Buying pre-order items
Ebooks and Audiobook
You will receive an email with a download link for the ebook or audiobook on the publication date.
Payment
You will not be charged for pre-ordered books until they are available to be shipped. Pre-ordered ebooks will not be charged for until they are available for download.
Amending or cancelling your order
For orders that have not been shipped you can usually make changes to pre-orders up to 72 hours before the publishing date.
Payment for this pre-order will be taken when the item becomes available
Description
Every border is a world of stories, not just a line on a map or a political frontier. This book introduces readers to the worlds of African borderlands by following border-jumpers, asylum seekers, return migrants, and contraband traders across five borders in eastern and southern Africa.
Through vivid, character-driven narratives drawn from ethnographic fieldwork and relationships spanning fifteen years, African Border Worlds challenges three common assumptions about African borders: that they are arbitrary colonial impositions, that they are peripheral spaces of poverty and marginalization, and that they should be thought of in terms of binaries such as good/bad or open/closed. Instead, it shows that borders are dynamic, contested, and full of paradox. They are sites of violence and engines of opportunity, zones of exclusion and platforms for reinvention. The people at the center of these stories are active participants in shaping how borders work, not simply passive victims of border regimes.
Grounding the analysis in his own experiences of border-crossing, anthropologist Daniel K. Thompson also reflects on what it means to conduct research across borders defined by deep global inequalities, and on the relationships that make such work possible and morally consequential.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- EPUB 3.0
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
Visual adjustments
Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
- Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
- Purposes of all links are made clear
Rich content
Language tagging provided
Table of Contents
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Precarity and Possibility at the Border
Chapter 1. Borderwork in the City: Migration Regimes and Refugee Lives in Johannesburg, South Africa
Chapter 2. Making New Borders: Returning to South Sudan after Independence
Chapter 3. Checkpoints: Power and Exclusion in the Ethiopia-Djibouti Borderlands
Chapter 4. Deportation and Aspiration: A Story of Endurance on the Ethiopia-Somalia Frontier
Conclusion: Connecting Through Borders
Afterword
Notes
References
Index
Product details
| Published | 12 Nov 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 192 |
| ISBN | 9798216441946 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 10 figures, 1 table |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Related Titles
