Author: Olivier J. Walther

Photo: 2023 World ABS Conference in Eilat, Israel. Credit: Walther, 2023. In a new guest editorial published in Political Geography, we take stock of the work conducted in border studies so far and discusses some of the challenges ahead. We argue that, nearly half a century after border studies emerged in the social sciences, much … Continue reading Border Studies at 45

Transport policies hardly managed to reduce accessibility disparities in Ghana. In a new working paper published this week with Dr. Paul Nugent and Ms. Susanna Goewey, we show that accessibility gains are particularly important in the southwestern part of Ghana. By comparison, northern region have experienced slower growth in accessibility than the national average. A summary of … Continue reading As Ghana becomes increasingly urbanized, regional disparities tend to grow

The new OECD report “Urbanisation and Conflicts in North and West Africa” coordinated by my lab is now available online in English and French. The report shows that violence is shifting to rural areas as urbanization increases in North and West Africa. A summary can be found on the SRG website.

Domestic travel patterns of the 9/11 hijackers. The size of the cities is proportional to the number of trips between them. Source: Walther et al. (2022). Using publicly available sources from the 9/11 Commission, the FBI, and the U.S. Congress, Rafael Prieto, my students Joseph Padron and Jason Scheuer, and I mapped the travel patterns of the 19 … Continue reading Travel Geography of the 9/11 Network

Our edited book “African Border Disorders. Addressing Transnational Extremist Organizations” is now available in Open Access, thanks to the generous support of the University of Florida. African Border Disorders explores the complex relationships that bind states, transnational rebels and extremist organizations, and borders on the African continent. Combining cutting edge network science with geographical analysis, the book highlights … Continue reading African Border Disorders now available in Open Access

Source: OECD (2022) based on ACLED data. The growing importance of transnational conflicts in North and West Africa calls for more spatialized approaches that can map how borders shape political violence. While numerous single-case studies throughout the region have shown the salience of borderlands for violent groups, little is known about the overall relationships between … Continue reading African borderlands are becoming more violent

Image courtesy Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash Covid has significantly disrupted many international teams, especially those focused on basic and applied research in developing countries. To understand how the pandemic affects international collaboration networks, the National Science Foundation has awarded us a new EAGER grant for two years. Entitled “Inclusiveness and Diversity as Building Blocks of … Continue reading New NSF grant to study how Covid disrupt research networks

I have made several maps showing the location, built-up area, economic importance and accessibility of West African border markets since the early 2010s. My first map showed the location of all West African border markets in 2013. It was made with Google Maps when I started to work on border cities, as part of the … Continue reading Mapping West African border markets

The livestock sector is a major trade opportunity in West Africa, particularly for the Sahelian countries that supply major urban centers on the Gulf of Guinea. Yet, few attempts to formally describe the regional trade structure have been made so far. A new paper published in PLOS ONE today intends to fill this gap by … Continue reading Network analysis of regional livestock trade in West Africa

The annual meeting of the African Borderlands Research Network (ABORNE) will should have taken place in Paris from 7-8 September this year, has been cancelled. The objective of the meeting was to rethink the complicated relationships that bind trade and security in African borderlands. The conference is organized by the OECD Sahel and West Africa … Continue reading 2020 ABORNE conference