This paper focuses on the time when Angola moved from war to peace. Drawing on research conducted between 1996 and 2010, the paper examines how people’s interactions with the border have changed. With the end of the war and the rehabilitation of the formal border crossing, legal restrictions and practical obstacles to movement have relaxed. At the same time, the conventions – based on informal, ‘illicit’ understandings between local officials and inhabitants on both sides of the border – that operated for many years have been undermined. There has been both an ‘opening’ and ‘closing’ of the border. The breaking of these conventions has reduced the size of the zone of informal exchange, or borderlands.
Download WP-63-2012: Moving from war to peace in the Zambia–Angola borderlands