New approach in border studies. The need for re-thinking the European-African borderland through the case of the EU-SADC relationship and the Caprivi strip

This paper proposes re-thinking the relationship between EU(rope) and Africa as an expression of the complex dynamics produced through the construction of what we define as the Europe-Africa borderland. We focus attention on the "plurivocality" of such a borderland, assuming it both as a geopolitical territorial and an epistemological, symbolic anthropological entity. More precisely, our analysis deals with two issues that emerge as crucial in a number of narratives through which a Europe-Africa space of relation is defined: security and regionalisation policies. They not only perform a relevant role in themselves but their geopolitical centrality derives from their relations, as highlighted by a critical analysis of the so-called "EU-Africa Dialogue", launched through the Cairo-process in 2000. However, although security and regionalisation are proposed in institutional narratives as cross-border strategies to construct a Europe-Africa dialogue, what seems to be missing from these initiatives is a clear self-criticism of the EU's normative logic and model. We attempt to develop this point by proposing the analysis of the EU-SADC (Southern African Development Community) relational geographies through the reference to a territory of the Southern African region, part of Namibia, but at the centre of old and new regional projects as its fieldwork: the Caprivi strip.