OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
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.