Sudan, now the Republic of Sudan, in 2011. However, many of the region’s borders, including at least the eastern stretches of this one at the “tri-junction point” where South Sudan meets both the Republic of Sudan and Ethiopia, are heavy with history. The lines are sharp on the map, if not yet always on the ground. Yet in the past, the whole border zone of the escarpment, hills, and valleys where the Sudanese plains meet the Ethiopian highlands—a stretch we can call the Blue Nile Borderlands—was a zone of comings and goings, mixing and matching, and a certain autonomy among many local communities. They were long used to taking advantage of the geographical opportunities of this sharply hilly landscape, making their own alliances and seeking their own security. Our present-day opposition of “state” and “non-state” actors, along with much of the terminology associated with the modern state—starting with the boundaries themselves—simply does not fit the way that borderlands used to work, and, from the point of view of many local communities, perhaps still ought to work. While current attention is being drawn to the politically difficult Sudanese borderland issues of today,¹ the social and cultural relevance of much older history is still worth exploring.